I love roast vegetables. About once a fortnight, I will do a huge roast vegetable fest – one enormous tray of potatoes, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, carrots, onions and beetroot, cut into chunks and the potato and beetroot parboiled, and then…
Category: everyday cooking
Review: Apples for Jam, by Tessa Kiros
I love this cookbook. It’s the cookbook that got me making biscuits, and the cookbook that first convinced me that making my own stock wasn’t that much of a hassle and was worth the time it took. Either this cookbook…
Recipe: Lemony Garlicky Fractal Broccoli with Pasta
I wanted to call this creamy lemony garlicky floral fractal broccoli with pasta, but I thought that might be a tad long. I haven’t cooked or eaten Romanesco Broccoli before, and the recipes I had all seemed to involve cutting…
Recipe: Pasta Carbonara, my way
My father’s family is from the Basilicata region of Italy, and even after moving to Australia, my Nonna and Nonno would make their own sausage every year. I think one of my great-uncles kept pigs, or maybe just one pig…
Recipe: Choc-Chip Cookies for Scientists who have had a Very Bad Day
One of my very nicest postdocs just discovered that the freezer had defrosted, taking all her experiments with it. Her partner, another particularly delightful postdoc, had a Bad Grant Day. And one of the PhD students came into my office…
What’s for dinner?
What do you cook on those nights when you really don’t feel like cooking? For me, nine times out of ten it’s pasta. Generally baked with something, though my old friend, pasta bolognese, the first dish I ever cooked by…
Recipe: Three Roasted Vegetable Soups
Three recipes in one post today, because it’s the same (very easy!) method, but with markedly different flavours. I’ve given recipes for a very simple but delicious pumpkin soup, a subtly perfumed beetroot soup and a creamy Jerusalem artichoke soup,…
Recipe: Arroz con Pollo with Peas
This recipe is adapted from Andrea Chesman’s book Serving Up the Harvest. I’ve made this recipe with snow peas, sugar snap peas, green beans or broadbeans supplementing or replacing the peas, and I often add paprika, chilli, oregano, thyme, or…
Review: Serving Up the Harvest, by Andrea Chesman
I bought this book a few years ago, when I discovered the wonderful world of vegetable boxes delivered to your door and was trying to work out what to do with all those brassicas (cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli and brussels sprouts…
Review: Cook Simple, by Diana Henry
Is it even possible to have a single favourite cookbook? A specialised cookbook about chocolate is in a whole different category to a culinary encyclopedia or a baking book or an Italian cookbook… and I have favourites in all these…