Oxtail Soup

Everyone’s depressed and winter’s coming in. I’m not suggesting soup can solve much, but when I go back to Yorkshire I need it in my system to function. A big pan of something on the stove also warms the house up nicely. Coming back home makes me realise how blooming freezing I’ve been all my life; surely everyone ‘wears’ a duvet watching TV at night? Wait, you mean you don’t sleep in a hat?? I’m typing this while wearing a shawl for crying out loud.

Roasted Vegetable Salsa

There comes a point when you have to admit that autumn is coming. I’m not ready to think of winter yet, give me time for that... But when summer days start ending on a chilly note and you find yourself reaching for your stash of vests (everyone has one, right?), it’s time to adapt your food to fit. This is often helped on by supermarkets, who begin to stock basic ingredients that just don’t work as well as they did in summer months. Take tomatoes. They’re ripe and juicy in the summer, albeit for a price. By autumn, the packets that grace the shelves are full of fruit as hard as stones and just as tasteless. Luckily, salt, pepper, olive oil and a spell in a hot oven at everyone’s favourite gas mark (6, duh!) is enough to get the tastebuds excited again.

Spicy Fried Okra

About a year ago, I read about a little bar not too far from Leeds train station, called Bundobust, which served small Indian nibbly dishes. As part of our ongoing, but interrupted, culinary-veggie tour of Yorkshire eateries, I went to check out the place with my friend Caroline. Though we did that awkward thing of one of us waiting inside the restaurant, the other one waiting outside, when we finally found each other, we found that Bundobust served up some pretty good stuff, from pots of creamy black lentil dhal and rice, to the more interesting bundo chaat, a combination of samosa pastry, chickpeas, potato and relish. But the star was their okra fries, thin and crispy, in a chickpea batter, dusted with salt and mango powder.

Highs and lows of the Slow Cooker: Shin of Beef Chile con Carne

Working mainly from home means that from 4.30 pm each afternoon, I spend a lot of effort trying to resist the magnetic pull of the kitchen. In days of yore, I’d launch myself in there with gusto from about 3 pm to start crafting a feast for the family. However, that was when I didn’t have any responsibilities. None at all. But now I have an ever-growing reading list, and an upcoming PhD upgrade which isn’t keeping me awake at night, but still makes me a little nervous. In short, even my to-do lists are breeding, so I’ve been barring myself from the kitchen in order to get some work done.

A first time for everything: Marmalade

My parents eat a lot of marmalade. They like the dark stuff, not any of your Golden Shred nonsense. Real marmalade. Do young people eat marmalade, or even jam anymore? Breakfast, followed by a chaser of toast and marmalade, has been the standard morning routine in our house for as long as I can remember. Although seeing as I generally eat my body weight in potatoes, I’ve never joined in the marmalade ritual.

Fresh Ginger Biscuits

I think I’m allergic to history. I went to the National Archives for the first time a few weeks ago and caught a cold. Then last week, I went to the National Maritime Museum and now I have the flu. See what I mean? I’ll admit that both times I was more nervous than I should have been, which resulted in me being able to eat only a pear for lunch on one occasion. But still. It’s got to be all that history. Or maybe it’s the fact that I feel that I shouldn’t sneeze near archival materials, which inevitably makes me need to sneeze so badly! 

Crisps made in the Microwave, aka Magic Crisps

There is no savoury snack that I savour more than a crisp. Though nutritionists would need a lie down on hearing this, a fond childhood memory of mine consists of me standing by the side of our cooker as my mum cooked up thin slices of potatoes in a chip pan to make “crisps”. Yes, I was a chubby child but it was the nineties! Plus, my mum never really did anything like that, so it was a naughty, indulgent experience for both of us. In fact, I don’t even remember Amy being there, so perhaps the secrecy added an extra spice to our nocturnal proceedings. My impatient wait by the cooker as the oil came to temperature was nothing compared to the agony of allowing the cooked crisps to cool on a piece of kitchen paper. Sprinkled with salt and chewy in places, those crisps were divine. We’d eat them greedily as each batch came out of the pan and so never had enough for a bowlful.