This version is with chicken but the mildness of the dish would also compliment fish. Apparently Ling is a good substitute for catfish or monkfish or hake. Must try it sometime. Either way the wonderful colours of the curry reminded me of a journey that I have only taken in my mind to the Xandrian Quarters.

We managed to pick up a decent bag of cooking apples from the Dartmouth Community Orchard in October and froze most of them after processing. Processing in this case meant peeling, coring and cutting into decent sized pieces. We also had the view that butter would prevent the apples going brown and so we melted butter and mixed it with the apples. We have since learned that this was actually pointless for this purpose. However it gave a nice base to a cooking mix. Anyway, we

This is a short piece of writing taken from The Collector of Tales. Although the images are provided by Chat Gpt and the spoken voice by ResembleAI, the story itself is entirely my own work. I hope you like. If you'd like to listen rather than read then download here. The Swift’s Tale My pursuer had backed off and so I waited for him. Briefly he reappeared but soon faded back into the crowd as I continued on towards the square.  Although I  stopped to look  back, I didn’t see

Some meals are simply perfect. Of course it is all a matter of preference but last night's offering to the gods of cooking has to be listed as being on a par with the best that I have experienced. It's not arrogance. After all I cooked it, ate it and tasted it and it was indeed for my own pleasure. It's reportage. So I am not up there in the presentation of the food but to me that's not what its all about.

It's the weekend of 25th October and the 2025 Dartmouth Food Festival is in full swing. The wind and the rainy weather has given over to crisp cool sunshine with occasional light showers that you can usually see coming down the river valley. The Pelican of London, a splendid, three mast vessel moored up on the town quay, normally in pride of place as a focus of attention, is having to take second place to a whole swathe of marquees that are set up along the South Embankment.

Oslo is home to Frogner Park, a municipal open space famed for the stunning Vigeland sculpture installation. Over 200 bronze and granite works by Gustav Vigeland depicting, I assume in his words, the breadth of human emotion and experience. The works took Vigeland from 1924 to his death in 1943 to complete (designing and modelling each piece himself) and when you look at the body of work it is truly a remarkable achievement. I am sure it is documented somewhere but I wonder

Trilobites became extinct on our planet about 250 million years ago at the time of the Permian mass extinction. This was the greatest mass extinction recorded with something like 90% of all species being wiped out. It made the Dinosaur (KT) extinction look tame. These were marine creatures and so it is unlikely that on our planet they would have ever scuttled about around the feet of humans. But I guess it could have been! In any case, I chose to bring these marvellous creatu

Seagrum the Dwarf is a vivid, unflinching plunge into a decadent world of taverns, bounty hunters, witches, vampires, and bureaucratic corruption. At its heart stands Seagrum — a coarse, cunning dwarf whose vices, wit, and grim practicality make him both the story’s hero and its moral caution.

Continuing with the dal theme and following on from the Dal bhat that I reported on in September, here is another vegetarian recipe. It reflects our increasing move towards a less meat based diet. I am sure that there are recipes out there but this one was put together with the stuff that we had available. Not a little unlike the Collector of Tales in that his preference was always to make do with what was to hand, although in his case the concept of a no meat ( or fish) mea

So we thought that we would do ourselves a cold mezze this week as an evening meal. The target was a mere four dishes that we would prepare more or less from scratch rather than buy from the supermarket. This was quite different to the hot mezze described in the novel Turtles Swimming in Sea Grass . The first task was the taramasalata so we headed off for the fish stall in the market to get some smoked cod roe. During the process of purchasing, we managed to discuss the abil

Our sortie to the fish stall in the marketplace on Saturday produced a couple of large mackerel amongst other things. The fish as always...

Well, we have lived at The Quay now for just over six months and last night I got my first close up of a grey seal whilst walking...

A cassoulet is a melange of rich meats, white beans, fat and aromatics, cooked slowly over many hours. The recipe here, although claiming...

A jollof is a Nigerian dish of rice cooked with tomatoes. It is another of those one-pot dishes that pop up in the culinary landscape...

This is a simple recipe adapted slightly from the BBC Good Food website and a couple of other recipes that I have read cookery books. It...

This is a much under valued fish in the UK but is fairly popular in the mediterranean where apparently it is overfished. In the UK it...

This year was the 180th year of this annual celebration where, for a few days, the town descends into a madness of noise and stalls and...

This staple of Nepal is a delicious and substantial meal as an alternative to a meat based meal and contains all sorts of good things from a dietary and nutritional point of view. I have taken to cooking it in a similar manner to a biryani ( see previous post ) as I feel that the textures and flavours combine beautifully in this manner. It is a pretty basic meal that can be eaten breakfast morning or night as you see fit. The version I made here includes black lentils ( Belug

The Head Gardener is a darkly whimsical, sardonic fantasy novel set in Florencetown, a vividly imagined city of humans, dwarves, ogres, werewolves, witches, and other beings. It blends satire, grotesque humor, and gritty worldbuilding with a strong sense of the absurd. At its heart are two unlikely figures: Capability, the enigmatic Head Gardener, obsessed with roses, and Seagrum, a rough-hewn, sharp-witted dwarf entangled in intrigue, sex, and violence.

T his chowder is loosely based on Mediterranean-style fish soup that is popular in the cheaper restaurants and cafes down by waterside...