Dishes 4/30

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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Homity pie

" quiche mistranslated by a rugged, carb-addicted farmhand. " Jimi Famerewa/The Guardian In this week's Guardian Feast Newsletter, appeared this - to my potato freak eyes - a glorious concoction. It turns out it was Marmite and leek homity pie from a guy called Jimi Famurewa who had been messing with (the marmite) a supposedly much-loved British pie of potatoes, leeks and cheese. But I had never heard of it, so my interest was piqued - maybe that was just a marketing plo

Nov 8, 2025

Aubergines on top of yoghurt

"the composition is inspired by Yotam Ottolenghi’s unbeatable formula of flavoured yoghurt base + roasted aubergines + vibrant toppings." Ixta Belfrage This is Ixta's Aubergines with lime yoghurt and tomato, cinnamon and chilli oil - a recipe from I'm not sure where. Anyway I thought her words might be an opening into a post - most likely I thought - about how everyone was copying the technique. You know the one - I talked about it recently - a base of something creamy. yo

Nov 1, 2025

Scarpaccia - and sad/happy memories

"thin and a bit crusty, just like an old shoe." Frank/Memorie di Angelina That's how I feel a bit these days ... Well not quite thin enough in body anyway. But this is a story all about this delicious looking Tuscan speciality. As always I start on one thing and wander here and there before ending up somewhere completely unexpected. So to begin at the beginning - the picture above of Tom Hunt's version of Scarpaccia which instantly reminded me of another Italian zucchini

Oct 31, 2025

Old-fashioned canapés - first recipe

"If you don't have the time to prepare something good then just serve some olives or nuts." Beverley Sutherland Smith Well you would perhaps wouldn't you? - or just open a bag of crisps because canapés - the retro kind - often take a lot of work. This is a photograph of some of Beverley Sutherland Smith's canapés, styled in a very old-fashioned way on a silver platter with the bottle of champagne in a silver bucket. The kind of thing you would get served at a fancy cocktai

Oct 30, 2025

Beautiful words, beautiful food - Nigel

"Early spring, Kamakura, and a small basket appears at my table and a tiny dish of salt. In it, a single whisp of new season's bracken in tempura batter, the fern caught in the process of slowly unfurling." Nigel Slater Looking for inspiration again - it's an everyday thing. I couldn't get excited about the cuisine of El Salvador or smoked fish canapés (my next first recipe - maybe tomorrow), and so I decided to have another look at Nigel Slater's beautiful book of small w

Oct 29, 2025

Roast leg of lamb - a lucky dip

"How to roast a leg of lamb to rival even your mum's" Donna Hay Magazine Yet again my heart sank when I opened a page at random in my randomly chosen cookbook - Issue 10 of the Donna Hay Magazine - now discontinued. These days I ask David to choose my lucky dip books because my choices are not really random, for even with my eyes closed I sort of know what book I'm picking. He, on the other hand, has no idea. Issue no. 10 is a winter edition I think, and so a roast is a

Oct 28, 2025

Bagatelles

Bagatelle: "a thing regarded as too unimportant or easy to be worth much consideration." Oxford Languages So yes 'bagatelle' is a French word for a trifle: "The French word bagatelle , from the Italian word bagatella , means a trifle or little decorative nothing." Wikipedia And this is an oddments post - full of trifles. A bagatelle trifle is also a specific French Canadian dish of which the magazine Saveur says "The typical bagatelle in La Beauce is a child's delight o

Oct 27, 2025

A ramble beginning with oxtail soup

"Rambling talk with an image of air." William Butler Yeats This particular ramble began today, with a question, to which I haven't really found an answer. Well maybe. Although really it began a few days ago with a vague idea for a blog. It wasn't going to be a ramble down highways and byways. It was just going to be a fairly simple exploration of oxtail soup - my ultimately chosen English soup in my very occasional world soup series. The usual thing - a few words about

Oct 20, 2025

From the street to Michelin stars - first recipe

"there is no such thing as ‘traditional, authentic cuisine’ anywhere. It’s constantly evolving." Thitid “Ton” Tassanakajohn - Michelin star chef Bangkok Before I return yesterday's book to a shelf somewhere I thought I should do a first recipe thing on it, as it will be placed on a shelf that has already been given the first recipe treatment. I also decided retrospectively, having researched a bit, to cover two different dishes here - the first and third recipes in the book.

Oct 17, 2025