Easiest ever meal for guests

Last night, my fiancé’s best friend, Tim Evans, came over for dinner with his wife, Helen, and their baby daughter, Petica. I was fairly relaxed about this, because sometimes when we go to their house for dinner, we end up ordering a takeaway; so I knew that, if worse...

News on the march! – Xander heads for the capital!

It’s a shame, and almost morally wrong, to knock that beautiful picture of barrels of beer off the top of the blog. However, I reasoned it would happen soon enough so here we are. Today I woke up, summer seems to have been a brief 3-4 days over a...

Cambridge beer festival

Now in its 33rd year, the Cambridge Beer Festival is currently offering hundreds of different ales from a marquee on Jesus Green. Many of them are produced by small breweries, and have names most people have never heard of. It’s always a popular event, where visitors pay a refundable...

A Spanish tipple (over)

Eating in La Tasca in Cambridge the other day provided me with the opportunity to try a 2001 Rioja, which is a region of Spain where they use a blend of grapes to create their red wines. In this case, it was made from tempranillo and granacha grapes and...

English cheeses

A colleague tells me that when he was a boy there were only nine English cheeses. Given the numbers and variety today, this seems incredible, but he assures me there were nine. He named: Cheddar, Cheshire, Caerphilly, Gloucester, Lancashire, Leicester, Wensleydale , Derby, and Stilton. The first thing I...

Ebury in the rain

The place I wanted to eat at was booked for a private party, but I remembered the Ebury in Pimlico Road, just a few streets away, and managed to get there without getting wet. I don’t rate the restaurant upstairs, but the downstairs bar area is fun and lively,...

Experimental fish dish

Tonight’s dinner was a slapdash experiment that worked exceptionally well. “I want you to make this again,” my boyfriend told me as soon as he tasted it. That’s a good sign. I chopped an onion and four cloves of garlic, plus a few handfuls of oyster mushrooms, and cooked...

Full Irish

We flew to Belfast yesterday, and back today, to visit friends (who have a stunning marmorino stucco blog for their business-cum-art). We stayed in the achingly trendy Ten Square, which had many things going for it, including the food. I had my first full Irish breakfast this morning, and...

Ouder Gouda

I brought back some traditional Dutch cheese from Amsterdam, in the shape of a round of Gouda. This is a springy cheese, quite sweet, and prepared in a waxed rind. It grows more complex as it ages, and the older ones (18 months plus) are clad in black. Pleasingly,...

Paul’s Patio Barbecue, 19th May

Yesterday, I hosted a barbecue in my little courtyard at the back of my Cambridge townhouse. Despite rain most of the day and the promise of storms, the weather held off, as prayed for, precisely during the predetermined hours of the party. I thought I’d make the wine interesting and the...