Category: Lunches
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Eat the Seasons: Your Essential Guide to Autumn
Without a doubt, autumn is most people’s favourite season, mine included. There is a freshness in the air after the sticky heat of summer, along with a brisk chill and lingering smell of smoke from the bonfire of dead leaves raked up in someone’s garden. You gradually add more layers to your wardrobe; thick jumpers,…
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Soy-Glazed Seabass
As far as jobs go, mine is marvellous. Becoming a chef was never a childhood dream – in another life I will be a ballet dancer – as it was far too sweaty, stressful, and you can’t paint your nails. But, contrary to my expectations, it is a role I’ve worked in for the last…
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Bacon and chorizo macaroni cheese
We all need a little r & r now and again. Life has become relentlessly active these days – work hard play hard – with little time to slow down and breathe (unless you’re nursing a hangover). The Sunday ‘Doomsday’ dread has never been more tangible when we start the five-day countdown to ‘Fri-yay!’. Play…
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The Best Picnic Food
Like buying an ice cream or building sandcastles, picnics are a rite of passage for the summer. Eating outdoors is a novelty, especially in this cloudy little country, so we grab those warm afternoons and evenings with both hands, venture outside and load our paper plates high. Summer essentially equals messy eating and we all…
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How to make a great salad
Every year we yearn for summer’s arrival. In mid-winter’s clutches we shiver like huddled penguins and strain to remember those warmer times. Winters last eternity, much like a never-ending winter in Game of Thrones. Slowly but surely our wishes have been granted and at last, it’s summer! And with it came the sweat. Was everyone…
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5 a Day
At last spring is here! Hands up; who’s excited about all the fresh veg? Just me? Not that we all don’t love a muddy turnip or beetroot, but the dense, sweet, earthy flavours of winter are now too hearty for the season. So long to soups, stews and pies (unless you live in Manchester where…
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A slice of bread
Somehow, tartines passed me by. For someone who claims to be a food-obsessive and, for that matter, work in the food industry, this is quite embarrassing. I think I was confused as the word looks so similar to ‘tarte tatin’ (it does), which is structurally the same – a carby chewy base, topped with flavourful…
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How to make the perfect scrambled eggs
The first lesson at Leiths School of Food and Wine taught us how to scramble eggs. Our tutor was meticulous, regularly repeating, ‘Now, this is VERY important’ which I would immediately scribble down in my notebook margin, ‘very important!’ with lots of aggressive capital letters, and, like the good pupils we were, we all leaned…
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#newyearnewme: Spiced carrots with couscous and preserved lemon
Cooking vegan meals is more fulfilling than I thought. This is a statement I never thought I’d say. If you are a reader of this food-obsessed blog you will already know it’s unlikely I have partaken in this month’s Veganuary, especially as my last post described my recent meat spree in graphic and visceral detail,…
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Quichemas – Sausage, apple and blue cheese quiche
The café at which I work has a specials board. Like most specials boards it is big, black and made of slate, and to many strictly set menu-adhering customers, a cumbersome distraction to the ambience of the room. Before I worked with food I was an indoctrinated menu-follower. It is handed to you politely by…