food writing « with knife and fork

Take 5 cookbooks

Last night I was chatting to fellow food lovers Gower Cottage Brownies and Presents Queen (aks The Foodie Gift Hunter) about cookbooks and in particular first cook books and the first things we cooked.

Now as anyone who has read this post about food book I did knows I now have many many food related books….but of course a long long time ago I started with none….

Here’s five books that have heavily influenced my cooking and count as first in some way or another

The Play and Cook Book,Marguerite Patten (1973)

This is genuinely the first cookbook [...]

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Festive menu,part 3 (all about chestnuts)

Yesterday I told you about the cheese terrine we had for starters today its all about the chestnuts…mainly so you can make the chestnut stuffing from my festive menu but also so I can share my most recent blog for Francoise Murat Design on Christmassy foods and which also includes a fab chestnut jam and a chocolatey chestnut cake…so here it is….. (first posted 8 December the cakes are actually made now!)

One of the wonderful things about Christmas is the fact that there are lots of chances to cook up delicious meals and food gifts for [...]

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The fat of the land

This post was originally published in early November in Francois Murat Design newsletter. Although the apple season is pretty much at an end now many varieties store well so this is still a lovely dish to make over the coming cold months……

Autumn is well and truly here,the nights are drawing in,the weather is cooling day by day. Many of the fruits and vegetables are harvested. Those that can be have been turned into preserves of various kinds or carefully stored away to be used over the winter months.

Apples are still with us and there are varieties [...]

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Threes P’s Risotto and guest posting

I’ve been doing my regular post for Francoise Murat’s newsletter for a while now but recently I was asked to do a guest post for fellow blogger Jo,of Jo’s Kitchen,whilst she was away. So I thought why not its always fun to do a bit of writing elsewhere.

Here’s what I came up with for her….

With monotonous regularity someone somewhere will go on about how an education system founded in “the 3 Rs” is just what we need to get back to basics and raise standards. Its always worried me a little that these three R’s [...]

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Its been a while…

Ah yes,another break in the blogging flow. It been nearly four weeks since I posted here and that was after a gap of nearly two weeks. I don’t know how some people manage to keep such a regular flow of posts going. Sometimes the inspiration comes in huge chunks sometimes not,and when it doesn’t well there is no deadline to make you file on time.

I have been doing a few things elsewhere…like over on my various posterous sites where I’ve been posting food and non-food related snippets and also splitting the food and none food into two [...]

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In Season:Cheese and Onion

This article was first published in Francoise Murat &Associates newsletter in March 2010.

Mention cheese and onion and most people think of crisps. My quick Twitter survey revealed answers naming the Walkers brand,the colour of their bags (blue apparently) and even Gary Linekar,the face of Walkers crisps for so long he must surely have earned more from promoting crisps than from playing football and being a pundit. A few people were more inventive suggesting pasties and toasties but for most it was all about the crisps. The reason the crisp flavour works well is that the milky [...]

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On blogging,writing,twittering…

Even after a year on Twitter I still find the connections you make amazing and surreal at the same time. I guess its true of any kind of networking that if you put effort in and talk to people then you’ll have some great opportunities present themselves. I’ve meet a whole lot of fascinating people,some I’ve only talked to on Twitter so far but plenty I’ve met in the ‘real’world as well. So I’ll be carrying on tweeting (and other online networking) and hoping to meet more.

One opportunity that came up recently was the chance to write [...]

Continue reading On blogging,writing,twittering…

Take 5 cookbooks

Festive menu,part 3 (all about chestnuts)

The fat of the land

Threes P’s Risotto and guest posting

Its been a while…

In Season:Cheese and Onion

On blogging,writing,twittering…

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