As summer has passed, so too have overly summery dinners. Gone are the cool, green salads and light dishes and in come the more hearty recipes. Eating outdoors isn't really an option any longer - although we still have sunshine, there's a chill in the air and it all...
Like a lot of our garden, since autumn - and the rains - have finally arrived, after a very long, hot summer, our vegetables seem to be growing at quite a pace. From seeds, we've got a bit of a bumper crop of courgettes, so having done a few soups, we decided to try...
For such a long time, I've been trying to find glasses like the one on the right of the photo, above. We seem to smash our "every day" wine glasses on a regular basis in our house and never seem to have an even number, so the quest was on to find something that was a...
I say this is an Italian Potato and Ham Pie, because I found the recipe on an Italian website - and I used mozzarella and parmesan cheese - but apart from that, I don't think there's anything specifically Italian about it. What it is about, is a recipe that is so...
Making a soup is definitely not difficult, especially a veggie one. I've made variations on this recipe before, usually making it up as I go along - because how difficult can a soup made of courgettes and tomatoes be? But I decided this time, I wanted something a...
Not too far from our house, but a little off the beaten track, along a country road, through beautiful scenery, to the end of the village of Medici, is the last of the closest restaurants to us, which we're ashamed to say we only investigated recently. We've always...
2022 is going to be Grow Our Own year. We've tinkered around the edges of growing vegetables and herbs before, but it's always been pretty half-hearted as far too much else has been going on in and around the garden. We've had minor success with lettuce and tomatoes...
Like everyone else in lock-down, we tried our hands at bread-making. Not the arduous kind of bread where you have to proove it for days. More the kind that you knock up in a bread maker. We did have success although we did still find even using the machine to be a...
Winter is the season of comfort food. When the nights draw in very early and it's dark and cold, we tend to cook comfort food. Hearty stews, thick soups, pasta dishes often loaded with a sauce, Sunday roasts. The kind of food that is often followed by a snooze on the...
No visits to Greece is ever complete, without numerous visits to local bakeries for the delicious spanakopita, those gorgeous filo parcels, packed full of spinach and feta and pine nuts. Back home from idyllic Greek islands, I’d never contemplated trying to replicate...