From the monthly archives:

December 2009

Tried and tested 5: pumpkin ice-cream, walnut chocolate chip cookies

Pumpkin ice-cream I have an unhealthy obsession (very literally I’m sure) with the various seasonal flavours at Starbucks, my current favourite order being a tall iced non-fat pumpkin spice latte. It is sickly, artificial, contains no nutritional value whatsoever… and I love it. This recipe from David Lebovitz, however, is all the good bits chucked [...]

Viennese striesel a plaited, glazed fruited buttery brioche-style bread suggested by Katie of Thyme for Cooking for the Bread Baking Babes group (I’m just baking along for the ride as it looked gorgeous!). As I’m gathering my thoughts, equipment and baking mojo for the challenge of panettone, this seemed like a good intermediate step and [...]

Review – Bread: River Cottage Handbook No.3

All my worldly possessions are in storage at the moment. It’s all too clear, I’m afraid, where my priorities lie: 3 boxes of clothes, 5 boxes of books and 11 boxes of kitchen equipment. (I think you can probably guess for yourself that most of those books are cookbooks.) While my prized mango slicer, silicone [...]

It has proved a lovely, lovely thing to cook some of my childhood favourites for Mr. R&R, and I’ve also (with not a little trepidation) cooked some of his remembered dishes from growing up (see my italian meatloaf, or polpettone). I suppose it’s a way of cementing our two histories together, of saying that yes, [...]

As you can see from the picture, they’re not exactly delicate, pretty morsels. My homemade version of these pugliese biscuits are dumpy and lumpy, browned from baking. Indeed, when I cooked them yesterday evening, they seemed to lurk menacingly in the oven, as if saying “Just wait ’til I get crispy, sunshine…”. But I have [...]

The following is my standard ice-cream recipe – a light custard base which will take infinite variations – flavour the milk and cream before cooking, stir in liquid ingredients into the custard or add chunky pieces just as the ice-cream is nearly done churning.
I worked on this recipe (well, it didn’t really feel [...]

Recipes from around the internets, tried and tested 4

Ultimate Creamed Spinach
I’d seen Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall make this on River Cottage. It is utterly divine – a bechamel infused with grated carrot and onion, bay leaves and nutmeg. unfortunately I had to make it with frozen rather than fresh spinach but it was still gorgeous. I reduced the butter down to 30g from 50g and [...]

I’m afraid that Thanksgiving was rather overshadowed in our house by the excitements of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We got pretty hot and bothered by the new Dyson vacuum cleaner (ticks all my boxes: limited edition, “Apple Mac”-white, extraneous scientific rationale, an accessory for every eventuality) and ignored the founding fathers.
But I can’t [...]

December 2009

Tried and tested 5: pumpkin ice-cream, walnut chocolate chip cookies

Viennese striesel

Review – Bread: River Cottage Handbook No.3

Taralli – brutish bagel biscuits from Puglia

A light gelato with green tea, hazelnut, mocha and ginger variations

Recipes from around the internets, tried and tested 4

Stuffed acorn squash with cranberries, wild rice and walnuts

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