Category: Starters
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Roast chicken, lime and herb salad
This year we have all made a new friend. That friend is called Lockdown. He’s not a friend to everyone – he’s quite smothering and bossy, to be honest. He says he has your best interests at heart. But if that best interest is me eating my body weight in baguette and not taking any…
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Goat’s cheese and coriander salad
Lockdown has been a peculiar time. Like many others I’m sure, my normally eager productivity has sunk into the depths of a swampy quagmire, struggling to stay buoyant. Cooking for myself is suddenly hard work and my cool night time habit of reading cookbooks has worryingly disappeared. People have been proudly nurturing their sourdough starters…
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Watermelon and feta salad
I was born in bleak mid-January, so, naturally, I have become accustomed to a cold, wintery birthday. It comes with the territory. Like all occasions, you shape the celebration to the season and I have hosted a number of wintery parties. For instance, the Valentine’s Day-themed sleepover which involved a hideous microwaved Skittles concoction (why…
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Homemade taramasalata
It’s been a busy week. For the first time I can remember, I’ve not been thinking about food, what I’m eating, cooking or baking, instead my thoughts are preoccupied with the logistics of that cooking – storage, transporting food across the city, and installing stoves and ovens. The café is expanding. A new branch in…
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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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Roasted pepper and sweet potato soup
This time of year reminds me of the front cover of a Sophie Dahl cookbook. Wrapped in a cosy thick coat (in a pink print much like a rug you’d see in a vintage shop which you’d immediately notice then avoid) her elegantly crossed legs ending in some sturdy wellies, she’s sitting on the steps…
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Goat’s Cheese, Walnut and Grape Salad
The car park in which Levenshulme Market is cloistered is surrounded by wildflowers. The grassy incline up to the railway bridge is covered in long green tufts of unweeded foliage and amidst the chaos are flowers in red, white, purple, yellow, all singing the song of summer. All I wanted to do was clamber over…
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Guacamole
My dad works away from home, spending most of his week near Birmingham. Every Thursday he drives back to be the out-numbered male in a house of three women and spends the weekend cooking up a storm. He is a very good cook – throughout our family life he has taken the reins of providing…