Carrot Cakes come in many guises and they seem to me often to go strong on other ingredients. Leafing through our recipe books I’ve seen cinnamon, oranges, lemons, desiccated coconut, ground almonds, bananas, pineapple chunks, nutmeg, vanilla essence, ground cardamom. This seems to be in order to disguise the taste of the carrot, which defeats [...]

On Saturday we were in Bruges (a Christmas present from our sons) and as we had not paid for the Eurostar or hotel we treated ourselves to a decent meal. Not a cheap experience, by the way.  Being by nature not one who likes to be ripped off on the wines in restaurants I’m always looking [...]

Being late and with an early start the following morning we asked for somewhere to eat close to the hotel rather than go into the centre of Florence. We chose one “where the locals eat, not the tourists”. I dont know if there are many vegetarians in Italy but it’s not an option at this [...]

We were at The Thai Rack in Gerrards Cross last night with friends selecting wines to accompany Thai food in anticipation of a forthcoming dinner party. The Thai Rack will be supplying the food and we will be supplying the wines so we took along half a dozen bottles to see which would work best. [...]

Whilst in Bordeaux last week dropping-off our son, Richard, for his nine month work experience at a Chateau (read Richard’s Blog separately in these pages) we were told absolutely to eat at L’Entrecôte, a must-do in Bordeaux as long as you are not a vegetarian.
It was about 50 m from our hotel in the centre [...]

If you’re going on holiday anywhere near Narbonne, I want to recommend to you a super little restaurant where Jeff Carrel and I had lunch the day I first met him; Le Petit Comptoir (4 Bd Maréchal Joffre – 11100 Narbonne. Tel +33 (0)4 68 42 30 35). Delicious, freshly-prepared food and a great wine [...]