My beloved despairs of my habit of putting all her best efforts on buttered bread, turning anything from crayfish to roast lamb into nothing more than a sandwich.

It’s something I will never grow out of, although I have thus far avoided reverting to type when in company.

At home there is nothing I will not put [...]

I have always loved pumpkin, but that rough and tough and mottled skin was too much for anybody less muscled than Rocky I, II, or III, before he started to get weather-beaten and beaten. Butternuts were easier, but then I could never get them to taste the way mum’s used to in the days when [...]

There are none so blind as those who will not see. For some time I had wondered about the origins of ratatouille, and then I looked at the flourishing vegetable garden and saw tomatoes blooming, and chillies and peppers blushing, and garlic popping from the ground, and zucchini taking over, and finally, surveying it all [...]

Whenever you see Roma tomatoes in the market you know it is deep summer. These are the luscious variety used for thousands of years by Italians for pasta sauces. They are much denser in the flesh and seem to have less water content, and so more flavour, than the usual table tomatoes. They also ripen [...]

Eggs are hardly the food of the nineties, these days of healthy eating, but what the hell.i’m as aware as the next person that sensible eating makes for a good night’s sleep and a productive, contented life, but that doesn’t mean you dive daily into a pool of virgin olive oil, coming up only occasionally [...]

Zucchinis are wonders for the hack gardener. You plant them, leave them to the ladybirds, and keep picking from their foliage for months on end. You can eat them raw, grate them on salads, bake them, toss them into stews, and their beautiful flowers make for wonderful containers for all sorts of ripping flavours.
Stuffed zucchini [...]

Hummus was a hip dip in the days when we were all growing up and learning there was more to eating than roast lamb, carrots and tomatoes; and more to the Middle East and North Africa than the Pyramids and Casablanca.
Hummus is the happy marriage of dried chick peas and tahini, the paste made from [...]

Restaurants rarely treat eggplant as much more than an occasional accompanying vegetable. The only place I have seen eggplant treated as a star is at Browns, the flashy Melbourne restaurant, where Greg Brown shows just how lovely eggplants can be.
His version is as simple as simple. Just cut the eggplant in half — either way [...]

Eggplant and the microwave are as happy as peaches and cream. Big, bold, shiny, hard to cook by conventional methods, and full of water: eggplant is just the combination this space-age machine delights in. Just prick the vegetable a few times with a fork, shove it through the door, and what do you have? Absolutely [...]

Discovering Raclette (i): We had just settled into the plush seats at Two Faces at Delgany, that brilliantly restored castle/hotel at Portsea, Melbourne’s Riviera. Unused as we are to such style and service, we were still holding on to that moment of self-consciousness as the waiters scurry about and smile glowingly, and you ask about [...]