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

Smoked Salmon Ricotta Quenelles with Fennel Cream Sauce

Quenelles are really just fishballs in French, so there’s nothing that should scare you here. You aim for a super light texture (very contrary to their Asian cousins), but if you don’t quite achieve it, there’s still nothing lost and you will probably enjoy them just as much. If you’re making them for guests, my

Pâté de Campagne – Rustic Pork Pâté

Pâté is the kind of thing you see in French butchers’ windows or served by slice in a Brasserie in Paris, so you naturally assume that making it is complicated, fraught with risk and really belongs in the domain of the experienced chef. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s easy to make and

A Happy New Year

Now that our revels are ended, I’m slowly growing tired of wishing “Happy New Year” to all and sundry all day long, desperately trying to remember whom I have wished and whom I haven’t and probably getting it wrong, wishing the same, by now exasperated person eight times, I am looking forward to the time

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 Beautiful Tray of Roast Peppers fit for a Sunday Feast

Capsicum are a pretty vegetable. Which of course they are not. They are actually a fruit, if we are to be pedantic. Just like the tomato, they belong to the nightshade family. When I make this dish, I like to choose as many different colours of capsicum as I can find, because unlike zucchini, which

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