Elegant Egg Salad Sandwich Savoury
Savouries, like the Foot Guard Uniform and cream teas, are a uniquely British institution. Modern eaters will recognize these salty, spicy, small bites as appetizers, commonly appearing before the meal with drinks. Famous savouries include angels on horseback–that’s a bacon wrapped prune–and Fergus Henderson’s bone marrow and parsley salad. Not…
Pickled Onions
Once again your hostess would like to apologize for being such a laggardly poster. It’s not lack of interest in the blog, or in you, my readers. The truth is the same dull reason it’s always been: my health. More precisely, my back. Last week I had yet another cortisone…
The Fried Chicken Wrap
The ethics of blogging–and yes, such things do exist–contend that three changes to a recipe make it one’s own. So while it would be “ethical” for me to claim I invented the fried chicken wrap, I did not. The original recipe comes from Nigella Lawson’s Cook, Eat, Repeat, where…
Wacky Cake Revisited
As more people are vaccinated and lockdowns lift, social life is gradually resuming. People are once more gathering and eating together. Sooner or later, you may be invited someplace, and you may be asked to bring a dessert. Many people, rightly or not, find the entire business of baking anxiety-inducing….
Cooking Cucumbers
So, hi. I could regale you with the horror story entitled “my latest dental extraction,” but I’ve been gone for weeks. That says it all, right? For comic relief, it rained for ten minutes on Friday night. Northern California’s entire rainy season was compressed into those ten minutes. Trees, they…
Cottage Pie
In How To Eat, Nigella Lawson describes the British traditional Sunday lunch thus: Proper British Sunday lunch is everything contemporary cooking is not. Meat-heavy, hostile to innovation, resolutely formalized, it is as much ritual as meal, and an almost extinct ritual at that. With their military vocabulary and timetables, my…
Pot Au Feu revisited
Pot-au-feu is one of the big classics. As such, it never goes out of style. I’ve yet to hear of attempts to veganize it, keto it, or substitute cauliflower for the meats and call it “clean” (this is not a suggestion. Food is not dirty unless you drop it on…
Chicken Liver Mousse
We can all agree this holiday season isn’t the merriest. Covid 19 has decimated the population, wrecked the economy, and generally wrought havoc in a shockingly short time. Offering up some fancy dish along the lines of foie gras feels pretty tone deaf…kinda like suggesting $600 is enough to help…
Baps (Scottish Breakfast Rolls)
A bap, if you are wondering, is a Scottish breakfast roll. The recipe below comes from Elizabeth David’s English Bread And Yeast Cookery, published in 1977. David, never one to mince words, rails against the state of English bread. If your copy has American notes by culinary historian Karen Hess,…
Apple Cider Muffins
Last year I was reading a cookbook that gave a recipe for baked apple cider doughnuts. Not fried, leaving you with gallons of used lard to somehow unload. Have you ever read a cookbook that told you what to do with used cooking oil? Me either. Anyway. My husband, he…