Blog
In my garden of Eden
Vegetable patches can be surprisingly social places. Ours is especially so as it is in our front garden. These days I spend time in the mornings and evenings pottering about. It is fun to inspect all the changes taking place. While I am out there, I get to wave to neighbours driving by. It is common for our immediate neighbours to stroll over for a chat. More →
Jamie cooks up another great idea
Jamie Oliver must get very little sleep. Either that or the ingenious chef has an army of worker bees constantly turning over ideas for his consideration. His latest venture, Recipease, is about to launch in the UK. Like so many of his ideas (the school canteen overhaul and Pass it On recipe movement, for example), the concept is brilliant More →
Good living on the land
I’d be terrible at farming. Getting up close and a little too personal – hello, lambing season anyone? – with nature. But I love to hear stories of farmers bucking the system and reaping the rewards. Take George and Kate Heathcote. The publicity shots from the British reality TV show, A Farm Life, for which they agreed to be guinea pigs might make them look like an old-fashioned cliche, More →
Oprah dumps diet dramas
Oprah Winfrey has finally woken up to the fact that diets simply don’t work. Or if they do appear to work – as in the case when she famously lost a wheelbarrow load of fat on a stupid liquid protein diet – they are not sustainable. After years of well-documented fluctuations in size, More →
Hug in a bowl
The name risotto dances off the tongue and gives you a bounce in your step just by saying it – risotto.
This is the full breast of all rice dishes. Warm, smooth and deeply comforting.
Take out the homemade organic stock that you have squirreled away in your freezer.
Get ready to let time stand still – More →
Celebrate life with cake
Four weeks after having spinal surgery my daughter baked a chocolate cake. It wasn’t easy – she needed me and some industrial pain killers – but bake she did. Some people find their passion early in life; my daughter found cake. In fact some of her first words were “yummy yums”. I remember dropping her at her grandparents when she was three. It was my birthday and I was off shopping. More →
Plenty to cheer in the New Year
It was in retrospect, to paraphrase Mr Dickens, the best of times. Slowly awaking to the scale of society’s environmental and health problems, more of us were taking a closer look at the source of our daily bread. Who made it? Where was it made? What was it made with? Should I be eating it? Organic was no longer a “hippy” term, but had become hip. More →
Five steps to a truly merry Christmas
Tis the season to be sil-ly, fa la la la la, la la, la, la. Okay, it’s not quite the lyrics to Deck the Halls, but Christmas does seem to promote largesse in more ways than one. Not only do we go overboard with the credit cards, we seem to think it’s a given that we must dish up more food than nubile nymphs at a Roman feast. More →
All I want for Christmas
When money is tight, Christmas seems to loom like an all-devouring beast. Expectations are high. Gifts for everyone. Even if you start from a low base of $10 a person or only buy for the children, most families are heading well into the hundreds of dollars before too long. It\’s hard to see a way out of it cheaply. More →
Cooking a stock to die for
I love nothing more than the good hubble bubble of making stock. As I drop in my chicken carcasses and twigs of this and that herb I wonder whether I was a witch in a previous life. It is so comforting to fill the kitchen with stream and promising aromas. More →
