Cooking Recipes Books 4 U

A veritable essay from Robert ;-) ........there are accompanying images to this now over at Flickr.....enjoy! For four days, spread over three cookery events, we devoted rather a long time making rather ordinary looking, rather gooey sticky sweet things. Next to the great roasts, vyande de cipres may look a bit underwhelming; but making it became one of the most interesting, and perhaps important experiments we have undertaken. It's one of those recipes that occurs early on; it is mentioned in the first english menu, thirteenth century, and can be followed up through the years, changing a bit each time. It seems to be an anglo-norman innovation; Hieatt and Butler couldn't find a french source version, despite its name. 'Vyande'; meat, food, and 'cipres', meaning sweet, as Cyprus was known as a supplier of sugar. Sweetmeat. Although the oldest recipe has almond milk, rice flour, ginger and, bizarrely, pistachio nuts; but no sugar. The s...

..It's Christmas! So here we are, at the start of an 'old school' 8 day long Christmas cookery event....leaving aside the why and wherefore of my lack of posting (and to be frank my lack of interest), what's the s.p.? Well, today was nice and busy...just the right number of people to keep us talking all day but still let us cook the planned meal, all of which was pretty good, especially the perre which was outstanding....and the roast beef was to die for. No great adventure or surprises for the first day....keeping it simple to ween us into the work....but we will be cooking some new (to us) recipes a bit later in the week....fingers crossed I'll let you know more about them when we get to them. I'm keeping this short and sweet as it's cold and posting involves: 1) Eating into valuable drinking time. 2) Standing in the cold garden in order to get a mobile phone signal!!! So, as the younger generation used to say......Laters.

Cripes it's been cold over the last few days standing in the kitchen! Not cold enough for ice or snow, but the bitter piercing cold that we get that creeps in through your feet and saps you're spirit….still, a nice excuse for a warm cuppa and a nip at the end of the day eh? Not a massive amount to report to you all out there, as has been the case for most of the year…..we've broken some pots (sort of intentionally, hopefully more to tell you when the official report is written on that), we've tried the odd new recipe (which I would expect Robert to write about in the New Year), we've eaten some good food and we've talked to some very nice visitors who have asked some very taxing questions…..which has helped to take our minds off the temperature. A subtle problem has arisen with our charcoal though which has meant we have had to slightly re arrange the kitchen layout to try to keep the excessive ash that it is producing away from our visitors so they...