Month: August 2008

Delicious Carluccio’s Dining

The restaurant creates a very Italian air, with full Italian names for the dishes in the menu, and really good food, for which, of course, Italy is famous. We drank a Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, Umani Ronchi, grown along the Adriatic Coast. It was 13% and from 2007, with an appropriately...

Barbecue wine

Which wine to serve with a meaty barbecue? There were two types of sausages, burgers made from minced lamb (nothing added, just pressed together by hand). There were skewers of green, yellow and red peppers with mushroom, onion and tomato, and skewers of prawns with tuna and salmon fishcakes...

Barbecue sausages

There was a time when I used to settle for “jumbo franks” to barbecue alongside hamburgers and sweet peppers, relying mainly on various mustards to spice up their taste. But sausages have become more interesting than they used to be. There seems to be a resurgence of interest in...

Arniston Bay

It is a South African wine, a blend of 80 percent chenin blanc and 20 percent chardonnay, with 13.5 percent alcohol. Furthermore, it was on sale at half price and ready chilled, so it looked worth a try. I was serving chicken, so it seemed right for the occasion,...

Chicken en croûte

I saw the chicken en croûte at Sainsbury’s and wondered if it would be as good as mine? I hardly ever buy prepared food like this, so it was something of a first. It said that the two pieces contained “British chicken breast topped with mature Cheddar cheese and...

More stunning summer pudding

Again adapting a Sam Stern recipe, I made another of those summer puddings. This one had raspberries but no blackberries, and blackcurrants instead of redcurrants, but followed the same procedure. The only other difference was that the strawberries were locally grown, and were smaller and sweeter. Again, I used...

Pork schnitzel with apple-orange sauce

I made this one using Jamie Oliver’s recipe from Cook With Jamie. Schnitzel is the Austrian way of cooking thin escalopes of veal, pork or chicken coated in breadcrumbs. I made the apple sauce first, using two eating and one cooking apples (peeled, cored and chopped), quarter teaspoons of...

Grantas and Rivers

There are two places in Cambridge with the word ‘Granta’ in their name, which can become confusing. The first, probably the most popular, is called The Granta and it’s a pub near the Newnham end of town, towards the south. The other is called The Granta Bar and is...

Congratulations Sam Stern

Teenage chef Sam Stern reports that he passed his A-levels and gained a place at Edinburgh University (where I did an MA in History many years ago). He’s going to take a gap year first, however. His latest book is due out next week, too. It’s called Sam Stern’s...

Duck casserole

I bought two fillets of Gressingham duck. First I lightly pan-fried them to brown the outsides in a little oil – very little because the duck skin has plenty of fat. When this was done, I stripped off the skin and gave the exposed side a few more seconds...