"Pizza for breakfast?" I can remember Regan querying, in the communal Waveney Terrace kitchen where I was sitting with my brother eating an early lunch. Those pizzas were tiny English ones bought from a Norwich deli. Now, almost 50 years later, I am finally making proper breakfast pizzas. Ingredients for the base: 300g/10oz flour, approximately …
Serendipity sponge pudding
I always wanted to make one of those surprise puddings that cook in one bowl and end up with three layers. With this pudding I seem to have achieved some sort of a version of that, just by making a mistake in the recipe! I was intending to mix up a classic cake batter and …
Smoked haddock soup
I was checking to see when smoking fish became a thing. Several references to medieval Poland but surely it must go back further than that? This is another soup made from leftover bits and pieces. Definitely tastes better than its parts, a very warming bowl. It could be considered a chowder, or maybe a bisque? …
Lamb curry
So far this blog has suggested several vegetable curries - all go well with this rack of lamb. Or you could add a green salad - it's up to you! Ingredients: One rack of lamb. For the marinade: Half a teaspoon each of mustard, coriander and fenugreek seeds. The same of ground cumin. Several cloves, …
Butternut squash and turnip curry
Another simple vegetable curry, the sort of thing I don't get tired of eating: Ingredients: Half a butternut squash, one turnip, two red onions, one red pepper, one chilli, one tomato, a small handful of kale, another of red lentils, 1tsp of ground cumin, coriander and half of mustard seeds. Several cardamon pods, 1Tbsp oil …
Baked cabbage and bresaola pancakes
It's Pancake Day! Way back in June I was eating pancakes all the time because I had plenty of flour and no bread. You could just skip this post and go back to Operatic pancakes or Almost blinis if you prefer. But I thought I would make something a little different, something for a cold evening, something which does not require any finesse:
Experimental brownies
One summer, aged eighteen, I worked for the NAS International Biological Program, counting tardigrades and copepods in tundra soil samples. Most everyone else was a graduate student earning money during the vacation and the Arctic biome around Barrow/Utqiaġvik was a very long way from home. Mothers and girlfriends would send cardboard boxes of brownies, wrapped carefully in waxed paper, and we would await these despatches eagerly. The recipient would offer the box around before taking the letter and remains back to their Quonset hut bunk.
Bread, Judith
'In the more than four years that I've been living by myself I have never baked bread, but when the increased aloneness of lockdown took hold in 2020 I resolved to do so. It proved impossible to obtain yeast however so that my intention faded and was only fulfilled in recent January days when I …
Raspberry tart
'Tell me where have all the raspberry women gone?' Prince Rogers Nelson
Cooking for one 