The Grinch-like grumbles about Christmas cavorting in November are silenced by the arrival of December.
Buying a Christmas tree and choosing decorations can be tiring, especially with kids in tow and the Little House of Cooking at Blackthorpe Barn in Rougham offers a welcome respite for hungry shoppers who come here to enjoy the ever-growing Christmas shop, craft fairs and walks through the estate woods.
In her Polish cook book, Polska, Zuza Zak tells us that the beginning of Polish history as we know it is marked by a feast which magically grew from modest beginnings to a table replete with fantastical food and drink.
What does £1.25 get you these days? Just over half a cup of latte from Starbucks, a couple of Mars Bars or you could buy a print copy of the Bury Free Press. ‘But but but,’ I hear you cry. ‘Why buy the paper when I can read it free, online?’
Mexican food is a perfect fit for the shortened days of autumn when temperatures drop sharply as the light falls away.
The last few weeks have been busy ones. As well as a holiday in Venice, I’ve attended a launch party for Gannet Magazine at Brawn in London where we ate bread from Sardinia, anchovies from Spain and drank French wine and a book launch at the Maltese High Commission saw us eat food cooked by Meike Peters whose latest book Eat in my Kitchen celebrates the food of both Germany and Malta.
This crumble should really be called ‘fruits of the forage’ because it exemplifies all that is best about this time of year when windfall apples and pears are there for the gathering, to be used in recipes where a perfect outwards appearance is not required.
Many people don’t own an ice cream maker but crave the kind of chewy, rich and intensely flavoured ice cream that costs £5 or more for a tiny tub. If you adore ice cream like I do, this can be prohibitive.
Recently, this paper printed a story about McDonalds applying to build a drive-thru close to Moreton Hall, a rather cynical move on part of the company considering that this estate is home to many children and their parents.
I really didn’t want to write about the referendum in this column especially after reading humblebrag tweets from political journalists about their lack of sleep and disappearing fingerprints, worn away by typing endless copy.
East Anglia doesn’t really do the dog days of summer. It’s rare to find us fanning ourselves in the shade, cursing the fact that in two hours time, there’ll be 10 people coming over to eat barbecue and we’re too darn hot to fire the thing up.
In December 1970, a meeting took place between two of the most well-known men in the world: a hugely popular musical star and the other, soon to become one of the most disliked politicians.
Don Cheadle not only directs but also takes the lead role as Miles Davis in Miles Ahead, a film he describes as a metaphorical tale of an encounter between a Rolling Stone journalist played by Ewan McGregor and Davis at a time (1979) when drink, drugs and demons had turned the jazz musician into a recluse.
April has been an interesting old month, weather-wise hasn’t it?
If you travel to the Basque region between March and June, it is likely that you will meet food-lovers making a special pilgrimage of their own, and not for religious reasons either, but to eat the tiny tear-shaped peas that are harvested from farms which line El Camino de Santiago.
April is such an ambiguous month for me, a month that has both given and taken away in the profoundest of ways.
These are challenging times for the NHS. The introduction of loans for student nurses and eventually, one must assume, all Allied Health Professionals alongside the junior doctor crisis has put it at the forefront of political debate, much to the chagrin of our government who would rather we turn a blind eye.
According to Mark Twain, experience is an author’s most valuable asset, “It’s the thing that puts the muscle, breath and warm blood into the book” he said. I know I love reading books although I’m less convinced that I have a book IN me but I have been thinking about what inspired my fondness for landscape writing and the natural world.
One of the aimless ways I entertain myself with is by imagining what kind of tattoo I might like if I was in the market to have one, which I am not, despite the burgeoning number of tattooists in the St Edmundsbury region. What event or thing might I commemorate via multiple dermal injections of ink? Had I offered up my tender flesh to Colchester’s Tattoo Mick as a teenager, what would I now be looking at with a frown, trying to recall what might have made me think it was a great idea.
The wolf is an indomitable animal, aloof, untamable and in times past represented humankinds struggle against the wilderness as Christianity slowly spread through Europe, replacing what it saw as a feral abyss. Often depicted as evil in folklore and in the church teachings of medieval Europe, there was no place for such a wild beast in the garden of the Lord.
