Aniseed Balls

I'll tell you what is rubbish: soups. Well not all soups obviously, but there is a certain kind of emperor’s clothes cookery book with ludicrous recipes, where soups are particularly vulnerable. As with a child's design and technology homework, like parents we are expected to feign approval. Curried Parsnip Soup There isn't much scope for inventing soups because people have been doing it for a very long time. The ones that work have stood; the ones that work really well have become the classics; and the ones that don't work have rightly been consigned to the compost heap. But the latter is too good for the soup recipes in some of these effete cuisine-style cookery books, usually with ludicrous titles like Taste of Dreams . The scope for novel soups lies in combining ingredients from disparate sources that have simply not come together before. The obvious example is Curried Parsnip Soup as popularized by Jane Grigson in the 1970s and still popular with restaurateurs f...

Whenever I visit one of the big chain supermarkets I come out thinking "serves you right for going in". The most recent experience is illustrative and by no means unusual. Yak's butter I wanted cornmeal. I already knew that the local M&S didn't have any, so I went to the huge Tesco Extra nearby. After hunting high and low amid hordes of thoroughly unpleasant people and eventually determining that there was no customer service counter, I managed to find a staff member willing to humour me by checking on the computer. All they had was ready-made polenta.  I drove to the equally huge Sainsbury's Superstore a few miles away and again hunted high and low, before eventually asking an assistant who unapologetically claimed never to have heard of cornmeal or polenta. Keeping things simple I explained that cornmeal is what mexican tortilla is made from, and she looked at me as though I had asked for yak's butter. I got the impression that she knew for ce...

To start with I am posting here the various rants I have previously emailed to all and sundry.  I am setting the post date to match the original email.  In future I will post whenever I feel moved - I expect it will usually be when I am in grumpy old man mode.