Gin & Yang

 In honour of moving into my new home, I decided to cook a special first meal.  Actually I found some black truffle sitting in the pantry during the move and realised I had to use them, so what better way to celebrate than chopping it up into some pasta and enjoying it with a glass of prosecco? Lavender might seem like an odd ingredient but it really adds to the recipe.  I have a supply[…]

 Grilled cheese, cheese toastie, toasted cheese sandwich, how ever you refer to it – this simple and tasty meal is easy to make.  To make our ultimate grilled cheese sandwich we need the right ingredients, while this may be subjective to some, everyone knows that Gruyere is the ultimate melting cheese and that Red Leicester is better than Cheddar.  All we need is a third cheese to add a bit more flavour and my personal[…]

 This is a recipe I recreated from a simple pasta dish we had in Italy.  Phoebe loved it so much that she demanded I make it when we got back home.  My version is quick and easy to make but utterly delicious – as is all good Italian food. All you need is some chicken, pasta, garlic, butter, extra virgin olive oil and some parsley (or other herb).  For the calorie conscious you can reduce[…]

 This must be one of the easiest recipes I can think of, nothing fancy, super quick and really tasty.  It’s a perfect mid-week meal when you don’t have time for anything big, easily done in 30 minutes or less.  I always make extra, because it is so easy to eat and so good, it’s hard to put the fork down.  Any leftovers can be reheated the next day for lunch. Use good quality, smoked streaky bacon.[…]

 I’ve been meaning to do my own review of the Thermomix TM31 for a while, I just haven’t gotten around to it.  Anyway, I’ve had the TM31 for over 2 years now and I use it fairly regularly, although I don’t use it for everyday cooking (which is what the majority use it for).  You will have seen in quite a few of my recipes, I resort to the Thermomix, particularly for the more technical[…]

 My first dessert course for my tasting menu was a Dark Chocolate Cremeux with Caramel Mousse and Raspberry pearls, served on a piece of honeycomb.  This is meant to be a small and light dessert.  The cremeux is the center piece of this dessert, everything else is just in support of it.  This entire dessert can be made well in advance, which was handy because by the time we got to this course we were[…]

 It’s been a long time since I wrote about my Hammer Stahl knife set and I said I would review them once I’d used them – I will get around to it, but I feel I should go over the basics of kitchen knives and what to look for when buying.  First, you need to decide which knives you are going to buy.  In my opinion there is an essential set of knives that everyone[…]

 Spherification in molecular gastronomy is the process of taking a liquid and turning it into a ball of jelly with the centre still in liquid form.  Spherification is achieved by one of two methods, “Spherification” and “Reverse Spherification”.  For this post I’ll be focusing on Reverse Spherification because it is the one I used to make the grapefruit and raspberry pearls for my tasting menu.  See the recipes here: Langoustine and Lobster Cannelloni with Grapefruit[…]

 Ox Cheek Confit with caramelised carrots, fondant potatoes and a tomato essence air.  This was the first dish I put on the menu, I’ve wanted to do ox cheek for a long time and this particular recipe has been going around my head for months after I spotted a similar recipe nearly two years ago on another site.  As soon as I knew I was doing a dinner party, this dish had to be part[…]

 Last year, I decided to forgo the usual Christmas Turkey and went with Goose.  I find I have so many Christmas dinners or lunches that by the time I get to doing my own I’m thoroughly sick of turkey.  Aside from that, I’ve never found turkey to be that nice for roasting, it’s dry and usually fairly tasteless.  Cooked properly, it can be nice but that’s rarely the case.  It’s usually dry turkey, overcooked sprouts and boiled[…]