Notes and recipes from a Wine Merchant’s Kitchen

A tale of 250 of my family’s favourite meals.

Falling in love with exciting food and wine is a swift and easy process, providing it daily, at home for my family, is a lot more demanding. Notes and recipes from a Wine Merchant’s Kitchen looks back on the successes and mishaps of a life spent casting around for culinary discoveries.

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Notes

Upbeat Update

Upbeat Update

Eastern Daily Press. April 2022. Words Stacia Briggs. Photos Brittany Woodman. Sometimes the best ideas emerge from the worst of times – when a...

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Begin Part 1

Begin Part 1

  "What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. They are happy in: Where can we live but days?"...

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Recipes

Sourdough tales

Sourdough tales

Apostasy (/əˈpɒstəsi/; Greek: ἀποστασία, translit. apostasía, is the formal abandonment of, or renunciation of a religion by a person. It can also be defined within the broader context of embracing an opinion that is contrary to one's previous religious beliefs. One...

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Guanciale & Spaghetti all’ Amatriciana

Amongst the guardians of Semitic languages, pigs get burdened with a bad press. In some faiths, they are regarded as ‘unclean’ animals, mainly because, whilst rummaging in the wild, they will eat virtually anything - carrion, garbage, even animal excrement. Not so...

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Pain de Campagne

Pain de Campagne

I have for some time laboured under the twin beliefs that everyone who worked their own kitchen should fashion some home baked bread once in a while and that all shop-bought loaves teetered on the brink of the inedible. Well it turned out that some modification of...

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Jerusalem Artichoke Soup

Jerusalem Artichoke Soup

Blackadder: “Baldrick, have you no idea what irony is?” Baldrick: “Yes, it's like goldy and bronzy only it's made out of iron”. In my determined quest to reduce our household consumption of meat, treating it as an occasional pleasure rather than a daily expectation, I...

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Picallili

Picallili

A lady friend - refined, middleclass stock, Dubarry wellies in season and a penchant for Mercedes estates - frequently ‘throws’ dinner parties. She never deigns to provide simple suppers. We bump into each other on occasion at a nearby Country Market. Part farmer’s...

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A Norfolk cottage pie

A Norfolk cottage pie

Stendhal (19th century French writer and diarist) “The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same”. On the subject of recipes - words matter. They serve to define expectation. Shepherd's pie or Cottage pie, is there a...

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Rich Pigeon Pâté

Rich Pigeon Pâté

Genesis 1:26. Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” Not wishing...

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