What's in a name? - 'marry me'/Tuscan chicken
"I know the internet has turned this dish into marry me chicken but it’s still Tuscan chicken to me!" The Taylor Table/Instagram And what's Tuscan chicken anyway? Not Tuscan whatever else it might be. But back to the beginning, although in a way it's really the end. Pondering on this and that for today's post I decided to see what was trending in the food world and found on the Taste website - a list of Trends 2026, some of which were truly awful, but top of their list of
Jul 26
Leftover lettuce salad omelette - so many ways
"Done and dusted. Out of this world." Foodie China 888/YouTube This picture comes from the end of one of the most captivating cooking videos I have seen on YouTube. In roughly 25 seconds you are shown - complete with instructions to use either your right hand or your left hand -how to make this Rolled lettuce omelette. The pictures are very clear, the voiceover is male - he calls himself Foodie China 888 and has a slight Chinese accent I think. Halfway through, a kitsch
Jul 24
Vegetarian skewers - some thoughts
"I'm not sure a tomato belongs on a kebab anyway. They refuse to turn when the kebab is rotated on the grill, burst and collapse into a red mush. Pointless." Nigel Slater Now having a vegetarian granddaughter and some vegetarian friends, every now and then I have to think of some kind of skewer dish for them if the food I am cooking everybody else is for a BBQ or is the family's favourite kebabs. So when Yotam Ottolenghi's topic for his last week's newsletter was vegetarian
Jul 22
Tonight's dinner? - some kind of pumpkin tart
It's Friday, which is generally quiche night, but David has been loyally eating the remains of last week's quiche for his dinner when I was fasting, and so my thoughts turned to a galette - and specifically a pumpkin galette because I have some pumpkin that needs using. My thoughts immediately turned to Ottolenghi's (maybe Ixta Belfrage's too since the recipe is from their book Flavour) Butternut and sage galette with orange caramel which I have made a couple of times before
Jul 17
A week of dining out
"Everything tastes better when it's eaten together." This is the last and in some ways the best, of four meals I ate away from home last week. Here is my glorious family in the home of my younger son - the one at back right - eating one of his pasta meals. Many of them are pulling silly faces, as family and friends often do in group photos such as this one, but you get the picture - adults at one end and loving cousins at the other. I guess you could say that it was not hau
Jul 16
Ranch dressing - a moment in the sun
"It’s the friend of all manner of dude foods." delicious. Ranch dressing is one of those absolutely American things - well I think of it that way anyway - if I think about it all that is. But Deb Perelman in her Smitten Kitchen newsletter, directed to me to an article in The Atlantic by Ellen Cushing which told me that: "Ranch dressing has become, deservedly or not, a face of the nation during the World Cup." And I have checked - it is indeed a thing - at least in the media
Jul 9
Yes there is such a thing as grape pie - but ...
"Rarely do grapes make it to the cooker, the majority being eaten straight from the vine." Nigel Slater" It was just a throway line at the end of yesterday's post - are there grape pies? - but then today I thought I should find out if there are. And yes there are. Well there seems to be just the one really - Concord grape pie - the Dish 'n' the Kitchen shown here, which is a speciality of the west of New York state centred around the town of Naples. At first I thought Con
Jul 6
Italian/Indian or Indian/Italian?
"Arguably, two of the most loved foods of all time, combined." Devinder/East West Pizza" If you think about it, Italian and Indian cuisines are more similar than expected: rich comfort foods with generous use of tomato, garlic, and onion." clicksngiggles/reddit The photograph is of pizzas on offer from the East West Pizza cafe in East London that Devinder with his wife Manpreet run. In 2021 in a competition run by the BBC for the best pizza takeaway in Britain it was voted
Jul 3
Nigel's fry ups
"The fry-up has always appealed to me, in particular the bits that stay put at the bottom of the pan, the crusty scrapings that brown rather too much." Nigel Slater Uninspired as usual of late, I did my own kind of lucky dip by just picking a page from Nigel Slater's Tender volume 1 - and came up with A fry-up of pumpkin and apple to accompany a meaty supper - well why not I thought. Another enticing recipe title that sets a scene. I thought he might have some more fry-up
Jun 22
Lucky dip - Kubbeh hamusta
"A recipe that adapts to its environment, but never forgets where it came from." Elli Benaiah/Beyond Babylon There are so many tricky and just picky issues about this particular recipe. It comes from Sami Tamimi and Yotam Ottolenghi's book Jerusalem - a word that evokes a whole range of emotions these days - mostly not good. Although Sami Tamimi - a Palestinian and Yotam Ottolenghi - a Jew of mixed heritage, are no longer official business partners in the Ottolenghi empire,
Jun 19
Cauliflower cheese soup
"It has something of the Welsh rarebit about it." Nigel Slater Often I have a vague idea of what to do for dinner, and then I either go with what is to hand, or search around my cookbooks and the net to find the answer. Today I thought I should probably use the last bit of cauliflower that I have in my fridge before it goes off completely - small brown spots are already appearing. And when vegetables are getting to that stage, then soup is the answer. There is some leftov
Jun 16
A surprise mushroom bourguignon
"I always argued that most of the things people thought they liked about meat they actually liked about the sauces and braises and spices they were cooked in" Deb Perelman/Smitten Kitchen Last night we were invited to dinner at my son's house - for a French mushroom dish - his wife told me - when the invite was issued. A lovely surprise in itself but the meal was also a delicious surprise. I should say here, that although my younger son does indeed cook quite a lot, he most
Jun 15
Reflections on a small piece of quiche
"When we eat, we travel." Mina Holland This was my lunch today. A small piece of leftover quiche, so being otherwise clueless - partly because I have not been writing of late - otherwise occupied - and partly because it's an interesting exercise to do every now and then I decided to consider in a more analytical way than usual what my lunchtime quiche. As you know by now I make quiche a lot. It usually begins with some kind of leftover which might well offend the purists,
Jun 10
Spanish-style - well any '-style'
If you have read yesterday's post, you will know that this is one of two dishes that I am currently considering for our lunch on Saturday. It's from the delicious. book More Please, by Valli Little, and for some reason I assumed that it was a Spanish dish. And so today, I was going to 'research' this Spanish dish and do one of my kind of analyses of a traditional dish. However, when I checked my Spanish cookbooks - Claudia Roden and Robert Carrier being the authors - and al
Jun 4
Dutch babies - neither Dutch nor babies
"dramatic, rumpled crepe-like pancakes will always be more exciting than undramatic, unrumpled crepes" Deb Perelman/Smitten Kitchen This really began with an Ottolenghi newsletter but since I started with a quote from Deb Perelman, I thought I might as well start with her recipe Extra billowy dutch baby pancake - because it's just the basic recipe. And in a way that's all you need to know about this. It's a sort of a cross between a crêpe and a Yorkshire pudding, in that i
May 31
Nice - a word and a place
"By 1926, nice was said to be "too great a favorite with the ladies, who have charmed out of it all its individuality and converted it into a mere diffuser of vague and mild agreeableness." [Fowler]/Etymonline I have no idea now where my inspiration for this post came from, but I think it began with the word rather than the place - very different things - and yet, maybe that quote is indeed apt. for both of them. We shall see. Above is my very last sight of la belle France,
May 27
Raw fish from the sea
"It turns out that sushi made with hot mustard tastes mostly of raw fish and hot mustard. Who could have predicted that?" Chris Worfolk's Blog Raw fish - very expensive if you do as they say and only buy sashimi grade - and also probably not what most of us would nominate as a favourite food. Japanese sushi lovers apart I guess. But one thing that bothered me slightly as I was researching this post was what is the difference between sashimi and sushi? Well this picture show
May 25
No pastry? Try potatoes, rice ...
"Very Easy and very cheesy" Erin Jeanne McDowell/Food 52 Today's Happy Foodie newsletter featured a whole lot of quiche recipes, which was sort of coincidental because of yesterday's galette. So I checked them out - there were ten of them and two of them were unusual in the sense that their pastry enclosure was - well I guess you would say - 'not normal'. I was intrigued and started rambling the net to find other ways of making a case for your quiche - or your tart. Now I
May 23
Polpette al limone from Sicily
"Please don't eat the lemon leaves" Massimo Mele/Gourmet Traveller It's a dismal day, and so I just decided to do an ordinary 'dish of the day' kind of thing, picking another kind of meatball from my meatball book Around the World in 80 Meatballs. This time I picked a Sicilian recipe Polpette al limone - meatballs with lemon. No picture in the book and no recipe online, but having now exlored a large number of options online I think there is no need, because really this is
May 18
A classic in so many ways
"Along the way I was reminded of a kind of cooking which, in the pursuit of the new, I had all but forgotten. And I fell in love with it all over again." Jay Rayner/The Guardian This is a lucky dip post. David picked out the large format revised copy of Robert Carrier's Great Dishes of the World and the page I randomly chose included a recipe for Coq au vin - accompanied by a short essay and this old-style arty photograph of the dish - well the ingredients. Although now th
May 15