Pork Chops with Tarragon and Elderflower cordial recipe
We don’t drink wine very much these days so we tend not to have wine hanging about in the kitchen for cooking. Danny developed a great pork chop recipe so as a treat I grabbed a litre wine box in the supermarket. There was a yelp when he finally opened the box and turned on the tap. I had bought red wine rather than white. “Well why don’t you try using some of my Elderflower and Lemon cordial?” He adds this cordial to roast chicken. He created a superb sauce, adding some cream at the end to thicken it. But he forgot to write down the...
read moreBest Brunch: Herby mushrooms and tomatoes on toast recipe
Danny likes a few sautéed mushrooms and a grilled tomato with his Saturday midday brunch. Although they sound tempting they never really appeal to me – I prefer the more conventional home smoked bacon, organic eggs and buttered toast from a homemade loaf. A couple of weeks ago I found some mushrooms and a tomato knocking about in the fridge and decided to experiment. If I simmered them together with a little olive oil, butter and herbs would they transform into something that I would like to eat alongside my bacon and eggs? They smelt...
read moreBest great budget recipes for 50% or less: Plaice with a creamy prawn sauce recipe
We stopped eating fish for a while a few years ago as it was just so expensive. I made a fish pie one Christmas and the ingredients cost over £15.00. Then I realised that there are often amazing bargains on a late Sunday afternoon from the Waitrose fish counter. With these and the regular offerings from the Tesco condemned food section we now have access to quite a lot of great fish and sea food for at least 50% of their normal value. A lot of fish is tossed into the freezer to be turned into fish pies but if we find plaice or sole these...
read moreBest recipes for leftovers: Baked Portobello mushrooms with ham, parsley sauce and parmesan recipe
We cured and smoked our own ham this year. It was delicious and a proper old fashioned half leg. We were thrilled that it worked out as I had tweaked our bacon cure, upping the salt by 25%. This is still far less than the HFW cure and every other recipe that I’ve found on my researches. We smoked it for a good 24 hours in the smoke chamber above our wood burner. The latter opens into an old chimney, rather than a flue. I had saved some seasoned apple wood for this very special smoke. I finally roasted the joint for us on Christmas Eve and it...
read moreLate morning brunch: Cheesy mushrooms on toast with a dash of spice recipe
To cut our carbon footprint we decided to combine the post run and the weekly shop and travel to Newmarket in the same car. This meant that Danny had to face an experience that he refers to with tight lipped horror. Saturday supermarket queues. In fact he hates any sort of queue. Even the queue for the tote to collect his winnings. I now refer to queues as moving lines. This seems to calm him. As we drove into the Tesco car park we couldn’t find a space. I knew that unusually long moving lines were already threading across his mind as he...
read moreIndulgent treats: Prawns, spinach and crème fraîche linguine
A couple of years ago we became addicted to Tessa Kiros’ recipe for linguine with prawns and asparagus. Delicious and almost worth crawling the five miles to Newmarket to buy the ingredients. Tonight we decided to eat Clare’s scrumptious quick spinach and prawn gnocchi recipe and then I spotted that we had some linguine in the larder. “Let’s try Clare’s recipe but use the linguine rather than buy gnocchi.” Linguine is the perfect pasta for soaking up a sauce. Danny has a horror of what he describes as...
read moreLeftovers: Spicy new potatoes and cabbage on the side recipe
I’m not a great one for being imaginative about small leftovers. They are usually shoved into the dogs as a relish on the top of their complete dog food. In the past I used to put them into small bowls, hoping for inspiration and they would be forgotten as they were gradually pushed to the back of the fridge. Danny calls these “offerings to the fridge gods” as he removes them two weeks later. Now I’m enjoying using up everything that I can. The little scrappy handfuls are the most fun to transform into something that...
read moreFoodies in a hurry: Quick broccoli and stilton soup recipe
Kay who writes the Blue World Gardener blog has inspired me with her suggestion of a store cupboard meal once a week. I reckoned that I needed to fine tune the larder and start practicing immediately. So when I next visited Daily Bread, I popped a bag of dried onions in my basket. My mum used these a lot when I was growing up. In fact, when I left home for university back in the early seventies, she put a carton in my suitcase along with a very handy cook book Cooking in a Bedsitter by Katharine Whitehorn. This little gem of a book came into...
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