Recipe Road Test: Chocolate-Caramel Macadamia Nut Tart

A decadent chocolate-caramel dessert for impressing guests As a I cook I’m usually drawn to the simple and I rarely make something that requires multiple steps. So this tart was a departure for me, since it involved blind-baking pastry, making caramel, making chocolate ganache, assembling it all before the chocolate and caramel set, and piping [...]

Spring cooking: Recipe for asparagus tart

An improvised tart to celebrate spring – perfect for a Sunday lunch with friends. The White Witch still has the East Coast in her wintry clutches, but here in Californarnia, Aslan is on the move. It’s spring! The song birds are pairing up, the squirrels are getting frisky, and the trees are in blossom. Best [...]

Thanksgiving dinner: A dress rehearsal for Christmas

We cook up a feast for our first Thanksgiving in America. Thanksgiving is a peculiarly North American holiday. In the United States it is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November and in Canada it is the second Monday in October and is, I believe, more of a harvest festival. Perhaps readers can enlighten me [...]

Driving Highway 1 in California: Pescadero and Duartes Tavern

Have an artichoke lunch at Duartes Tavern in Pescadero, a few hours south of San Francisco. This is the first in a series of posts about our road trip down California’s famous Highway 1. The stretch of Highway 1 immediately south of San Francisco, before you hit Santa Cruz, is pretty but not as spectacular [...]

Recipe Road Test: Ptolemy Mann’s rose-geranium cake

Recipe for sophisticated Middle Eastern-inspired, gluten-free cake with rose geranium I was browsing in the farmers’ market at the San Francisco Ferry Building the other week when I found a stall selling bunches of rose-geranium leaves. For those not in the know, it’s a specific type of geranium with rough leaves that smell like roses. [...]

Recipe Road Test: Orange poppyseed cake

It was my birthday last week so what better excuse to bake a cake? It’s been ages since I’d done any baking – I’m usually a savoury cook. I had a bit of time to play around in the kitchen and I quite fancied getting out the wooden spoon and mixing bowl and whipping up [...]

A very English spring – sausages, sparrow grass and simnel cake

We have returned to London in the glorious throes of spring, with blue skies and brilliant sunshine and the signs of new life throbbing all around us. As we walk through the parks, the lawns and canopy of new leaves in the tree tops seem unnaturally green in their jewel-like hues. The meadows are alive [...]

Recipe: Lebanese aubergine stew

Hearty vegetarian dish adapted from a Nigella Lawson recipe. The problem with food blogging is that a lot of the most delicious food is not particularly photogenic. If I were a truly dedicated food blogger, I would cook up beautiful cakes just for the joy of photographing them, and I would do most of my [...]

The best of 2008 (and 2007 too)

The top 10 most popular posts at the end of 2008. 10. Recipe Road Test: Nigella’s rhubarb tart Guest blogger Pixie tests out Nigella Lawson’s rhubarb tart recipe from How to be a Domestic Goddess. 9. Recipe Road Test: Fried aubergines with chilli and salad onions I test out Simon Hopkinson’s aubergine recipe from Waitrose [...]

Recipe: Potato-leek soup

Hearty and healthy winter soup. I’ve been asked for my potato and leek soup recipe so I thought I’d share it here. It’s from Mollie Katzen’s wonderful vegetarian cookbook The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. After the excess of Christmas and with just over three months to go before my wedding, I’m on a bit of a [...]

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