A Lock-down Food Diary

Anyone who has spoken to me, or has read one of my previous posts on life in lock-down will have realised that I’ve become slightly obsessed with food over the last month or so. I think about food a lot. I’ve barely finished one meal and I’ve already started planning the rest. Why? Well I do enjoy food and lock-down is as good a time as any to eat well and take time preparing it. Underpinning this there is probably also a slight anxiety about when it will be time to do our next food shop, but I’m choosing to focus on the fact that lock-down has helped me to rediscover my enjoyment for cooking and planning meals which are tasty and varied. View Post

A Few Thoughts on Baking

I aspire to be the sort of person who produces freshly baked good each week. Whether it’s tasty cakes or traybakes to offer to guests or colleagues, or fresh bread to enjoy in the morning, I’d love to be making new things and impressing people with my baking skill. Sadly, like many people, when there’s a list of other things to be done baking falls to the bottom of my to-do list and I rarely actually get round to it. However, a day off recently provided me with the perfect opportunity to get stuck in. I planned to spend the day baking in advance, so I wouldn’t feel guilty about doing so, and to make sure I had all the right ingredients (although typically I still ended up doing a mad dash to the shop after running out of something halfway through weighing it), and I’d forgotten how much joy… View Post

Recipe: Lentil Chilli

I decided recently that I wanted to try and eat more vegetarian food. Whilst I enjoy meat, and don’t intend to give it up entirely, I don’t feel the need to eat it everyday and I don’t want to take it for granted. There are lots of reasons why we shouldn’t eat meat, or at least not eat it as frequently that have started to make more sense to me. This recipe came about as a result of me experimenting with non-meat dishes. View Post

Recipe: Turkey and Sweet Potato Pie

When the weather outside is cold and wintery, there’s often nothing quite so comforting as a Shepherd’s Pie. However, winter is long and dark and there are so many shepherd’s pies that one can eat… so sometimes it calls for a little variation! In an attempt to create something a little different, I developed the following recipe. View Post

Recipe: Cheesy Leek and Bacon Tartlets

I love recipe books. There is something about the pictures of yummy food, and the exciting range of dishes that you can make which I just really like. However, I also very rarely use them. I could quite easily collect recipe books that I flick through, but never follow, usually because I haven’t planned ahead and don’t have the right ingredients or because I decide it will take too much time. But they are still great for inspiration, and you can quite easily adapt recipes to your taste. For example, recently my boyfriend bought a vegetarian recipe book only to decide that they would all be so much better if they contained meat… However as he isn’t a vegetarian he can add as much meat as he likes! View Post