Are we in spring or is it summer already? It’s hard to tell sometimes. Anyway, this is one of those mix-and-match dishes, so just use the freshest, tenderest seasonal veg you can lay your hands on, and the soft green herbs of your choice for the dressing. Continue reading
We’ve been on a roll since we did a smoking and curing course with Marsh Pig Salami a few months ago. We’ve been making batches of our own bacon and pancetta and it’s so good I don’t think we’ll ever go back to shop-bought.
Our first pancetta has just finished curing and I couldn’t think of a better way to use it than to wrap it round our home-grown asparagus. Continue reading
This was my haul from the vegetable garden the other day (the hens live there too). Asparagus, purple spouting broccoli and eggs, all freshly picked or newly laid. It would have been madness to eat anything else that night. Continue reading
You’ve got to love a food festival that starts on April 23 and continues until June 21. None of that namby-pamby “one weekend only” stuff for the Vale of Evesham asparagus growers.
They’re onto a good thing and they know it. Continue reading
If you have a glut of asparagus in the garden (lucky you) or you’ve had a splurge at the farmers’ market, this is a lovely summery soup to make. Continue reading
My vegetarian friend Pippa came for a visit the other weekend, lured from the fleshpots of Oxford by the promise of gorging herself silly on asparagus.
As I’ve mentioned before one of the first things we did when we bought our house in Suffolk was to plant an asparagus bed. Four years on it is flourishing and most years we have enough to pig out on ourselves as well as to share with friends. Continue reading
What a perfect thing an egg is.
It comes in its own elegant casket, pleasingly shaped to fit in the hand.
You can boil it, poach it, coddle it, fry it, scramble it, stuff it, beat it up into an omelette or a quiche or a tortilla, make an unctuous mayonnaise, whip up a syllabub, a meringue, a custard or an eggnog, use it to enrich soups and sauces and in pastries and cakes … Continue reading
We’ve been married for 13 years – lucky for us. Rather than go for a blow-out restaurant meal, we celebrated with a dinner of produce fresh from our garden – lucky again. Continue reading
Virtually the first thing we did when we moved to Suffolk – after rabbit-proofing the vegetable plot – was to plant an asparagus bed.
This was motivated entirely by greed. Continue reading