Category: 5 ingredients or less

  • Peanut Butter Fudge Sauce

    Peanut Butter Fudge Sauce

    In a week of Valentine’s Day and Pancake Day, here I am offering you peanut butter fudge sauce. It’s a poor replacement, I know. But I hope it counts, dear reader. During these ceaseless months of lockdown, I have become very attached to my food. I’m sure we all have. Instead of kissing the person…

  • Blood Oranges with Spiced Caramel

    Blood Oranges with Spiced Caramel

    Every season, there is a fickle, flighty fruit or vegetable which, as soon as I get my grubby mitts on it, takes all my energy and forces me to neglect other foods. They are allusive creatures. Here today then they disappear in a wisp of fragrance, leaving us mournful in their wake, wondering what we…

  • Hazelnut Butter

    Hazelnut Butter

    It’s good and familiar to be near a lovingly-stocked kitchen. The cupboards are full of jars and spices and pastes, all the accoutrements that take time to collect. In our new kitchen in Toulouse, our cupboards don’t even have an order, unless you call ‘wherever you can find space, that’s where it goes’ order. The…

  • French recipe: French Crêpes

    French recipe: French Crêpes

    As I predicted, moving abroad has its hurdles. I write this still awaiting my SIM card and with no bank account, not for the lack of trying. Administration in France is not easy at the best of times but add a pandemic and doors start gently closing with a perfunctory, ‘Désolé!’ Unlike French bureaucracy, that…

  • The 4 Best Sweet Breakfasts

    The 4 Best Sweet Breakfasts

    November in Toulouse is not nearly as austere as other parts of the northern hemisphere during late autumn. The sun glitters through next door’s hedge, the sky is a spotless azure (most of the time), the leaves are gently turning from green to red, and, in fact, it’s colder inside than out due to a…

  • Lockdown 2.0: France – Coriander and shallot sauce

    Lockdown 2.0: France – Coriander and shallot sauce

    Amidst the tumult of the last few months; the pandemics and politics, the masks, the job losses, and the general upheaval, I’ve quietly moved to France. It really was quiet – it was just me and a suitcase or two – and after a tight hug with my mum at Heathrow, I donned my mask…

  • The 4 best savoury breakfasts

    The 4 best savoury breakfasts

    A girl doesn’t ask for much. It would just be wonderful if: I am coming to terms with the fact that three points on this list are impossible (although I’m taking some comfort in wishing my hair to miraculously change as I sleep). Breakfast, though, is easy. To start, I need to discover what makes…

  • Bramble Jam

    Bramble Jam

    I love jam. That may not be a mystery. My friend Hannah can testify. When we lived together I had a collection of seven jams in the fridge. One for each day of the week you could say. Looking back, I admit it was excessive. Jam on toast, jam on scones, jam on my face,…

  • Panettone with Christmas cake ice cream

    Panettone with Christmas cake ice cream

    Oh the weather outside is frightfulBut the fire is so delightfulAnd since we’ve no place to goLet it snow, let it snow, let it snow Said no one in Wellington ever. This is what I’m having to put up with. For a summery, sunny city, however, there are surprising number of wintery scenes. Christmas cards…

  • Homemade custard

    Homemade custard

    Finally, Easter weekend has come and gone, and with it so has Lent, hooray! Back I joyously skip into the arms of temptation and bury my face in the next cream tea or jar of jam I see. Although, I have to confess, my absconding from sugar took a dramatic nose dive these final few…