March - 2026 2/2

Welcome to my blog/journal/whatever

This is the real guts of this website. The old website and its archived posts is still available at its old url. Newcomers might like to dip into it every now and then.

Welcome to you all. Amazingly I still don't seem to be running out of ideas on what to write - well occasionally - but I have my writer's block strategies to turn to - see the text on the right. Check this page for the latest posts and if something interests you just click on it. It's easy to leave a comment and I love to read them. And now you can subscribe to the blog and get emailed notifications of new posts. And sorry I just don't understand Facebook.

"We are not here for long. So let's at least make ourselves something good to eat."

Nigel Slater

"I was born hungry, not a cook."

Julia Child

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well"

Virginia Woolf

Writer's block

Every now and then I can't think of a suitable topic and so I have devised a few strategies to get around this.

Lucky dip

The first strategy I devised is to go to one of my three cook book bookshelves, close my eyes and pick a book. Close my eyes again and pick a page. It's really quite an enlightening method of getting over writer's block.

'A word from'

My second strategy is to devote a post to the thoughts of one of my favourite cooks. Hopefully it will introduce them to you

Or

I shall choose a picture I have come across and extemporise on that.

A second kind of lucky dip

I have been thinking about first recipes in cook books - so I shall choose a book not quite randomly and then look at the first recipe for inspiration.

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enjoy

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A Mediterranean Dish coincidence

“I think that is the key [-] the monotony of showing up every day and owning a niche and sticking with it." Suzy Karadsheh It's a website post today - but before I get to talking about this particular website - just look at this - the most recent recipe - 'updated March 3 2026' - i.e. yesterday - the same day that I was writing about fish finger sandwiches - The best crispy fried fish sandwich (Egyptian style) . There it was on the Home Page of the next website on my list

Mar 4

Fish finger sandwiches

"the UK equivalent of Mexican fish tacos or West African fish rolls" Felicity Cloake/The Guardian Although this particular post began with Rick Stein - possibly the British king of fish - at least in a commercial way - I'm beginning with Jamie Oliver, who has said of the fish finger sandwich - a peculiarly British institution: "As a chef I always feel I shouldn't be eating something like a fish finger buttie – but you know what, I think that makes it taste even better." T

Mar 3

Handwritten

"a small labour in these copy-and-photograph times." Rachel Roddy She means copy and paste surely? Yesterday I was a bit uninspired and so I started looking through the Ideas pages in my little notebook of various nudges into blog posts and there at the top of the page on the right is an idea from Rachel Roddy, which I wasn't really up for yesterday, although I did check out the article, which was, as always with her, an interesting one. So today, having survived the threa

Mar 2

Food delivery - a sort of boy kibble postscript

"Australians are now spending billions of dollars every year on food delivery apps." Australian Financial Review There were a couple of kind of related items in yesterday's AFR weekend and they both sort of connected to the boy kibble thing - and in addition, coincidentally, an item in my Happy Foodie (Penguin's cookbook publishing) newsletter this morning also fed into the whole thing. So herewith a few rambles around GenZ and Millenials, their eating habits and the way of

Mar 1

ROSEMARY'S

RAMBLINGS

daily musings on food