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A curry of new potatoes with tomatoes
This has nothing to do with mash, or truffles, or whiskey, but more to do with some fiddling I’ve been doing with potatoes since several happy visits to very good Indian eating houses. It is best made the day before you want it.
onions, sliced
1 clove garlic, sliced finely
2 solid dessertspoons of garam masala (a hip [...]
Irish potatoes
This all started with several slugs of Irish Whiskey. I had always believed that Irish was just another version of Scotch, and Scotch was the one and only whisky. It just goes to show how wrong you can be, and how there’s something new to learn in this business every breathing moment. The truth is [...]
6 large floury potatoes, in their skins
1/2 l milk
50g butter
1/2 bunch of parsley, chopped roughly
small bunch of tarragon leaves removed from the stem, or chives, chopped roughly
black pepper salt
1
Boil or steam the potatoes until they take easily to the knife. You might think you have too much. You can never have too much mashed potato.
2
Allow them to cool a little, peel [...]
Vegetables for all tastes
You don’t have to be a vegetarian to love vegetables. All you have to do is to love essential, splendid flavours, enjoy flamboyant shapes and colours, and look on vegetable cooking as one component of the kitchen craft which is forever changing and surprising.
Vegetables are remarkable for their ability to provide so many different textures, [...]
Fish for the kids
There are no rules for cooking for children. It’s as much a case of pulling out whatever they liked yesterday, adding two tablespoons of hope, a couple of wild jokes, and mixing it all together gently with patience; when they won’t take that, give them what they wanted in the first place.
Just persevere. Every now [...]
A touch of India, and scallops
Scallops don’t need much assistance really. If you’re adding extras, make sure they are not of the sort which overwhelms. Allow the scallops to speak for themselves, and go for them as a light main course, perhaps preceding your best plate of cheese.
Onions, cooked slowly in the pan are a perfect accompaniment for just about [...]
Scallops on the half shell with a little soy
For years we suffered the flavour loss which comes from that shonky fishmongers’ method of profiting by soaking scallops, purportedly to clean them of any muck from the sea. All they did was rinse them of their best, most subtle flavours, and add large volumes of water, water we paid for on the scales.
Then one [...]
A prawn salad with Gnocchi
There are some old delicacies that just wouldn’t be the same without cream. Gnocchi is one of them. And the sauce that comes from belting down prawn stock with cream is just one of the most intense flavours of cooking. That’s the simple way, one-directional cooking, and by and large it’s fine. But now and [...]
Snapper in a tomato sauce
My past has come back to haunt me. As I read my cholesterol level on the lab sheet at 20 per cent higher than the optimum, my mind raced back through all those throwaway lines from food columns of the past: ‘drown the lot in butter’; ’serve with cream or ice cream, or better both’; [...]
Poaching orange roughy
The previous butter-soaked fish dishes came from my restaurant days, somewhere between 1983 and 1988. The following was written in May, 1990, when the penny was starting to drop.
I think I must be falling for this health propaganda in some sort of subconscious way. Not so long ago, if you gave me a fish to [...]