Hot smoked

This is a ‘super simple’ dish to do on the Big Green Egg or indeed most BBQs that have a lid you can close.  It is an ideal dish for mid week when you want to cook something fresh, ideal for eating outside in the…

This is a very short blog (and modified recipe) about our second attempt at the Tuscan Terrine (see the first version here). The recipe remains largely the same.  In an attempt to have a slightly drier mix, only the gin was used as a liquid…

Perhaps it was all too inevitable – if it works well for cannellini beans it would probably work well for borlotti beans too!  

Whilst visiting the local supermarket in Tuscany we spied a box of plumb tomatoes ostensibly for preserving. They looked lovely, and at €3.80 for 8Kg clearly too good to resist.  Inevitably, therefore, we are eating a lot of tomato based meals – and what easier…

The simplest of dishes – individual rump steaks and slow cooked cannellini beans with sage!  It is the simplest of dishes if you have already made the slow cooked cannellini beans that is!  But once cooked will stay happily in the fridge for a few…

The simplest of simple Tuscan dishes.  Slow cooked Cannellini beans infused with sage.  Two hundred and fifty grams of dried beans were soaked for about 12 hours overnight and then put into the our small cast iron Le Creuset casserole dish.  This will just fit onto…

Making terrines is something of a lost art in the UK and we are venturing into this area quite tentatively.  I have to say most of our experience has been in the indoor kitchen and not in the BGE.  As I have found a very…

Salmon is such a versatile fish. This is a very simple hot smoked dish but one that looks rather impressive and can also be served on the wooden planks on which they were smoked for a slightly different ‘twist’. Using a cedar-wood plank is a…

There is no reason to call this Bastille Day Steak other than the fact that we chose to cook it on Bastille Day with part of our French family!!  The only real link with France there than the timing is the fact that the so…

Having been out with friends to a Lebanese restaurant one of our favourite dishes there was the Shawarma Chicken.  So the quest quickly came about to try and replicate the tastes from that evening.  Typically the Shawarma  chicken is made from the thigh meat, unrolled…

Idly browsing through the internet in 2017 there were lots of “Over the Top” Chilli recipes appearing on social media.  The name itself drew me in!  ‘Over the top’ could just as well describe the obsession of Big Green Egg cooking as much as this…

Jackie and I were driving home after a weekend away and found a lovely Kilnford farm shop in Dumfriesshire.  Specialising in grass fed Galloway beef, and farmed by the owners – it seemed churlish not to take some meat home with us.  

In 1975, the writer Shirley Conran published the book Superwoman, targeted at busy women, and with it, coined the phrase ‘Life is too short to stuff a mushroom’.  Well yes I am taking that out of context but here is an opportunity to stand that…

Whilst almost all the posts on this blog are of our own cooks, at time it is delightful to sit back and enjoy the work of friends!  This is one of those cases and with one of my favourite cuts of beef – ribeye, but…

It seems that in the UK that as we are about to move from winter into spring that winter intends to have a last fling with cold coming in from the east across continental Europe.  So how about a suitably warming winter dish?  Travelling around…

Melanzane alla parmigiana This is such a sumptuous dish and a perfect vegetarian dish to serve to anyone who says they do not like vegetarian food. We first had it in a hotel in the Dolomites in Northern Italy. In winter, a mountain ski lodge,…

On a wet winter’s day it is good to remember some of our summer cooking which has inspired one of the upcoming recipes.  The summer dish was based on veal, earlier in the week we had cooked two delightful “Veal Minute Steaks” – (see here) –…

Turkey gets such a bad press, and yet it is the “go to” meat in the UK for Christmas in particular but also and other holiday periods too.  This year we delayed our ‘Christmas season’ Turkey cooking until New Year’s Day, and I have to…

This piece was first published in the Guardian on Saturday 11 Dec 2004 – see here.   by Heston Blumenthal.   According to talk in the media recently, up to 70% of our Christmas turkeys will carry salmonella and/or campylobacter, so there’ll be a lot of upset…

This is a title that will polarise people – some will rush to what is actually a lovely winter recipe, and I can already see others “screwing up their faces”!  If you like ‘pulled pork’ and you like slow cooked winter casseroles you will love…

Pulled pork is a BBQ classic with its origins in the US.  There is lots of “folklore” attached but in essence it is a very simple dish to cook.  It needs to be cooked slowly, ideally over charcoal with a little dry wood to add…

I am always staggered when we journey through France and Italy at the variety and quality of the meat the local supermarkets carry in contrast to the picture I find in my part of the UK.  We were driving along the Rhone on the way…

We had really enjoyed our “Vitello Tonnato” when we were in Italy and wanted to try something similar now we were in France, but on this occasion we couldn’t find any veal.  So ‘necessity being the mother of invention’

After a lovely break in Tuscany we had driven into France, to the Rhône-Alpes to meet part of our “French family”.  

Well one thing is certain, Italians like veal!  It is so much easier to buy veal in Italy than we have found at home.  This is a real shame as the UK Rose Veal probably has the highest welfare standards 

Having said that we had only come across grilled octopus once in Tuscany, the very next time we went out to eat – there it was on the menu.

When is a sardine not a sardine………..? Out shopping I saw what I thought were some lovely looking fresh sardines – only later when I checked the spelling of Acciughe (also often called Alici) did I realise that the sardines were in fact anchovy!!   I…

On our wanderings we came across a butcher selling ‘home reared’ turkey and turkey breasts.  Well for 2 of us even a 1kg turkey breast seemed quite a lot of meat and even that was going to be a bit of a ‘tight squeeze’ on…

Grilled Octopus is not something commonly found in the restaurants of Northumberland!  As yet I have only come across it on one occasion in restaurants in Tuscany but perhaps we need to get out more!!  Anyway, octopus has the reputation of being tough and chewy…

Although I don’t do a great deal, I do like bread cooked in the Big Green Egg – and bread cooking in the Large BGE is a real pleasure (more of that in future posts).  I had always been told that bread cooking in the…