One Can of Guinness

I always keep a couple of cans of Guinness in – just for cooking purposes you understand … Last week I liberated a pair of duck legs from the freezer. The only way to separate them was to partly defrost and then, to do what you’re not supposed to do, refreeze the second one. This […]

600 divided by 2

Two posts ago I shared my sausage pizza bank holiday lunch with you. That used 200g of dough. 200g is a pitifully small quantity – you end up with practically as much on your hands as on the bench. So I make up multiples of that amount, use what I need and put the remainder […]

Ajo Blanco

Last week, when I had a couple of days with friends in big London, I snuck off for a bang-up lunch at at one of our favourite restaurants, Moro. Had a little chat with Sam(uel) Clark and took my annual photo (if you don’t know Moro, it is owned by two Sam Clarks, Samuel and […]

‘fraid it’s more sausage …

Look, it’s August Bank Holiday weekend, we finally got proper August school holiday weather (pissing down), I’ve got nicely maturing pizza dough in the fridge and sausages in the freezer. What does that say? To me it say Garlic Lovers Italian Sausage Deep Pan Pizza for which we say thank you Peter Reinhart for supplying […]

Update: End of August 2026

What can I say? I just checked and it’s been about three months since I posted on this blog and yet I still get between ten and twenty hits a day and the odd two hundred, presumably when I get a mention on another bread site. I know this is minuscule compared with the current […]

Crevette & Squid Pizza

This is a mighty beast of a deep-pan pizza I made for two German friends of my neighbour Steffi. Just back from France myself, I had to improvise with what was in the freezer or on the shelves. To start off with, the dough. I used an old, handleless, non-stick frying pan, 10½” in diameter, […]

Improv

My turn to cook on Saturday at the Sporadic Neighbours’ Late Late Lunch Club. Asparagus to start followed by Garlic Lovers’ Italian Sausage deep pan pizza and Steffi, our neighbour of many years, contributed some imaginative salads. Still finding cooking for one difficult – not talking about the social and emotional aspect which is a […]

Sue

People who follow this blog but are not in any other contact with me may not have heard that Sue Wilson, my wife and partner of nearly 50 years, died very suddenly on 10 December. It was a very strong and enduring relationship that I’m not yet ready to talk about. Many of you who […]

Challah-gain

What haven’t I baked for a long time? (The familiar cry of the retired baker. It was easier to have variety when there was a potential sixty customers than there is for just the two of us.). I know, Wholemeal Raisin Challah, the old one I put together years back, not the Babka Zana one […]

Bad Boy Bread

I like a loaf that looks a bit of a ruffian. I get so tired of rows of perfect white batards that bakers seem to be aiming for these days. An ear and an edge of feathery foliage delicately cut along its length. Yuck! lets have a bit of aggression. It’s bread we’re talking about […]