In case you are stalking me (RACHEL) you might want to know I've got a food blog now at http://distractedgourmet.wordpress.com/ where you can look at how awesome I am in more depth.

So, I've booked my first holiday with Michael ever, and it's probably the first holiday I've had in summer for years - very excited! Going to France with M and the girls, to a lovely seaside place where we can travel to various different parts like Cherbourg. I really want to get some calvados, but we'll see how it fits in! We also want to go to ( Read more... )

I've been busy in the garden over the last few days, and spent quite a few evenings with books, gardening magazines and packets and packets of seeds. I have a little gardening notebook now (which my mum gave to me for Chinese New Year, so sweet!) - it's just a normal lined book, but it's full of the ramblings of a crazy lady who is obsessed with ( Read more... )

I have a massive fondness for US-centric retro kitchen stuff: although I obviously have absolutely no ties whatsoever to the era or the country, for me, it creates a happy fantasy world of big skirted goddesses going about daily household chores with a smile. I love old fashioned cookbooks with bizarrely lurid illustrations of bright red glazed ( Read more... )

My enthusiasm for growing stuff has returned just in time for spring, and armed with my gardening magazine and the Suttons Plant Catalogue, I'm ready for action. This weekend I bought a blueberry plant, but now I need another one (they fruit better in pairs) and some ericaceous compost to grow them in. I am also going to send off my my strawberry ( Read more... )

Well, I've made my Seville orange marmalade (now I have about four jars of it in the cupboard and can eat nothing else for about a year) and the Chinese dinner, which were both pretty good. I did try my hand at the sourdough bread, but it wasn't particularly sour and the starter didn't last very long in the fridge before I threw it out for looking ( Read more... )

Just because Michael asked me this anyway, I'm costing out making white bread vs buying ( Read more... )

I just wouldn't be me if I didn't flit from one obsession to the next - so my current obsession is bread making. I borrowed one of my mum's bread makers before New Year to make dough for pitta bread, and as she's been trying to offload the machine on me for ages, kept it around to see if I could make some nice bread. I used my bread maker's recipes ( Read more... )

I've made a list of all the food I'd like to make for New Year - as always, pretty ambitious, and I'm not even sure I can get hold of all the ingredients ( Read more... )

I'm making this list for purely personal reasons, so apologies if this is boring you. Anyone who knows me knows I'm a little bit obsessed with food, so for the New Year I wanted to make a list of all the food I want to cook in 2009, updating it as I remember new things ( Read more... )