26 September 2010

Apples, Bloody Apples And An Apple Cake Recipe

We only have three apple trees in our garden, but they have been massively fruitful this year.  In fact, they have produced so many apples I cannot even hope to use them all, even with friends and family taking them.  Nature has been so very fecund t...

22 September 2010

Recipe For Pears In Rooibos With Vanilla And Saffron

One of the classics of British cuisine is to poach pears in red wine or syrup.  As a variation on this, I sometimes create a sweet spicy syrup to poach the pears in, then reduce these to a thick, sweet sauce.  Recently, however, I have been...

20 September 2010

Simpler Venison Casserole Recipe

Having gone through the fuss and carry on of marinading venison in stock per the previous post, I wondered why you do not just make a stew in the normal way as you would for beef or lamb.  Also, I still had some of the Hornby Castle venison in the fr...

17 September 2010

Recipe For Yorkshire Fruit Tea Bread

We have always loved teabreads here at home like those made by Elizabeth Bothams of Whitby, but I reckoned that some of those homely, comforting cakes could not be too difficult to make.  So this weekend I set out to make a traditional Fruit Teabread...

15 September 2010

Vanilla - A Beautiful And Sensual Spice

Vanilla comes from the vanilla orchid, called Vanilla planifolia, which is native to Mexico, but is now indigenous in many tropical parts of the world, for example Madagascar and surrounding islands.  There is a second vanilla orchid called Vanilla t...

11 September 2010

Should We Encourage People From Countryside To Cities?

...Self doubt gets you thinking.  I am still thinking through my concerns about Fairtrade and I wonder whether I've got it arse over tip. 

07 September 2010

Where's the money...for us?

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...

06 September 2010

A Big Shout Out To Small Business Owners

We, 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...

03 September 2010

Recipe For Luxury Chocolate Gateaux Or Pavé

This 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...

29 August 2010

New Razors - Old Razors

I have been spending the last week  and a bit shaving with two new razors that I bought on Ebay.  They are Gillette Razors from the late 1950s - a Red Tip and a Blue Tip Super-Speed Razors.  Why, you might rightfully ask; well, with razors, Gillette...

28 August 2010

School Reports And Memories Of Mowden Hall School

I 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...

24 August 2010

Recipe For Business Success Cake

I 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...

22 August 2010

Life Really Does Begin At Forty

I 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...

15 August 2010

Recipe For Milk Shake

You spend hours and hours creating delicious home cooked food from scratch, buying the best ingredients you can find, then you hear you kids discussing the best type of chocolate or sweet and flavour of crisps (chips) in the back of the car*.  You fe...

15 August 2010

Electoral Systems For The UK (Part 2)

...This follows on from last week's blog

14 August 2010

Recipe For Coronation Chicken

I 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...

13 August 2010

Where's The Economy Really At?

I 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...

08 August 2010

Electoral Systems For The UK (Part 1)

I 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...