The recent announcement by the makers of Dolmio and Uncle Ben’s, advising consumers that their sauces should only be consumed once a week, struck me on two levels. Firstly, as the manufacturer was not required to make this declaration, I wondered what could have motivated it to take such a unilateral step. Ever the cynic, I believe this move was less about serving the interests of consumers and more about […]
Thousands of curry dishes are eaten every day in the UK, but few of them are cooked from scratch. Many are bought as ready meals or take-aways, although increasingly popular over recent years has been the ready made “cooking sauce”, representing a sort of “half way house”, where the cook prepares and cooks the other ingredients before stirring in the ready made sauce. By far and away the most popular […]
For decades official nutritional guidelines have warned us that saturated fats cause heart disease. This guidance was based upon the findings of a single, biased research project carried out in the 1950s, but it has taken the best part of sixty years to overturn those findings. Earlier this year Cambridge University became the latest respected institution to publish research which concluded that saturated fats are not, and never have been, […]
My adopted home city, Worcester, has as its symbol a black pear. It appears on the city’s coat of arms, on its rugby and cricket club badges and features in numerous other associations with the city. The Worcester Black Pear is in fact an ancient, local variety of pear, believed to be at least six hundred years old. No longer grown commercially, it can still […]
Sometimes you eat something and it is so good that it fleetingly stops you in your tracks, suddenly, unexpectedly giving you a deep sense of wellbeing, the kind of food that you never want to stop eating. That’s what I envisage whenever I hear the expression that something has been “cooked with love”. For me, it signifies food from pure, wholesome ingredients that have been put together with the intention […]
A couple of months ago I received an approach from Suma, a vegetarian wholefoods cooperative based in Yorkshire, who asked if I would be willing to join their newly formed vegan and vegetarian bloggers network by creating recipes for their bi-monthly catalogue. Suma runs on strong ethical principles, specialising in fairly traded, organic and natural products, and as a workers’ cooperative to boot they pretty much tick all the right […]
