11 December 2011

Recipe For Speculaas Biscuits - A Dutch Christmas Treat

One of my favourite Christmas cookies are spekulatius biscuits, or speculaas as they are called in the Netherlands.  I remember we always used to get a special parcel from Lebkuchen Schmidt in Nürmberg from my Granny.  In amongst all the beautiful ti...

03 December 2011

My Most Well Worn Cookbooks

I don't know whether it is when you really learned how to cook that determines what are your favourite books, or whether some books are just better than others.  However, I noticed recently how I still keep on going back to a few cookery books that I...

22 November 2011

A Truly British Cup Of Tea

Taking all the information in my previous blog, here is my stab at how to make a cracking cup of tea:

18 November 2011

The Perfect Cuppa

The other day I listened to James May chatting on Radio 5 Live about the new series of Man Lab and in it he discussed the perfect cup of tea. As in everything in life, I agreed with some of what James May said, but disagreed with other parts, for exa...

15 November 2011

Mint Choc Cupcakes

Weren't we all brought up on the luxury of After Eights or Elizabeth Shaw Mint Crisps or Matchmakers, those quintessentially 1970s pieces of sophistication?  Or was it just me?  So using our new mintier Organic Peppermint Extract, I decided to create...

15 November 2011

Grants - What A Waste Of Time?

We have been looking at investing money in automating many of our currently manual processes to include filling, capping and metal detection.  As part of this plan, we had looked into getting some grant support rather than doing it all through extern...

13 November 2011

Youth Unemployment - The Real Issue

In amongst all the fantastical numbers that economists bandy around at the moment, there are some frightening figures that get lost in amongst the other seemingly more pressing numbers.  Amongst these, youth unemployment is the most worrying and is p...

10 November 2011

European Bailouts And The Structure Of The Financial System

There has been a lot of news recently about European bailouts, sit-ins and protests around St Paul's (there is also an anti-capitalist camp by Grey's Monument in Newcastle and probably elsewhere, but as usual London-Centric news of the UK largely ign...

06 November 2011

Lamb Stew With Rosemary & Lemon

I was pottering around the shops the other day and their was some good looking shoulder of lamb.  They called out to me "Cook me, take me", so I asked the butcher for them and popped them in the basket.  Back at home, I found some lemons that need us...

04 November 2011

Chocolate Ambassador

At my father's 75th birthday bash at the weekend, our children could not get enough of the Prinz Regenten Torte nor the Chocolate Ambassador.  Chocolate Ambassador turned out to be a rich chocolate mousse with raisins and biscuit within it.  As we we...

01 November 2011

A Couple Of Simple Recipes Using Steenbergs Peppermint Extract

Using Steenbergs relaunched organic peppermint extract, I made a few peppermint flavoured sweets the other evening for a Diwali meal that we were treated to by some good friends.  They are really simple and quite delicious; the hostess loved the Pepp...

30 October 2011

Our Agony With Peppermint

Peppermint has been giving us here a headache over the last few months.  Somehow our peppermint just was not quite good enough and we have spent lots of time trying to work out why and what we could do about it?  Firstly, the peppermint tea was minty...

18 October 2011

Blending Breakfast Teas (Part 3)

So how to get us started? Well, I decided to start at the end first and to work backwards, so I tried to work out what were the types or styles of tea that we wanted to come out with as products. Basically, we were looking for light, medium and stron...

10 October 2011

Blending Breakfast Teas (2)

These developments in tea blending style are best described through the developments in the composition of the standard household tea blend over the years.  These show how the blends became more complicated, even as they became less complex in flavou...

06 October 2011

Blending Breakfast Teas (1)

I have been doing some research while trying to create a range of Breakfast Tea blends to complement our very popular English Breakfast Tea.  This has partly been a matter of curiosity as I like, in a slightly anoraky way, reading old books on tea, s...

02 October 2011

The Sound of Northumberland

I have been to listen and watch Kathryn Tickell twice over the last month, once in Ripon and then at the Sage with her new show, Northumbrian Voices with her band and her dad - actually her dad, Mike Tickell, also came to the show in the Holy Trinity...

25 September 2011

I Needed A Fix Of Vegetable Curries

07 September 2011

Kaffee Und Kuchen In Munich

The other thing I always remember about trips to Bavaria and especially Munich was the cakes, or Kaffee und Küchen, either with my Granny or Aunts or in the posh cafés in the centre of town.  So we indulged with a visit to Kreutzkamm, but did not get...