Advent calendars. Mulled wine. Walking around Christmas markets with good intentions but never actually buying the £10 honey, the wind chime, or the charcoal drawing of a landscape you don’t recognise. There are some things that just scream of Christmas tradition, but the ultimate for me, has to be a ham. The ham I bring … Continue reading PINEAPPLE & TREACLE GLAZED HAM
Family folklore has it that Yorkshire pudding batter has always been somewhat of a mystique in my family. It run the whole gamut of complexity from the picturesquely perfect to the plain pain in the arse, with so many trials and tribulations in the middle. It’s a strange concept too as you’d think that following … Continue reading TADPOLES IN THE HOLE
Rich, aromatic, pull-apart lamb in a dark, malty gravy bubbling under tangy, pillowy bulbs of soft cobbler pastry. Any story that starts this way is one I am happy to finish. The good thing is, it’s the kind of story that really benefits from being put down halfway through, allowed to temptingly play in your … Continue reading LAMB, COURGETTE & DARK ALE STEW WITH ROSEMARY & MUSTARD COBBLER
Do you ever just thank God for the Ziplock bag? I do. I do it all the time. Food that’s waiting for you in the fridge, from the seasoned depths of a Ziplock bag, means that something phenomenal is coming to the table and there’s very little work left to do once that bag is … Continue reading PICKLED LEMON, OLIVE & TOMATO CHICKEN BAKE WITH ORZO
This is a BEAST of a post for something that truly feels like a BEAST of a task. Don’t dismay; it is not. This is a Sunday Dinner broke down to avoid a breakdown. Not because cooking a Sunday Dinner is difficult and breakdown inducing, but because the concept of it may seem difficult, and … Continue reading A SUNDAY DINNER
Everybody’s got a lasagne recipe Even the shakiest of kitchen-phobes somewhere in the depths of their culinary cranium, have a lasagne recipe. I often hear people who aren’t the most confident of cooks, punctuate their anti-kitchen confessions with ‘But I do make a good lasagne!’ And I’m not mad at this. I think so long … Continue reading A REALLY RELIABLE LASAGNE
A ragù is emotional. I’ve always found, after many years of cooking, that a ragù/ meat sauce, is deeply personal to everybody that cooks it. Even people who hate cooking/ don’t cook will always say to me that they make ‘a good bolognese’ or ‘a good lasagne’, and while this makes me happy, because I’d … Continue reading BEEF & ‘NDUJA RAGÙ
There’s almost like an unwritten rule with food writers that the minute the temperature so much as drops half a point, we all sprint to our Word processors to write about soups and stews and how ‘THIS recipe warms the soul‘ and ‘insert cute fireside bowl-clutching food blogger’ image here. This recipe could be that, … Continue reading LAMB CAWL WITH DUMPLINGS
A cooked chicken says many things while saying nothing at all. A cooked chicken speaks to something primal within us. It reminds us that while so many things in life are not guaranteed, what is guaranteed is that seasoning and citrussing a chicken, frying it for a short while and then roasting it for just … Continue reading SKILLET CHICKEN WITH LEMON, CUMIN & MINT
There is a scenic recipe route for cooking meatballs. Lavish, sepia toned landscape affairs of frying onions, soaking cuts of bread in milk, cracking eggs, grating garlic, combining two bricks of ground beef and sausage and then a laborious amount of dexterity. This isn’t that recipe. If that recipe is hiking the Himalayas to meatballs, … Continue reading QUICK MEATBALLS & SPICY PEPPER SAUCE
MIKEY AND THE KITCHEN. 