Roast Beef, Burnt Vegetables & Roast Potatoes

A great roast is one of life’s reliable pleasures and yet, a lot of home cooks are apprehensive about undertaking it. So here is how you can achieve perfection without freaking out too much. Start with the obvious; a good piece of meat. It doesn’t need to be the most expensive and if I was

Lamb Tagine with Green Olives and Preserved Lemon

Tagine is a dish that you either love or hate, though I honestly don’t understand how you can hate something so deeply satisfying. I have to admit that a lot of middle eastern food leaves me entirely cold, quite probably because it is so desperately badly cooked here in Malaysian restaurants. So if, like me,

Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms

Is life too short to be stuffing mushrooms? Not if they are big Portobello mushrooms! I’m starting to rediscover the recipes of my youth. These meat stuffed mushrooms make a perfect main course for the family, or a successful starter for a dinner party. I plated them on a bed of very thinly sliced white

Bratwurst

Why on earth would you make your own sausages? Teutonic souls will known; there simply isn’t a decent sausage to be had in this city. Some are okay, but none are the real thing we remember from our pre-covid travelling days. What we are making today is a fried sausage. It has no preservatives in

Fried Mackerel with Cassoulet Beans & Herb Garlic Crumbs

Here’s a dish that packs a punch! I wanted to make a cassoulet that our pescatarian friends could eat as well, but still preserve that depth of flavour and that heartening warmth of the meaty versions. Fat is an important part of a good cassoulet, so don’t be shocked by the quantities of oil I

Coq au Vin Façon du Chef

There is an easy way to make coq au vin and then there is my way. It’s a little more involved, but it will give you a beautifully clean looking sauce with perfectly cooked vegetables and an incomparable depth of flavour. Most recipes will as you to marinate the chicken in wine overnight and I

One Man’s Schnitzel…

…is another man’s Milanese. It’s all crumbs to me! And there’s the secret I’m about to share with you. The idea of the Wiener Schnitzel or Scaloppa Milanese is pretty straightforward; flatten, flour, egg-wash and crumb your meat and then shallow fry it in oil or better still animal fat. So far, so easy. But

Aromatic Crispy Duck

Our Aromatic Crispy Duck has come to its completion, so here is the actual recipe in full, without diversions into making your own Hoisin Sauce, for which you can make your own Black Bean Paste, for which you can make your own Five Spice Powder. Guess who was fool enough to make all his own

A Sunday Feast – Slow Roast Lamb

I was going to share this recipe with you yesterday, but then I ended up doing instead of writing. Eddie and I had some friends over for lunch and I broke my cardinal rule and made something I’d never cooked before, which is generally a bad idea. Of course you will know that it worked