Category: Food

I saw a recipe in the Sunday supplement last week suggesting you need a digital probe, a sprig of rare mountain herbs, and a slow-cooker set to a precise, whispered temperature to get it right. It’s absolute nonsense. Most people overcomplicate the process until they’ve spent forty pounds on fancy gadgets just to end up […]

You don’t need a degree in culinary arts or a set of expensive, gold-leafed preserves to master the art of the dessert; in fact, the biggest lie people tell you is that a trifle has to look like a work of art to be good. I spent years watching people agonise over the perfect, symmetrical […]

Most people will tell you that the secret to a decent scone is some expensive, imported flour or a complicated chilling process that takes half a day, but they’re wrong. I spent years watching people struggle in the village hall kitchen, wasting good cheddar because they followed instructions that were more suited to a laboratory […]

I was standing in my allotment last Tuesday, looking at a neighbour’s patch of what he called “gourmet organic rhubarb,” and I couldn’t help but shake my head. He’d spent a small fortune on specialized pH-testing kits and imported mulch, yet the stalks were as thin and spindly as a walking stick. People make it […]

I’ve seen enough “gourmet” recipe books in the local charity shops to know they’re mostly nonsense. They’ll tell you that you need hand-picked saffron or a reduction of vintage port just to figure out how to make a hearty stew, but frankly, that’s a load of rubbish. If you’re standing in a kitchen in the […]

I was standing in the kitchen last Tuesday, staring at a loaf of sourdough that had gone from being a beautiful, crusty specimen to something resembling a piece of discarded drywall in less than forty-eight hours. It’s a common frustration, and frankly, I’m tired of seeing those fancy, over-engineered bread boxes in the lifestyle magazines […]

I spent thirty years inspecting the structural integrity of houses, from the flint-walled cottages in the Test Valley to the newer builds out near Salisbury, and if there is one thing I know, it is that a solid foundation is everything. The same applies to a Sunday roast. I see people these days buying those […]

I saw a spread in the local magazine last week—all tiny, expensive little sandwiches with the crusts cut off and those fancy little jars of chutney that cost more than a decent bottle of cider. It got me thinking about how much nonsense people believe about how to make a picnic actually worthwhile. If you […]

I’ve spent thirty years looking at the structural integrity of flint cottages and Victorian terraces, so I have a low tolerance for anything built on a shaky foundation—and that includes your pastry. I see these glossy recipe books claiming that learning how to bake a quiche requires expensive French butter, a specialized tart tin, and […]

You don’t need a degree in food science or a kitchen full of expensive gadgets to master the art of preserving fruit; in fact, most of those complicated recipes you find online are just a way to make a simple task feel unnecessarily daunting. I spent three hours last Tuesday wrestling with a particularly stubborn […]