Travel and holiday has always meant food for me. Whether paella cooked over orange wood in Valencia, oysters from Étang de Thau, or squats lobsters from Applecross, its always been about first experiences, about aroma and flavour of the local cuisine. Recently holidays have been all about Scotland and it…
Pigeon is a meat which gets a very mixed reaction, for many they automatically think of the dirty grey scraggly ‘rats with wings’ which are so beloved of railway bridges, park benches, and statuesque poets. Not the most appetising of creatures. However wood pigeons are an entirely different matter, plump,…
Speyside is a place that I’ve always held dear, seemingly less rugged than the west coast where I spent most of my childhood holidays but at the same time majestic in its own way. I always loved coming to Coylumbridge to camp, the soothing sound of the river never out of…
Cooking with pheasant is one of the joys of winter, a bird that is beautiful in feather, and which adds such an amazing aroma to the kitchen when cooking. I prefer to pot braise pheasant as I find it keeps a good degree of moisture in the flesh and is…
Pretty much since I started to blog and then tweet I’ve followed Mark Williams of Galloway Wild Foods. Many a time I’d find myself desperately trying to get a signal on a beach or a forest to ask him what some seaweed or shellfish or berry was as it looked…
Foraging is a term that is on everyone’s lips these days. Wild garlic, mushrooms, nettles and elderflowers are now seen as fairly standard ingredients as the search for free food has become fashionable. However growing up in the 1980s, for me wild food meant only one thing. Brambles, lots of…
Rose veal really is coming into the mainstream psyche now as a wonderful addition to the repertoire of meats available in British farmers markets and butchers. While this beautiful sweet meat is quite different from white veal, one cut and dish which still speaks only of veal is osso bucco,…
As you walk into The Old Butchershop in Roy Bridge, home of Great Glen Charcuterie you are enveloped by an amazing aroma that speaks of passion, of integrity and of quality. The soft sweet oak smoke, aromatic spice and rich game tells of artisans in the truest sense of the…
