This week Nino started his settling in sessions at nursery. Having seen him through countless hospital visits, scans and over ten hours of open heart surgery, you’d think I could handle leaving him a cosy room surrounded by toys and a loving team of staff for a few hours. Not so much. It’s been a week of tears, and not all of them Nino’s. Separation anxiety, it seems, isn’t just for babies. Continue reading
Tag Archives: nuts
Creamy Barley Breakfast Bowls with Hazelnuts & Figs
Despite a coupe of un-seasonally warm days, it’s starting to feel like autumn round here. My evening walk with Nino is bathed in hazy light, it’s dark by the time that supper swings round and those 6am wake up calls? Like the middle of the night. Comfort food feels like the order of the day and dark mornings call for warm breakfast bowls. Nino and I tend to share blueberry porridge made with flaked oats and quinoa, dolloped with thick greek yoghurt and a spoonful of nut butter, but this week I’ve branched out and made a batch of creamy barley to last us several days. Cooked until tender with homemade hazelnut milk and topped with honey roast figs, this nutty grain makes for a delightful porridge substitute and one I’ll be making time and again in the months to come. Continue reading
No Bake Banoffee Pie with Pecans
It feels like a lot of the food I’ve made over the last few weeks is something of a metaphor for the life we’re currently living. I hadn’t planned to post the recipe for this no bake banoffee pie – surely anyone can throw together the basic combination of biscuits, bananas, toffee and cream – but your enthusiastic response to this photo on Instagram got me thinking about what we all appreciate on a day-to-day basis. Not fancy tiered cakes and complicated techniques but the joy of simplicity – the recipe equivalent of slow days snuggling on the sofa rather than a glamorous evening out. Continue reading
Chocolate Pecan Ice Cream Pie with Bourbon Butterscotch & Pretzel Crust
Valentine’s Day is just around the corner and this year we’re going out. Not for a romantic meal, mind you, but because not just one but two of our friends are turning thirty, accompanied by the requisite parties and presents. Some people might be sad to miss out on ‘the most romantic night of the year’ but I’m happy to. We’ve never been ones for joining the doey-eyed masses in restaurants on Valentine’s Day, instead preferring a date night in with just each other for company and a menu I can take charge of. More specifically, a menu which includes a dessert like this Chocolate Pecan Ice Cream Pie with Bourbon Butterscotch and a Pretzel Crust.
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Grain-Free Fruit, Nut & Seed Breakfast Bowls
If there’s a meat-eating man in your life, you’ll likely have heard of the Paleo diet. My carnivorous husband is a fitness fanatic, always looking for new ways to incorporate protein into every meal and the Paleo approach of eating enormous quantities of meat, eggs, nuts and seeds is endlessly appealing to his inner caveman.
In theory there are benefits to eating in this ancient, natural way. In practice, there’s so much I’d miss – pulses, whole grains and dairy, not to mention flour, chocolate and all sorts of sweet things which, while less immediately nourishing for your body, are one of the pleasures in life and, arguably, good for your soul. Continue reading
Roasted Cashew Nut Butter
This weekend just gone, we had a mini-heatwave in London. The sun shone, we ate a lot of ice cream and I turned on the oven just long enough to make this buttery milk loaf and roast a tray of cashews for nut butter. Continue reading
Five New Recipes & An Update
Things have been a little hectic round here of late.
There’s the possibility we might be moving house. I’ve been working on a food-related project for a while (details of which I’m hoping to share with you soon). And on top of all that, the dial on our oven is irretrievably broken. That’s not to say I haven’t been baking – if you follow me on Instagram you’ll have seen the usual sort of snaps – but I don’t trust its accuracy enough to write up a blog-worthy recipe this week. Continue reading
A Collaboration with Why Nut
When I was about five years old, I took my toy dog to a neighbour’s birthday party. Throughout my childhood a cuddly elephant was my companion of choice so I’m not quite sure why the dog received this special honour: perhaps the elephant was holding the fort in my bedroom. Either way, the dog was present for pass the parcel, sleeping lions, birthday cake cutting and jelly and ice cream.
Seriously Nutty Pistachio Ice Cream Bars
If someone presented you with a ‘seriously nutty’ pistachio ice cream, what would you expect?
To me ‘seriously nutty’ suggests the presence – perhaps even an abundance – of nuts. And in the case of a pistachio ice cream, pistachio nuts. Call me an idealist, but if an ice cream is labelled as ‘nutty’, I’m expecting a whole load of the good stuff. Continue reading
Green Tea, Honey & Pistachio Financiers
Sweet, soft & full of interesting flavours
‘Every time I’m forced to watch [my friends] eat egg whites, I feel bad for them. In the first place, egg-white omelettes are tasteless. In the second place, the people who eat them think they are doing something virtuous when they are instead merely misinformed’.
My attitude to egg white-only omelettes is pretty much in line with the Nora Ephron quote above. After a major custard or ice cream making spree, I’ve occasionally attempted to scale the mountain of leftover albumen by making an anaemic omelette, but I’m almost always disappointed by the odd consistency and insipid flavour which result. Continue reading