Pity poor Monsieur: he’s the one responsible for my love of Mexican food, the complex moles, the cactus salads (hold the spines) and the juicy ceviches. Yet Monsieur wasn’t with me at Wahaca last Thursday, for a much looked-forward to evening with Thomasina Miers, the Executive Chef and co-owner of London’s Mexican street food sensation, Wahaca….
Category: Chefs
Week In, Week Out by Simon Hopkinson
Simon Hopkinson does not like chestnuts. He avoids honey, and his views on New Zealand’s green-lipped mussels are clear, if harsh: “they are as tasteless as they are unwelcome,” he writes in Week In, Week Out, a collection of his weekly food columns for the Independent, released in paperback this past July. Quirks of the palate…
Lighten Up by Jill Dupleix
For the true grub-loving gastronome, the most fatal by-product of enjoying our food has to be weight gain. Monsieur and I are no different, loving our food as we do and engaged in a constant battle of taste versus calorific content. It was therefore serendipitous to catch a tweet from Quadrille Books, asking for bloggers…
From aspic setting to lobster killing – Julie and Julia do French cooking
When I was about eleven, I started home ec classes at school. My classmates and I then spent the next two years fighting over ingredients in these core classes as we perfected the mangling of simple dishes such as scrambled eggs and kedgeree. The worst part of these classes, however, was post-cooking when we had to sit and EAT what we’d just burned,…
Flicking knives on Valentine’s
Valentine’s Day is one of those occasions that has the potential to fail miserably. If you’re single, it can make you feel very alone. If you’re part of a couple, apart from being the romantic zenith of the calendar ,it can be very expensive, tacky, and can have the opposite of its intended effect by…
Clos Maggiore
When a top restaurant website rates an eatery number one in more than one category, you know you’re onto a good thing. When a friend recommends the same place, you know the reviews must have substance. Clos Maggiore is just such a place and really does live up to expectation. We reserved a table…
Dining in Disguise – or why Ruth Reichl is my new favourite food writer.
It isn’t often that I find a book that makes me want to read it twice in three months, but I should have known from the review that I’d want to immediately re-read Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl: “GARLIC AND SAPPHIRES is Ruth Reichl’s delicious and mischievous account of her time spent as an…
A R-Oily GOOD Night with Braham & Murray
Splendid’s been at it again; this time Splendid people Rax, Chris and Jenny invited me along to a dinner party celebrating GOOD Oil. This is a relatively new concept in cooking oils, being made from hemp seed. As if that wasn’t interesting enough, the creators of GOOD Oil and the off-shoot products of GOOD Seed…
Little Gordon
Here in the UK we’ve been somewhat immunised against swearing celebrity chefs, ever since Gordon Ramsay hit our TV screens with shows like The F Word. He’s everywhere: on terrestrial TV, on Sky, on our bookshelves, taking over our pubs (see my Warrington Pub poem here), building a transatlantic restaurant empire and teaching his kids…
Epicurienne 