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On Saturday following an excellent lunch at the Mark Addy, a riverside pub in Manchester that really is gastro, my friend Jon introduced me to the exec head chef Rob Brown. A lovely man who looks like he’d be entirely at home in a medieval banquet.
A fitting dish for the first post of March, the month where I stop hiding under a blanket and eating hearty comfort food and get excited about the days drawing out, milder weather, blue skies and all the glorious seasonal vegetables that are just around the corner.
In my world a good pie has few aires and graces. It should be robust, bold, bubbly - a bit overflowy in fact (is there anyone that doesn’t love the scorched, chewy filling from the edge of the dish? Surely not).
It makes me feel excited just as much as it makes me feel at home. I can’t wait to return.
Read moreIdeal for chilly weather and hungry guests. It may not have the finesse required for a dinner party, but for a boozy Sunday lunch with family and friends it’s perfect — providing just the right amount of comfort and being rather easy to pull off and impress with.
Read moreIt was actually introduced to me by my dad, who is without doubt the reason I am as adoring of food and cooking as I am.
Normally polishing off cheeses if a forte of mine, and my usual trick with Camembert is to bake it. Doing this is especially good after studding it with black garlic slivers, a coating of black pepper and a splash of white vino.
Little time and effort and good quality ingredients make this a real winner. Make sure you use good quality stock and high meat content sausages – and if you don’t like Toulouse then swap them for a more simple herbed sausage.
It fits in that category because it makes me think of the 70’s (not that I was there) and growing up spending time at my grandma and grandpas, therefore giving it a firm place in my food history and heart.
Read moreHowever, today I woke up feeling much better than I have been doing, and to celebrate this and my sore throat leaving me I decided to take a walk.
If you’re a noodle addict (like me) you’ll know what I mean, this is one of the best noodle dishes you can get. It contains delicious umami flavour, slurpy broth and long and slinky and wiggly noodles all spiked with prawns and crab sticks, a bit of Japanese seven spice pepper and some greens. Food for me doesn’t get much more fulfilling.
If like me, you’re one of the millions of people now feeling a little wobblier than usual and craving healthier nosh, you may be kicking off your new years eatings in the same way.
Read moreEvery day I’d return home and there’d be at least one new cake to eat. Sometimes more than one. One day when rooting around in the ‘naughty cupboard’ I found six cakes. I’m not kidding – six.
When feeling a little run down (or in my case, like you’ve been overdoing things), chicken noodle soup really does hit the spot. But yeah, you might have guessed, in my world it’s got to be oriental.
I’m convinced that this dish could rescue the cauliflower from plummeting popularity and sliding sales.
I came home earlier in the week and cooked a Thai prawn soup and some sticky jasmine rice, it’s a quick dish but by the time it was ready to eat it was dark and I couldn’t take a decent picture, so tonight I knew I was on for a bit of a challenge to get this ready in time.
Because of this dishes popularity, and of course because I love oriental food, I’ve decided to do another one in a slightly different way, and to show a number of different things that can be cooked from it. Hopefully this will please the thrifty, greedy and chili addled among you (and I don’t know about you, but I fall in to all three categories).
Szechuan peppercorns are very potent and clean tasting, almost mentholated, so they work really well with a big kick of ginger and green chilli, helping the chicken pack a punch in it’s fragrant liquor.