I interview 80-year-old Dee from south Wales who likes her pwdin reis with black skin on it. Rice pudding was once eaten for Sunday dinner all over Wales, slow-cooked overnight to make use of a hot oven after baking bread.
How to make… tahini
Tahini. That nutty sesame seed paste, and backbone to many a good hummus, can be made at home with minimal effort. It requires sesame seeds, a flavourless oil, and about 10 minutes of your time. And it goes something like this… Place at least 100g of sesame seeds in a dry frying pan. Any less will make it
Beautiful brassicas
Anyone seen the latest series of Chef’s Table? As usual, it’s bowling me over, and making me want to take to the wind again, to foreign lands and new food-inspired adventures. If you haven’t and need a place to begin, watch episode one, Jeong Kwan. The South Korean Zen Buddhist nun, who in her words
How to make… yoghurt
Yoghurt starts with yoghurt. Just a spoon of it. Then all you need are a couple pints of full-fat milk, a thermos flask and 8 hours of no work whatsover, to get you a whole big lot of it. Thick tangy lovely yoghurt. No effort, a lot less plastic and a few quid saved. My grandma would
Bean broth, made good
Bean broth, bean juice, bean liquid. Whatever appetising name you like to call it (there aren’t any), that murky liquid from a tin of butter beans or the cooking water from a tender chickpea, is liquid gold. Liquid gold! Especially, when saved for a rainy, bare-fridge kinda day. That day was yesterday. A jar of chickpea cooking
Fasting and feasting with Patience Gray
Forgive me for going on about eggs and potatoes, again. A very bare vegetable box, and a strong urge to eat all things comforting and simple are to blame. So eggs and potatoes it is. Fittingly, I’m re-reading a brilliant book by home-cook and writer, Patience Grey, called, Honey from a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalan,
Comfort in curry
Potato and egg. That bloody genius, comfort combination of soft, earthy starch and runny yolk, which together prove you don’t need money to eat like a king. Potato and egg are the basis of a Spanish tortilla, of course, which I first ate sandwiched between a white baguette in Valencia. A double carb-load that could not
Breaking bread: food and community
It’s been a few weeks since I got back from this six-month trip and I’m still digesting it all. It was incredible really. Getting back to basics, living in nature, staying on farms and in eco-communities, learning from people who live completely different lives, cooking local food and eating eating eating. For the majority of
Homemade salt and other discoveries
December was a month for firsts. I saw an avocado tree for the first time, I picked my first passion fruit (and ate it), I built my first yurt, I became a dab hand at using a circular saw and it was the first time I completely avoided the Christmas prelude – this caused a
Pig head soup anyone?
Just a quick note to raise a glass and say hello and happy Christmas to you all! This is me pretending I’m still drinking cognac in Armenia, when really I’m sat on my mum’s sofa not doing much. Please indulge me for just a moment. Coming home from a six-month trip across the “wild east” has
To hummus. A love letter
I knew I couldn’t leave Israel or Palestine without talking about hummus. That ubiquitous chickpea paste that is impossible to avoid in the Middle East. And it’s good here. So good! I can’t decide whether it’s the quality of the tahini, the way the chickpeas are cooked or the very specific way it’s served depending on