
Peach and mango meringue pie
This one’s for my friend Michael and his daughter, who are going in for a pie competition this weekend. I’m very pleased with the way it turned out – it really does taste as good as it looks. This pie is made with an all-butter pastry (none of your revolting [...]

Tarte Tatin is one of those lovely recipes with an attached aetiological myth. Back in the 1890s, the Tatin sisters, who ran a hotel and restaurant in Loir-et-Cher (still open for business in 2010), had a kitchen accident when making an apple pie. Apples were left cooking an a mixture of sugar and butter for [...]

There’s often a home-cooked ham in the fridge here. Always the control freak, I like to be able to season and flavour my own ham for sandwiches, pasta dishes and what have you. A piece of smoked gammon simmered in some aromatics of your choosing for a few hours will always be better (and work [...]

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you may have noticed a few references to Edwardian savouries and a writer called Ambrose Heath this week. The savoury used to be a course served at the end of a formal English meal. Salty, umami and often highly spiced, the savoury was packed in by English gentlemen [...]

Here’s another dim sum recipe; in Cantonese this savoury pastry, a bit like a little pie, is called Char Siu Sau. It’s a parcel of crisp, flaky puff-pastry wrapped around succulent barbecued pork in a sweetly spicy sauce.
Char siu, the barbecued pork in question, has featured on this blog before, and is very easy to [...]

Astute readers will notice that recently I’ve been obsessing somewhat about puff pastry. This should be your last puff pastry recipe for a bit – use a roll from the supermarket chiller cabinet or make your own using the recipe for curry puffs.
Dried wild mushrooms are great. A small handful, especially when simmered for a [...]

I’m having a bit of a Malaysian food binge at the moment, and the beef curry puff is about as Malaysian as you can get. These little pasties are made from a mouth-meltingly short, flaky pastry, and are filled with a rich beef, onion and potato curry.
There are as many variations on the curry puff [...]

These little party biscuits are incredibly easy to make – they employ what’s fast becoming one of my favourite modern conveniences, the refrigerated roll of puff pastry. There’s a particular charm in the way that no matter how squashed-looking they are when you put them in the oven, the magic in the pastry means that [...]

Alert readers will have gathered that I am currently drowning in tomatoes, and that yesterday’s promised recipe for the other half of a packet of puff pastry was bound to include them. You’re right – today it’s tomato tart. If, as a friend I was talking to tonight does, you have a vegetarian to entertain, [...]

We’re going to the Côte d’Azur later in September, where we’ve rented a big manor house with a gaggle of friends. I’m looking forward to the cooking – I’ve missed French market and supermarket produce since Dr Weasel and I left Paris to live in the UK again a few years ago.
I thought I’d cook [...]
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