OK, so the weather is decidedly cool again but this year’s recent hot Scottish summer has produced a bumper crop of delicious Scotty Brand raspberries. To celebrate their bumper crop, the lovely people at Scotty brand sent me a berry hamper to create my own Very Scotty Berry cocktail, which…
Over the last four months, I’ve experimented with the SousVide Supreme Demi, a compact sous vide for home use. We’ve used it to cook fish, vegetables, and fruit, to prepare potatoes to make very tasty gnocchi, to infuse vodka and make pumpkin custards. With Christmas just around the corner, my experiments…
I like gin. It’s a thing people know about me. Recently I was, for this very reason, given a bottle of Opihr gin by friends. They’d attended a gin tasting and decided to find one that was right for me. Using their knowledge of my palate and how it compares…
I’ve been feasting on pomegranates this year. My local grocers has been selling monsters almost too big to fit in two hands at £1.49 each. What interested me more was the chance to buy 5 smaller ones for £1. The seeds add a lovely bite, almost a crunch and a…
Dubrovnik is an extremely busy place, huge cruise ships arrive day in day out in the summer. In the walled city, tourists throng through the streets which are all pedestrianised. Visitors soon find that they need very strong legs to walk up and down the steep steps to where many…
To me, the scent of Christmas is fir needles, saffron and spiced wine. The Swedish version of mulled wine is a little sweeter and more highly spiced than the British version, but equally yummy. It is served in small cups or glasses as an aperitif, or après ski, with chopped almonds…
Holidays are wonderful. You change your perspective and habits for a while and eat, drink and nibble things that you wouldn’t normally. The thing I enjoy about the US is that it is so similar to, yet so different from, the UK. The portion sizes used to put me off…
Those of you who know me, will know I have something of an obsession for France. So you might quite rightly think the most evocative thing for me would be a great meal, the landscape, the wine, the bread. I have to confess that it is actually …. Orangina! This…
“Excuse me,” said a polite gentleman behind me in the queue at the checkout the other day, “but what is that?” He was pointing at the bottle of Campari nestling with the spinach and the carrots on the conveyor belt. I got very excited. “It’s a bitter, a drink made with chinotto, a…
A important part of any Swedish buffet dinner, snaps is surprisingly easy to make – in a couple of months it will be ready for drinking.
