how to clean a wok

This is one of our woks. They are, as you might gather from this one, well battered and seasoned, and the outside is pretty much carbonised now. They never see soap – I wash them with water, then heat them on the hob to boil it off, then add groundnut oil, heat till it spits,…

breakfast, before and after

Somehow, we have acquired a lot of fruit. We’re not good at eating it, and Riverford keep bringing it. We’ve been eating porridge for breakfast through the winter, mostly, but I think we must now attack the fruit backlog. Or possibly open a market stall. And so – breakfast.

mushrooms with cumin, coriander and spinach

This recipe comes from Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian Cookery, an excellent tome. It’s quick and simple to cook – served with basmati rice, it takes about 30 minutes from start to plate. And it’s delicious!

licorice

We popped into the village off-licence this afternoon to pay for our wine. All most civilised – we ordered We it via e-mail, have paid for it, and they’ll drop it round later! And on the counter were Natural Licorice Logs. I haven’t eaten licorice in years, and we picked up a log, and have…

we like soup

Working at home, we generally have a pot of soup on the go during the colder months. However, it’s almost May, and it’s not *meant* to be colder now, but this morning it was. So I looked in the fridge, and found a motley assortment of rather weary veg: some very tired carrots, a swede,…

pumpkin and apple risotto

After the aforementioned trying day yesterday, we fancied something simple and easy for supper. A rummage in the freezer brought forth a promising tub of mush, and so we had pumpkin and apple risotto. We make a lot of what I call risotto, but what purists would insist should be called an oven-baked rice dish,…

I know it's wrong …

We have had a trying morning, involving a web server running out of steam, and a Dishwasher Incident requiring me to hotfoot it shortly to B&Q to get some drain rods. Also, I failed to make any soup for this week’s lunches, as it was dead warm yesterday. To console ourselves, we stuck a couple…

melon

Melon is one of those foods I can take or leave. Don’t get me wrong – it’s OK – but it always seems a lot of effort for not much reward. However, we try hard not to waste things*, and Riverford brought us a melon in last week’s box. It has sat in the fridge…

Sunday supper

As previously noted, we picked up the first local asparagus of the year on Saturday; with it, we cooked one of our favourites – asparagus stir-fried with ginger and red chilli. It sounds a terrible thing to do to fresh asparagus, I know, but trust me … it really is glorious. We followed this with…

Sunday breakfast

Home made scones are lovely, but until I came across this recipe I was utterly unsuccessful at scones. But now I’m not. Hurrah! p.s. the dough freezes really well.