Lazarus Vegetables

I'm afraid there are all too many of us that have found something similar to this lurking at the bottom of our vegetable store....


This poor specimen was once a lovely parsnip but if there was an RSPC for vegetables then I would be looking at a life time ban for neglect. All it is fit for now is compost.......or is it?

Pop it in a galss of water and leave for 24 hours and.......



As if by

The Perfect Shopper

‘When I go shopping I am in control. I know what I want, stick to a budget and that is all that I purchase.’
There are very few of us who can honestly say that this statement applies to them. In fact retailers spend a lot of money researching what influences our shopping habits and we are open to any number of strategies that target our distinct personality types.
That plastic reward card in

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All food experts will tell you that we eat with our eyes. Rightly or wrongly, we make up our minds if we are going to like something within a few seconds of first catching sight of it. And of course, you don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression.
If what you serve up doesn’t look good then it has to taste twice as good to get people to enjoy it, if they even try it in the first

The Story of Lobby - Part 1

Who would have thought that a traditional German dish made from leftovers served with pickled herrings and beetroot would have resulted in the colloquial name for Liverpudlians? All this and more can be found in the history of Lobby, a traditional Staffordshire favourite.Lobby is a classic leftovers dish. It is basically meat, animal bones and onions, boiled in a pot with some water. Whatever

Margaret Atwood - the Amoeba's Tale

Here is the gist of Margaret Atwood's tale

At midday an amoeba is sealed into a test-tube full of food. The amoeba feeds and divides in two every two minutes. By midnight all the food is gone, the test-tube is full of amoebas and they start to die from starvation. At what time would the amoeba realise that there was a problem? (That is if they were capable of rational thought.) Well, at two

Cooking Disasters & How To Avoid Them - No1

A big cause of food waste is the dreaded cooking disaster. Not only does the food go in the bin but you have wasted all the time and effort of preparing it. Here is No1 in a series of tips on how to avoid and get around these events and a few other food saving techniques as well.

Don’t tell people what you are serving until it arrives at the table. If the food doesn’t turn out as expected invent

Salad days

As the salad season starts avoid committing your lettuce and spring onions to a messy death in the crisper drawer of your fridge. Simply keep them in a glass of cold, clean water on the windowsill and they will stay crisp and fresh.
Always buy spring onions with the roots still attached. This not only keeps them fresher for longer, but when you are ready to eat them you can plant the root ends in

About the Author

I don’t know why I have always had a more intense fascination with food than most of my peers. Even from an early age one of my favourite programmes was the Galloping Gourmet, Grahame Kerr, cooking with a passion and exuberance that I immediately identified with. My mother fed us a great variety of home cooked meals including stuffed ox hearts and sheep’s’ tongue stew so I was lucky to be exposed