Made (or at least started the making of) today:

- Yoghurt
- Yoghurt Cheese (like awesome cream cheese)
- Duck Proscuitto*
- Confit de Canard*
- White Kimchee aka Baek Kimchi  (pickled tastiness without the afterburner of normal kimchee)

*both recipes from Micheal Ruhlman & Brian Polcyn's "Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing"


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I rather enjoy cooking magazines - as long as I've eaten beforehand. They have a very visual appeal that goes straight to my stomach and tends to make me very, very hungry. Anyway, I bought an absolutely gorgeous eggplant the other week - firm and shiny and glowing white and the most beautiful shades of purple. It was almost a crime to eat it, but ( Read more... )

The Guardian has a lovely little 7-shot photo essay by Murdo MacLeod of Iain R. Spink making his Arbroath Smokies, a traditional smoked haddock. The Arbroath Smokie is now officially a protected 'Geographical Indication', much like champagne or Roquefort cheese, and must be manufactured within 8 km of Arbroath, a small town northeast of Dundee, ( Read more... )

Lamb roast for dinner this weekend. On which I got to try out my new camera. It's an Olympus EVOLT 510, which What Digital Camera recommended as the best of the entry level DSLRs. The last time I owned an SLR was almost ten years ago, a trusty old Praktika I'd owned since I was 16. It's somewhat amusing to note that digital SLR cameras don't help ( Read more... )

So I broke down and have bought myself an early Christmas present - a Cloud Dome for photographing my jewellery and other items.

It's supposedly the amateur's answer to making professional looking photos, and given the lack of bright sunlight in England and my lack of a fancy camera (I have a Pentax 3.1 Megapixel Optio which although not bad, ( Read more... )

I bought this old cabinet photo off The eVil That Is eBay a couple of weeks ago - isn't it wonderful?


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