This year has been a bumper damson crop for everybody according to the lady who rang my jam jars through the till at our local independant department store. And yet it’s only a certain sort of cookbook that has any damson recipes in it, let alone a choice. I’ve gathered together a list of my favourite damson recipes to help out anybody else blessed with too many damsons. No worries if you don’t have access to damsons – many of these recipes also work well with if you...
Our damson tree has never been so laden with powdery blue fruits and this year they’ve clumped together like bunches of giant, velvety grapes. Clusters and clusters of them all over the tree. I’m planning to make spiced damson chutney and damson gin but these are barely enough to make dent and so this year there has been jam too – a caramelised boozy jam of damsons and port. Fingers crossed, this is our last year in our current house (probably, you know how these house moves go –...
I hated fruit salad when I was a kid. Hated it. And then I grew up and started to enjoy eating fruit, but strangely the dislike of fruit salad persisted. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve realised the the secret to making fruit salad enjoyable. Only use fruit that you enjoy! D’uh. I know this sounds obvious but it’s taken me so many years to realise that feel that I should pass the message on in case somebody else hasn’t realised. For me a fruit salad should...
Scrambled eggs are home-cooking at its most glorious. Quick, delicious, comforting, frugal, familiar. And almost never nice when eaten out, with catering establishment incarnations ranging from watery through to bouncy. And then there are those diet police versions, throwing away yolks and with them a whole load of flavour, protein, Vitamin D, iron and beta carotene. This meal is a regular in our house thanks to our girls. Cooking the eggs like this is a good way of enjoying your scrambled eggs...
I hate those “I’m sorry I haven’t posted on my blog for months and months but I’ve been really busy” posts. Blogging should be a pleasure, not a chore that you must squeeze in. Plus sometimes it needs to be gently reminded of its place around activities that get you out spending time with the folk you love, or that just plain pay the bills. Anyway, so I wasn’t planning to acknowledge my epic absence round these parts and just get on with things. But then I started thinking … we’ve...
Our house is the neighbourhood home for unwanted rhubarb. I love the stuff, while some of our friends who have rhubarb growing in their gardens just aren’t as keen (or possibly just have way too much). It’s not uncommon for us to come home to find a bag of rhubarb hanging on our front door handle, sometimes with a cabbage for the chickens thrown in. There’s just one difficulty with the free rhubarb – it just doesn’t fit into the fridge easily. It’s too big for the salad drawer...
Last time we talked about online grocery shopping, and how it’s convenience can help you to eat healthily when life is busy. But there’s a down side too. A picture is worth a thousand words. This is what you don’t get when you do your shopping online. The freshest leaves… The youngest, tenderest produce… The foods that somebody carefully made or nurtured with their own hands All handpicked at Woodstock Farmers Market, April 2nd 2011
You’ve probably guessed by now that I’ve been a busy bee recently. It’s all good stuff so I’m not complaining, but it has interfered with my food shopping quality time. It’s easy to let healthy eating slip when you’re pushed for time but actually when you’re busy is when you need to eat well more than ever. To get round this I’ve been doing my grocery shopping online. I can’t stress enough how helpful a strategy this can be when life gets hectic and it’s one I’ve seen...
This salad recipe uses my new crush, gorgeous Tarocco oranges from Sicily, accompanied with peppery watercress and baked tofu. When I first started trying to eat more sustainably choosing fruit in Winter was a big shopping headache. After all, there is pretty much no fruit that grows in the UK between November and the first forced rhubarb in February. My attitude to this has relaxed rather over the last year, after all, part of sustainable eating needs to be about sustaining ourselves...
It seems like just days ago that we were talking about the surprising knock-on effects of really concentrating your efforts into eating plenty of fruit and veg. It’s a great way to make healthy eating incredibly simple. The idea prompted a lot of discussion and also this question on Twitter – does it matter if your five a day includes just fruit or just vegetables? Most of the research that backs our eat 5-a-day campaign here in the UK is based on the rationale that eating at least 400...
