On oat flour and elephant garlic
While not coeliac, I am wheat-/gluten-sensitive, yet I can tolerate porridge oats. Having lived in Australia for many years, I enjoyed oat bread, but can’t find it here. I’d bake my own if I could only get oat flour and…
Making fresh pasta is a rite of passage
Leo Tolstoy thought it was good for the soul to make your own shoes. As a result he spent his later years hobbling around with terrible corns. Some things are better left to the experts. For most people, pasta falls…
Do ‘superfoods’ really exist?
In the early 1990s, a cookbook called Superfoods appeared in the bookshops. It was co-written by the alternative medicine practitioner, Michael Van Straten, who is one of a handful of people said to have coined what has become one of…
A well-done steak isn’t a food choice: it’s a crime
Ido so love animals, especially dead, sliced up and roasted ones, their very life blood oozing out of them to the rim of my plate; the colour of conker on the outside, of velvet plush within. Stop wrinkling your nose…
The secret of the Mediterranean diet? There is no secret
Whoop-de-doo, researchers at King’s College London and the University of California claim to have identified the “secret” underpinning the oft-quoted healthfulness of the Mediterranean diet. From their lab tests on mice (not just any old mice, genetically modified ones) they…
Eat more anchovies, herring and sardines to save the ocean’s fish stocks
Cut back on tuna and salmon and load your plate instead with herring and sardines if you want to help save the world’s fish. So says the scientist who led the most comprehensive analysis ever carried out of fish stocks…
Summer prawn salad
This is a lovely fresh, crunchy salad with a hint of spice. You can substitute the prawns with crayfish meat, which is delicious and sweet, and should be cheaper too. Good delis and fishmongers stock it: opt for fresh UK-caught…
Make your own bacon
Buying bacon’s a lottery. There’s no telling the quality of pork that went into it, or the quantity of water added to bulk it out. If you want something that’s guaranteed to please, you’ll have to make it yourself. Start…
How to eat a persimmon
Our fruit bowls are becoming more adventurous. Having embraced the kiwi, the mango and the pomegranate we are now, it seems, passionate about persimmons. Supermarkets including Asda reported sales of the yellowy-orange, usually tomato-shaped fruits more than doubled last year…
Cornish blue: the greatest of cheese
General de Gaulle is famously said to have remarked of France “How can you govern a country that produces 246 varieties of cheeses?” The same can probably be said of Britain these days, and one of those cheeses, Cornish blue,…
Homemade yoghurt: something for the live-culture vultures
Yoghurt. We get through masses of it in our house. In fact, most things I cook for my children go well with yoghurt – breakfast, lunch or dinner. There’s the blob of fruity yoghurt my six-year-old likes to perch on…