Category: Winter

  • French recipe: Dauphinoise Potatoes with Thyme and Nutmeg

    French recipe: Dauphinoise Potatoes with Thyme and Nutmeg

    This weekend, I made two dishes of dauphinoise potatoes in two days. A tale of two gratins. We mustn’t compare or pick a favourite – just like a careful parent soothing offspring who are indignant to know the truth of the phrase ‘we love you equally.’ This makes no sense to the children who always…

  • Easy Oven-Baked Risotto with Leek and Sage

    Easy Oven-Baked Risotto with Leek and Sage

    This week’s oven-baked risotto came about because of the snow. I woke up this morning at 7:15 all of a fluster as I do every time my alarm rings. It’s a soothing alarm tone, one with bells and bird song, it’s very meditative rather an a literal alarm which rings like a screaming siren, but…

  • The Perfect Bangers, Mash and Onion Gravy

    The Perfect Bangers, Mash and Onion Gravy

    Smoothies are all well and good, but I can’t escape the fact it is January. I didn’t expect the south of France to be sunshine and rainbows 12 months a year, but honestly, the other day it was warmer in Edinburgh than in Toulouse. And so, understandably, I’m in hibernation. The shutters are down, metaphorically…

  • Comforting Miso Chicken Soup

    Comforting Miso Chicken Soup

    If self-care had a physical form, it would be in the shape of chicken soup. You might be thinking that you self-cared yourself enough this Christmas – eating all that cheese would be anyone’s ideal form of self-care (besides anyone with lactose intolerance that is), all smug and warm like dipping into a bath of…

  • Gingerbread marshmallows

    Gingerbread marshmallows

    I appear to have travelled through time. I blinked and somehow it’s advent. Time travel is clearly the only logical answer – although the time machine would have to be invisible and must be parked in one of the few unused parking spaces outside. And all users would have had their memories magically wiped. But,…

  • Spiced butternut squash muffins

    Spiced butternut squash muffins

    This post was originally published while I was living in Manchester, on 29th October 2018, and I think these little spiced butternut squash muffins deserve so much more from me than being buried in my archives! Here they are with some updated photos. The spooky glamour of Halloween ended quite abruptly for me a couple…

  • French recipe: Creamy Leek and Potato Soup

    French recipe: Creamy Leek and Potato Soup

    To quote Elizabeth Gilbert, since living in France, “I’ve been doing rude things to my body.” However, it seems unlikely that this leek and potato soup will help. While Liz made sweet love to pizza and pasta and gelato in Rome over the course of four months in her book ‘Eat, Pray, Love’, I have…

  • Classic Lasagne with Three Cheeses

    Classic Lasagne with Three Cheeses

    Before you immediately click away from this recipe because of course you know how to make lasagne, or you may be apologetically shrugging as if to say ‘so sorry Ally but my mum’s recipe for lasagne is unbeatable’, I’m just going to quickly say – you haven’t tried this lasagne. And I’m also going to…

  • Pear, Chocolate and Hazelnut Scones

    Pear, Chocolate and Hazelnut Scones

    There’s been a week’s intermission from blogging and from France, but I can offer you some pear, chocolate and hazelnut scones as compensation, dear reader. I don’t look like a French native. My cheeks are almost ruddishly pink – something even my dad pointed out recently in a fairly critical manner (‘why are your cheeks…

  • Juicy Carne Asada Steak with Loaded Nachos

    Juicy Carne Asada Steak with Loaded Nachos

    Carne asada nachos isn’t the recipe I was expecting to post at this time of year, but here we are. Veganuary, which you may know or have heard of, has no doubt settled under my skin. My sub-conscious urges me to eat salad after a month of gorging myself (see last month’s confessions of a…