The Cottage Smallholder

When I lived at home with my mum, we always ate lunch – main course and pud. Supper was an ad hoc affair – we could have whatever we liked that from the bounty of the fridge and larder as long as we prepared it ourselves. Quite canny of my mum as she could put Read More »

  Tomatillos are extremely easy to grow. They are great for making salsas and sauces and they freeze well. They also do not get blight so it’s always worth growing a couple of plants if you have a greenhouse or conservatory to get some tomatoey tangy flavour if your tomato crops fail. You do need Read More »

  I think that this could be called my Mandarin period. I’ve fallen in love with this fruit. The round glass bowl on the kitchen table is filled with mandarins and lemons and I’m addicted. Bizarrely the Min Pins have discovered this tart and delicious gem too. A segment is prized and even the skin Read More »

  If I was only allowed one type of meat for the weekly Sunday roast for the rest of my life, I would have to choose chicken. Roast chicken is so versatile and adaptable. I never tire of cooking and guzzling it. And of course it’s a great excuse to make bread sauce and play a Read More »

However careful I am about constructing my fruit cages a hungry bird or twenty always seems to crack the code and get in. One year one of our fruit cages was constructed with high security in mind – nothing apart from me could get in or out and it was such a struggle to access that I Read More »

  As a child egg and bacon pie was a traditional picnic dish and I loved it. This is not a quiche. The eggs are unbroken and the texture and flavour of the combination of short crust pastry, floury egg yolks, silky egg whites and thick cut bacon is out of this world. I had Read More »

  “Do you remember we used to use Jamie Oliver’s method of cooking fish in aluminium parcels? Let’s do that for supper tonight.” We used to use this method a lot a few years ago. It’s simple and quick and the foil seals in the flavours. Danny had found some CFC haddock marked down to Read More »

Lamb can be greasy but these were delicious and not at all fatty. If our friend KC is reading this, then you can skip the rest, K! She hates lamb. We did not know this when we invited K and JP for Sunday lunch of roast lamb and dauphinoise potatoes. Poor K was too polite Read More »

  Yesterday, I sent Danny into town with £5 and carte blanche to “buy something tasty for supper”. You may agree that it is a bit of a risk to ask a man to choose my kind of treat (prawn with spaghetti, scampi and chips, a take away Indian meal for two for a fiver) Read More »

  I was going to write about Darina Allen’s toasties and when I looked the recipe up on the Internet I discovered that I’d written about them before. On Friday, faced with two crusts of bread, a lump of cheese and two bantam eggs I made them again using Andrew this time. They were scrummy. If you are going Read More »