There remain difficult people to please and to feed. I have great sympathy for these poorly guided folk. It was not too many years ago that I was one of them. Chops, sausages and mashed potatoes. That was me.
So, whenever you are required to cook for one of this unfortunate and plentiful breed, give them [...]

I delight in osso buco because I delight in veal, and the deliciously subtle flavour which comes from well-cooked veal bones is blissful. Put them together and you’re in heaven. There are plenty of sound arguments why home cooks shouldn’t bother to make stocks, the basis of the discussion being that stocks require too much [...]

It never ceases to amaze me how much people love sausages. Why? Perhaps it is to do with the shape, or childhood memories; or the possibilities of the extreme flavour of a great sausage; or even how well a sausage melds with a classic tomato sauce.
My father used to look forward to his annual holidays [...]

Nothing makes my good friend Michael Gordon happier than a dirty apron, a wok, a bench loaded with spices, and a large crowd anticipating a good feed from the Orient. Micky once did a Chinese cooking course which had the unexpected side-effect of turning his intimate dinner parties into banquets for twenty to thirty people. [...]

You have to be something of an animal to enjoy pork spare ribs. Enjoyment is gnawing away at fat and bones, ripping away tender meat, while the soy and pork fat drips down your chin. And enjoyment is dependent on you getting the best quality ribs — plenty of meat, mixed with just the right [...]

The lovely thing about being keen on food and cooking is that there is no end to the things you can learn. Here I was, strolling down a suburban street, minding my own business, when I happened upon a butcher’s shop. I stopped to ponder on what appeared to be just another display of meat, [...]

Aaaah, a pleasant day in the country. Lunch was a leg of lamb, a lamb, I might add, which had been born, raised, and slaughtered not all that far from the table on which we ate. The post-lunch recovery was spent assisting (more accurately, watching, bemused) the round-up of a flock of ewes and lambs, [...]

I started a career on ABC radio with a recipe for lamb shanks, and the place went wild. People were writing in from mansions and caravan parks for what is nothing at all really — just a simple mix of lamb shanks and water and vegetables, and patience.
It gave me great heart that some of [...]

A large leg of lamb is, more often than not, too much: too big, too long to cook, too hard to get perfectly pink all the way through. But, if you get your butcher to cut a leg into its individual segments, running his knife along the inner tracts of muscle and sinew and fibre, [...]

You might see lamb fillets in the butcher’s display tray. Be wary. These are more likely to come from mutton than lamb, and, although still tender, have a very gamey flavour, which may not appeal to too many modern palates. This is the flavour of big, fat sheep, coming from years of roaming wild pastures.

If [...]