For as long as I can remember my family has had a penchant to get together at least once a week, preferably over a long Sunday lunch with friends gathering around the dinner table.My English childhood was dotted with epic walks - where we would traipse across the Heath in London – only to return home to huge, warming Sunday lunches complete with a roast leg of lamb, spuds, a large green salad followed by apple crumble topped with luscious cream. All sorts of friends would turn up during the...
Strawberries dot the memories of my childhood like fragrant gems, part of a delicious backdrop to memorable events.My appreciation of these delectable fruit started at a young age in the shape of tiny wild strawberries in my grandparent’s garden in alpine France. “Fraises des Bois’ have an unusual earthy, intense flavor and heady perfume. They could sometimes be found in small tarts, glazed with currant jam, glistening like jeweled box tops in the village patisserie’s display case. I...
Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilema and Cooked said ‘We do find time for activities we value, like surfing the Internet or exercising... the problem is we’re not valuing cooking enough. Who do you want cooking your food, a corporation or a human being? Cooking isn’t like fixing your car or other things it makes sense to outsource. Cooking links us to nature, it links us to our bodies. It’s too important to our well-being to outsource.’Coming from a family that is...
Written for Edible Santa Barbara - Fall 2014 IssueMany years ago I spent the late summer and early autumn months in the South of France in a little farmhouse situated not far from the sea. Every day I’d walk down to the sea for a swim, past the field that was overflowing with vast numbers of tomato plants and a quarter acre of melons. After my swim I would walk back past the same field, still filled with an abundance of ripe tomatoes and all those succulent fruit. On rare occasions I would...
Written for Anglotopia.comWhat’s for pudding, Mum?This question is asked on a daily basis across the British Isles where they are exceedingly fond of a good pudding. But what exactly is pudding and where did it come from? Coming from America, pudding means a creamy, custard-like mixture; pudding in England can mean a multitude of things. The esteemed Oxford English Dictionary definition runs nearly a third of page of minute type describing it as everything from “the stomach or intestine of...
When I was growing up, barbecues were something that occurred rarely and usually on a special occasion. They were not an every weekend occurrence. They were neither practical in rainy London, nor easy to produce as few people had a trusty Weber (or its equivalent) tucked away in their homes. In fact I can safely say that we never cooked a barbecue in London in all the years that I lived there.You might find it odd then, that I am writing about grilling food but bear with me. My earliest...
We were sitting upstairs in the café, close to the bar surrounded by posters of Marcel Pagnol’s films with succulent aromas drifting across the dining room from the open grill. Pagnol celebrated convivial meals in his films and this Californian bistro captured that joie-de-vivre. They had a simple green salad with warm goat cheese on the menu and I started my lunch with that dish. The salad was crisp, fresh and filled with a variety of tender greens. The goat cheese was creamy and...
I have just moved. It was the herculean task that packing, relocating and unpacking in a very short space of time can only be. One of the very kind people who helped me pack commented on the plethora of kitchen gadgets, tools, spoons, bowls, plates, glasses, more bowls, more plates, more tools and more gadgets that we carefully wrapped into the dozens of boxes that contained my kitchen. “Do you really need all this stuff?” she asked as she held out one of the cutting boards. The answer, of...
Soup puts the heart at ease, calms down the violence of hunger, eliminates the tension of the day, and awakens and refines the appetite." ~Auguste EscoffierThe building was impossibly narrow, 10 feet wide at most. It stood on the corner of a short London street and looked as though someone had shaved three-quarters of the structure leaving only the decorated façade behind. All four floors housed a single restaurant. 40 seats tops. Just a few tables on each floor accessed by an impossibly...
Cooking with Fresh Vegetable and Fruit JuicesEvery day during the summer holidays we’d go to the same café in the harbor of the little fishing village near our farmhouse for breakfast. It had red tables, red chairs, red awnings and a magnificent zinc bar that stretched across the back wall of this well-known establishment. We’d always come in early and sit at the same table. It was a well-honed routine and we delighted in the camaraderie of the place. As we waited for the buttery...
