Leiths Week 10: Tortellini and truffles

In the final week of the Leiths Confident Cooking Course, we tackled homemade pasta and amaretti chocolate truffles Tortellini of ricotta, lemon, parmesan and sage butter I’ve wanted to make homemade pasta for years, but I don’t have a pasta maker and I’ve not felt confident I could roll out the pasta by hand. Or [...]

Leiths Week 9: Lamb and syllabub

The menu for the penultimate week of my Leiths course was lamb with pan-fried new potatoes, beans and parma ham, onion and chili chutney for main course, followed by a passionfruit and Muscat syllabub Lamb fillet with pan-fried new potatoes, beans and parma ham, onion and chili chutney This recipe was adapted from New Zealand [...]

Leiths Week 8: Wood pigeon & black pudding salad and apple strudel

In week 8 of the Leiths Confident Cooking course we deboned wood pigeon and made strudel from scratch. Apple strudel I really enjoyed this class. It never occurred to me that we would be making the filo pastry for the apple strudel from scratch. Nor that making filo would be so much fun. Who knew? [...]

Leiths Week 7: Amaretto pavlovas and chilli squid salad

This week was my favourite Leiths lesson so far. We made chilli squid salad for our savoury dish and individual amaretti pavlovas for dessert. They were both amazing and very photogenic, as you can see. I took my camera along for the first time and I’m almost tempted to just let the pictures speak for [...]

Leiths Week 6 – Pork tenderloin, new potatoes, and citrus fruit compote with spiced caramel

It’s a double-whammy of Leiths posts as I try to get up to date before the class tomorrow night. It’s hard to believe it’s week six already – more than halfway through the course! Last week the menu was pork tenderloin with sage and madeira sauce, accompanied by crushed new potatoes and peas. We had [...]

Leiths Week 5 – Pâté with melba toast, salmon and broccoli salad

Chicken liver pâté and melba toasts I like liver pâté but I had never previously given much thought to its preparation. Now that I can speak from experience, I can say that ignorance is bliss and in future I will buy my rather than make pâté. Some things are best left to the specialists. It’s [...]

Leiths Week 4: Souffle and duck

Twice-baked salmon and dill souffles The first time I ever attempted souffle, the result was a rather nice frittata. It tasted great but it was flat as a pancake – and not a Scandinavian one. (In my defence, I would like to point out that we didn’t have an electric mixer and I was attempting [...]

Leiths Week 3: Currying favour with a curry

It was Indian and Sri Lankan this week at Leiths but before I tantalise your tastebuds with descriptions of the yummy food, please permit me a short rant. If you don’t live in London, you might want to skip the next paragraph. Leiths used to be fairly centrally located in Kensington. Unfortunately they needed bigger [...]

Leiths Week 2: Quails and chocolate roulade

My second week at Leiths just about kept me fed for the rest of the week! I had quail with peas for dinner both Wednesday and Thursday night and then took the cake to a friend’s dinner party last night. Chocolate and ginger roulade In the kitchen we started with dessert – a chocolate and [...]

Serious cookery at Leiths (Week 1)

I am mostly a self-taught cook. I learnt the basics from my mum and dad and since then my cooking repertoire has expanded through cookbooks and magazines, sharing recipes and ideas with friends, and playing around in the kitchen inventing new dishes from random ingredients. I guess it’s been a moderately successful approach as I [...]

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