A selection of articles about local food producers, retailers, chefs and those supporting the local food and farming industry.
Chinese Crispy Duck has been voted Britain’s third favourite food, pipping Chicken Tikka. Ducks, once a peasant winter staple, are now bred on a massive scale. Simon Ford goes in search of those that don’t look like UFOs. The power Read more »
South Somerset is not a multicultural hotspot, but that didn’t prevent Pheeraya Hill from moving there. Leaving Thailand in 1992, she first went to Haselbury Plucknett before settling in Merriott, where she and her husband, Jerry, now live. When Pheeraya Read more »
Dark days dishes. The time has come round again. The West-country word ‘dimpse’ is so onomatopoeically apt at this time of year, when the light leaks away so early, so abruptly, and all we can do to counter light-lustrelessness is cook hearty, gutsy, bright, light citrussy dishes and pretend. Pretend that we are in the scented orange grove that fills the kitchen when we make Seville orange marmalade or a steamed pudding dripping with an ointment of lemon, orange or lime-curd. And pretend good intention after the excesses and overkill of Christmas despite the fact that we tend to fail resolutions well before we admit we are defeated, that we have cheated.
I won’t eat puddings in January, I’ll give up drink, I won’t eat cream.
Josceline Dimbleby has an extraordinary life story. She has travelled all over the world and, drawing on her exceptional memory for people, food and places, has written a new memoir/cookery book entitled Orchards in the Oasis. As a diplomat’s stepdaughter, Read more »
Modern mid-life man has dreams. He has fantasies. For some it is still the perfect car but for an increasing number it’s the perfect porker – they lust over Readers’ Piglets rather than Meno-Porsche Monthly. My other half, Foodie, is a confirmed porco-phile and shows absolutely no enthusiasm for cars until we move from central London to deep Dorset at which point he develops a sudden, late-entry need to motor.
You can almost see my courgettes grow. Maybe not quite as impressively as the 9 inches a day I was once told an asparagus spear can push aside soil and stone to launch itself on to your plate, but enough to make me head for the garden through the summer and way into autumn, right up to the first opportunistic killer of a frost, with a sense of pride, anticipation and always, despite its continuously generous-natured bounty and reliability, surprise.
Known for his campaigning approach to making films that tell it like it really is, with programmes as diverse as Jamie Oliver’s American Road Trip to The Secret Policeman, double BAFTA award-winning television producer, Simon Ford, takes just as keen Read more »
Richard Bertinet may prove to be a great advertisement for the boy scouts. One of the first nuggets of wisdom he passes on to me about his cooking style is the need to be prepared. “It makes it easier to Read more »
Ever since man first learned to communicate, passion has been a source of huge inspiration – powerful emotions have compelled human beings to reach for the impossible, and often achieve the unimaginable. Whether building spacecraft, writing sonnets or expanding the Read more »
Moving from the city to the country to live the smallholding dream is not always all it’s cracked up to be – especially for the less obsessed partner of the Foodie in the family. Telling it like it is, Good Life Wife watches Foodie get broody.