Recipes

Food has always been a big part of my life and cooking for other people is one of those pleasures that makes life worth living. This love of cooking is a theme that permeates the ideas and behaviours of many of the characters in my novels. Have a look at the chef Leon in A History of the Troll Wars for example.

There was a chef who was always prepared and ready to cook!

There is a page on this site that is dedicated to some favourite recipes that I have included for interest (hopefully) and to remind myself of the ingredients for when I want to recreate the meal. I find that as I get older, I tend to forget small matters about the taste or combinations of taste. Besides it hopefully provides a little variety.

It seems to me that we have a natural tendency to follow the same culinary paths and retrace our steps over the weeks and months. With that comes the danger of familiarity and then what was once an experiment in taste becomes comfort food that is turned out with no sense of soul.

That being said, the biryani that is shown here is truly comfort food. It is a one-pot dish; is so easy to prepare and cook; can be cooked with different meats; would probably do well with aubergine and okra; tastes delicious.

I have tried a Spanish style recipe replacing Indian spices with smoked paprika, chilli, coriander and preserved lemons. It worked ok but it needs a bit of further thought to make it worth reporting on here.

Some of the recipes that will be included are comfort food in their own right. After all, the first entry is Migas, the Spanish 'leftovers' meal shown in an image at the head of this post.

The second recipe is the ubiquitous pizza which I have included so that those of my children who wish to go there, can try it out. It is weird to think that back in the late seventies (1978 to be precise) when eating a pizza in a restaurant was a trip to Pizzaland, our own homemade version included cooking the topping ingredients first.

Well what could we do, there was no internet? Our parents , along with most of the country it has to be said, at that time were pretty ignorant of Italian food than the ubiquitous spagetti bolognaise (smothered in long life parmesan of course). Ignorance is not necessarily bliss. Now of course we have a surfeit of information available” to us.

You want a chocolate pizza? I'm sure there is an offering out there on the web. The question now is whether you should go there or not.

So the theory is that now I have a bit more time available, some of the recipes and menus that are used on a monthly basis will be documented and recorded for others to consider and maybe use. Equally, it will provide place to go for a revisit of some favourites.

I'll share failures as well as successes.

Take a recent meal of wild mushrooms and pasta. Raw ingredients were good but there were basically not enough of the fungi and the whole thing whilst tasty, didn't look much on the plate!

I'll also not exclude vegetable dishes. If you're a vegan then you probably wont get much out of the recipes but if you like vegetables or are looking for vegetarian dishes, then there will be a few offerings.

In some cases - aubergines in particular - I prefer them to meat. Indeed often I wonder just exactly what the meat itself actually brings to the table in terms of taste.

(Perhaps I'm cooking it wrong.)

Fish on the other hand is a subject to itself. The only substitute for fish is another fish! As has been said before on here. There is no point being in Dartmouth and not being able to access fish and shellfish in particular.

And below is another example of a prawn dish similar to the title of the book, The Prawns of Lebowa.