In the last couple of weeks, I have been contacted by The Executive Chef magazine and St James's House on behalf of the Royal Agricultural Society. Both of them had the most wonderful advertising opportunities and we had been specially selected out...
Read moreWe, the small business owners and micro-entrepreneurs, are the forgotten, ignored and trodden upon solid foundation of the British, American and every other economy in the world. We employ most of the employed people and generate much of the new, gr...
Read moreThis is another recipe that I have followed from Pierre Hermé's inspirational cookbook "Chocolate", which I have reinterpreted for a British audience. The only tweak I have made to it was in the use of edible gold as a garnish on top of the chocolat...
Read moreI went to small, all-boys prep school in Northumberland called Mowden Hall School, which still exists and is now a mixed prep school. In fact, my father went there the first year it moved to Northumberland after the Second World War. It seems so ol...
Read moreI am a fan of those little self-published recipe books as within them you often get real recipe gems that have been handed down from generation to generation within families. You also get a lot of rubbish, as well, but a recipe book with even only o...
Read moreI am 42 now and I have finally worked out what the phrase "life begins at forty" means. It came as a Pauline moment as I was driving home the other day. It really means that you only ever plan your life until you get to about 40 years old*, so now...
Read moreI had been looking for an excuse to try a recipe that I had pulled out of The Daily Telegraph from Xanthe Clay's hunt for the Best British Recipes. It is that classic of British fusion cooking and sentimentality for bygone Imperialism (rightly or wr...
Read moreI have been intrigued by comments by Mervyn King and others about the state of the economy, as I am not sure whether they ever take into account the real situation for small companies. So I thought I would briefly blog some notes about Steenbergs at...
Read moreI was roundly castigated for being a political ignoramus with my first look at electoral reform, which was probably sound. However, far from being deterred, I still want to continue to try and understand the debate in spite of the heckling, and see...
Read moreNutmeg and mace are two of those mysterious spices that are really, unusual in where they come from. They also have many strange stories attached to them - they used to be thought of as part of a cure for the plague and are reputed to be a key ingre...
Read moreMy blog posts about Dumfries and Galloway would not be complete without talking about Cream O'Galloway, an ice cream producer between Gatehouse of Fleet and Kirkcudbright. We seem to spend much of our family holiday centred around their farm at Rain...
Read moreFor many years, I shaved with a Gillette safety razor that used a classic plastic double-bladed Contour disposable blade until mid 2009. However, I did not find the shave particularly close or satisfying, and I didn't like having to chuck the blades...
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