In these uncertain and stressful times, cooking is helpful. It keeps you busy inside and gives you delicious things to eat. We were already cooking most of our food from scratch but have extended that habit to treats like biscuits and cake. It keeps us out of trouble and off the…
I had a conversation with a friend of mine about coffee machines of yore. I told her that my favourite thing to get from the coffee machines where I worked between school and uni was fruit soup. Then I explained fruit soup. Then I asked how the apples got through…
Courgettes are a wonderful seasonal fruit: yes, a fruit, not a vegetable, but usually found on the vegetable shelves. Summer varieties continue into thicker-skinned relatives such as pumpkins and squashes in the autumn.
The humble cucumber is often regarded as just another minor ingredient to salad but nothing could be further from the truth! Yet another of these natural foods that are packed full of healthy nutrients, the cucumber’s greatest strength is its concentration of – WATER! Cucumbers are 96% water – which…
It’s difficult to believe but tomatoes have not always been popular! Historically tomatoes were considered to be a fruit (not a vegetable) not to be eaten as the plant leaves are poisonous. How our tastes have changed over the years!
I was at a vegetarian restaurant in Vienna the first time I came across seitan. It was the main ingredient in a couple of the mains and I had never heard of it. I asked, got the wrong end of the answer stick and thought it was a type of…
Many vegetables become fashionable – they just as quickly fall out of favour – but the simple truth is that all vegetables are healthy and nutritious and all vegetables should be included in your daily diet. A typical example is the not-so-humble carrot. Packed full of nutrients, carrots are the…
It’s January and I’m trying to go out less. This means cooking more. For all kinds of reasons, I’m not in the mood to cook (something I’ll discuss in a later post) so I look for simple and fast dishes that are tasty and ideally also healthy. This walnut pasta…
Cauldron asked me if I wanted to take their recipe challenge: making one of their recipes and trying it out. I did! Cauldron have a range of vegetarian products, from tofu, which we eat a lot – the plain in cooking and the marinated tofu pieces are a popular Friday night…
We’re trying to eat more healthily which means that we’ve stopped buying biscuits. One night when I really fancied something sweet with the after dinner coffee I grabbed my favourite old cookbook and looked for a biscuit recipe. I found kolakakor (toffee biscuits) and set out to make it. Of…
