Touring with the Mini-BGE

This is a very short follow up on the Autumn Pork and Chestnut Terrine blog from a few weeks ago which you can find here.  This was largely the same recipe and so we will not repeat that here.  The differences were simple and largely…

Sometimes it is the simplest of dishes that give the most satisfaction.  This is very much one of those dishes!  It is hard to better simple roast potatoes – but this is a dish that does that!.  Indeed it would be a lovely simple supper…

Having been pleased at the outcome of our fried and grilled calves liver recipe, I wanted to go back and try the more conventional approach.  We had reverted to grilling the meat after initial frying as the temperature of our plancha/pan had really not been hot…

When we were in Italy we were very fortunate to be given some Mazze di Tamburo (Parasol mushrooms).  These were found in the local chestnut groves and although we had seen them growing, our knowledge of wild mushrooms is such that unless we are with…

We were in holiday in Tuscany in the late summer and early autumn in 2019.  This is later in the year than we had normally gone and it certainly felt different.  Gone was the searing summer heat and in this agricultural part of Italy everything…

This is a liver dish that you may well enjoy even if you don’t like liver!  Better still it is one of those perfect dishes that comes about when something didn’t go according to plan in the cooking.  Here it was the ‘rescue’ that made…

We have been playing around with a few meat free dishes, such as our slow roasted caramelised fennel dish and our roasted cauliflower with truffle oil and toasted flax seeds.  But although we like vegetarian food our experience is limited.  Finding the book “Charred” by Genevieve…

It is 2 years now since we did the Sea Bream and Sea Bass cook when on holiday in Italy.  I remember it as a delightful evening as we sat out overlooking the local valley with a herby smoky aroma wafting towards us as we…

It was lovely to be able to roast 2 beautiful slow grown chicken breasts – butchered as supremes, with the first part of the wing bone and the skin included.  Even better when roasted on a bed of rosemary with just a hint of wood…

In the summer of 2018 we were in Italy with the Big Green Egg and thoughts again came to bread making.  We love Italian food but bread making does not seem to be their greatest triumph!.  We have to be straight before we start –…

I know it shouldn’t, but it always comes as a bit of a surprise to see the wealth of available seafood when travelling around mainland Europe.  I suppose a lot of this surprise is because there is so much seafood caught in the UK and…

This is a very simple dish that we have done a few time now as a way to use the remaining heat in the Big Green Egg once it has been shut down.  This is one of the endearing qualities of the EGG and we…

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…

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) –…

Porcini are really fabulous and I still find it very exciting to walk into a little shop here in Tuscany and see a basket of newly picked Porcini. This is something I am yet to see in the UK – but although

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…