People and companies 2/13

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.

Comments I love reading your comments. Just add a name - any name - it needn't be yours, add an email, ditto, type in your comment and hit the Comment button. Done. Wix sends me an email to tell me what you said, so I can respond if needed. Mostly I just read and enjoy. If you would like to subscribe to this blog and get notifications of new posts then click here. It's free - just a way of knowing what I wrote about today.

enjoy

to subscribe to the blog click here

Love and hate - a food blogger

"An incredibly successful food blogger/influencer who has millions of followers, struggling with a severe eating disorder." reddit commenter On to the next website on my list - Half- Baked Harvest whose home page is shown above. Having now 'finished' my research, I feel somehow a little 'dirtied' if that's the right word - simply because of some of the invective that I have come across - and which I shall come to - but also because it all made me feel so ignorant and/or

Jan 10

Who is Bo on the road?

"food as authentic as it gets" Bo on the Road This is a young lady who calls herself Bo on the Road, and who writes a website, for which she makes videos and writes articles, called Authentic World Food . I'm not at all sure how I came across it now - probably because I was researching one of the recipes she has posted. Something in the particular post I found must have appealed to me and so I put it on my list of websites to investigate. Some of those have proved to be v

Dec 20, 2025

With or without? - speculaas/speculoos

"Loos in old Dutch means without. Speculaas is with a lot of spices, speculoos is speculaas without most of those spices." reddit As I often do I started with a random, well a few, in this case, random recipes from somewhere, and you travel the world in time and space, learning a few fairly trivial and mildly interesting things along the way. Mind you I have sort of done this one before with my Biscoff for a rainy day post - and apologies for the missing pictures - I accid

Dec 8, 2025

Living the dream requires money - lots

"For mum, who taught me how to dream, and Pete, who makes my dreams come true." This is the Chateau de Bosguet in Normandy - otherwise known as The French Table - a gourmet getaway in a tiny village in Normandy where you can take cooking classes, or just simply relax. It is run by a Melburnian couple who, in 2003 began to dream of a life in France and a new business venture - a residential cooking and French village life focussed stay. And so in 2005 they bought this somewh

Dec 7, 2025

A recipe years in the making

"pushing the boundaries of Italian cuisine, to highlight the power food, drink and travel has on memory" Rob Hobart/Peroni Nastro Azzurro I started out today researching piña colada inspired desserts - it was a topic in my Ideas list. Somehow or other during those rambles around a couple of Google pages, I came across this Cherry and strawberry crostata with black sesame praline a dish that Ixta Belfrage had presented in her Substack newsletter, telling us that it was a re

Dec 4, 2025

If you're a dedicated cook ...

"I’ll admit it's a labour of love, but so very worth it." Ixta Belfrage This will be a quickie I think. It's inspired by this recipe for A curry leaf, cherry, coconut & hibiscus crudo on a red millet tostada which turned up in Ixta Belfrage's substack newsletter. (I think the link will work - if it doesn't just do a Google search.) It arrived in my email this morning. As you know I am a huge fan of Ixta. Her food is truly exciting, and generally only a tiny bit difficu

Nov 25, 2025

Feta or fetta?

"Keep a jar of Persian-style fet[t]a in the fridge and you'll always have something to smear on veg, swirl through pasta, add oomph to recipes and basically make life better." Sydney Morning Herald Good Food I have learnt a few things about feta/fetta today and not just the initial thing - that feta and fetta are not the same thing - but a whole lot of other associated stuff too. And let me say that I am not the only one who uses the two spellings somewhat haphazardly. I c

Nov 21, 2025

Letters to Nigel Slater - a blog

"If you accept what IS, then you can simply relax and appreciate it for its specialness" Hilary Chambers I haven't written about other bloggers for a while now, so it's time, and the next one is one I have been sort of looking forward to for a while - Letters to Nigel Slater . I mean how could I resist? Having now read a few posts it leaves me a little sad and with lots of questions. It's a very plain and unfancy looking website which began back in November 2011 and eded w

Nov 19, 2025

Ixta Belfrage excites again

"Not seasoning food is against my religion" Ixta Belfrage Well it's time I did a kind of overview of this exciting cookbook. It's been sitting on my desk for a while, with a dozen or so yellow post-it stickers poking out of it, saying, cook me, cook me. So today is the day. I just worry that then I will find it a place on my shelves and it will never see the light of day again. Although I see I have already made one thing from it - a passion fruit and white chocolate mou

Nov 12, 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

Hawaij, spice mixes and marketing

The other day I bought this expensive jar of Ottolenghi hawaij paste. It was on a special, I was just filling in time waiting for David for some reason I cannot now remember, wandering around Woolworths when I spied it. I had noticed Hawaij a lot here and there, or so I thought, and I was feeling a bit down, and so I thought 'why not?' and put it in my trolley. I feel a tiny bit cross at myself, because there are lots of recipes online for a hawaij spice mix, and it's not

Oct 23, 2025

Food for celebrities - a book

"Staying in really is the new going out." Nisha Parmar The pile of books on my desk is not getting any smaller because I keep on adding to it. It's becoming a bit of an addiction which is a somewhat worrying thought. So today I decided to tackle yet one more - a birthday gift from my son and his ex, so it dates back to June. I did look at it pretty much straightaway, but then it ended up in the dreaded pile. So a quick summary - a beautiful cover - well done designers. Go

Oct 16, 2025