Pasta with a sauce from the garden
The garden is such a fantastic inspiration, summer or winter, hot or cold, I wonder why we bother with recipes. Kick the mint and the air is filled with mint sauce, and roast lamb is a natural to follow. Rush into the kitchen and cook it.
Fondle the rosemary and all those delicious oils are released: [...]
Baked noodles in a bacon, leek and walnut sauce
I have read a lot about Italian cooking, eaten a lot of Italian cooking, here and there and at home. And I can’t help but feel that Italians love their food, but cook without much spontaneity, preferring the tried and true, almost to the stage of admonishment if certain procedures are not followed. Gual-tiero [...]
Pasta with smoked salmon in a smoky sauce
Smoked fish makes a delightful companion for pasta, for the same reasons as bacon does. It imparts an intense, smoky flavour to its carrier, the cream, and some delicious chunky bits to float through the pasta. The way to go is to use one set of chunks to flavour the cream, and a new, uncooked [...]
A Simple Pasta: Tagliatelle in a Bacon Cream Sauce
You approach restaurants with extraordinary naivety. The day we opened our one and only eating house we had two pasta dishes on the menu. We made the pasta in the early hours of the morning we opened, just after we had finished hand-churning the ice cream. Husband and wife, not long married and still wide-eyed [...]
Some Kitchen ‘Rules’
The best thing I did in the early days of cooking was to learn to make perfect pastry cream. I learned something else as well: always read new recipes right through before trying them on.
Fun First, Second, Third
For most of us, cooking is not about recipes, or routines, it’s about what’s in the fridge, or what’s cheap, or what’s growing in the garden. Recipes, I have noticed, are for special occasions, or for those things which need fine detail to make them work. For me, that is more likely to be for [...]
Foreword
Where do you begin to describe Geoff Slattery and his constant, occasionally frenzied search for perfection? A former sports editor whose greatest joy after deadline was to munch happily on a clove of garlic? A writer who can weave into a story about coucous a sporting snapshot of modern life. A father, food critic and [...]