My mint patch is up and running. We use so much that all the caveats about being overrun with mint do not apply. Mint in salads and tabbouleh, with potatoes and, of course, lamb. Mint pesto is a great alternative to the basil version. As well as serving it with pasta and lamb dishes, it…

Welsh rarebit has been a staple quick meal all through my life, on a par with beans on toast or scrambled eggs. Usually we have fresh bread and a soft cheese for Saturday lunch along with a sherry or Madeira but last weekend there was enough of our toasting bread remaining and some local Cheddar…

This dish is one of the first delights of the year. I like it as a first course, served warm with broken pieces of feta cheese scattered on top. Offer crusty bread to soak up the juices. Trim young broad bean pods and cut them at an angle into lengths of about 2 cm. A…

Mussels seem to tick all the boxes; being tasty, good for us, environmentally friendly and excellent value. I need no encouragement to eat them. This recipe, billed as being ‘supper delicious’ was in an article by Gill Meller published in The Observer . It makes a perfect first course or part of an alfresco lunch.…

We had ‘Chaliapin Duck‘ (already on this website) over the Easter weekend and the rich stock was perfect for making onion soup.. As Elizabeth David writes in French Provincial Cooking, ‘The onion soup generally regarded as ‘French’, with sodden bread, strings of cheese and half-cooked onion floating about in it, seems to me a good…

As a child, ‘Mrs Arnold’s Ginger Cake’ was always a great favourite. I had the recipe, stuck in my recipe scrapbook but somehow the page was lost. By chance, I found a very similar recipe in a magazine. The result is just as good. On Madeira they sell locally produced treacle which I use whenever…

Signs of spring and we celebrated with a half leg of lamb. Simon Hopkinson in Week In Week Out serves best end of lamb with a gratin Dauphinois which I thought would also go well with our roast. SH’s method is convincing. He mingles the infused cream with the raw potato slices with his fingertips,…

My recently posted recipe for caponata has sparked lots of interest and reminiscences. I remembered a variation that included red and yellow peppers and have tracked it down to a recipe in Simon Hopkinson’s Week In Week Out; another of SH’s recipes with an excellent pedigree as it came from Toni Vianello’s restaurant, l’Osteria, in…

I had forgotten all about caponata, an aubergine and celery stew from Sicily usually served as an antipasto, until a contestant on Masterchef prepared it. High time for a revival! I have a funny little book, Eating in Sicily, which is always worth consulting and both Anna del Conte in Italian Kitchen and Claudia Roden…

A recipe for cranberry, oat and white chocolate biscuits published by Yotam Ottolenghi in Sweet had sounded a great Christmas treat but one I never got round to making. The cranberries were bought and their use by date was nigh, so time to do something, I had to compromise on the original recipe but the…