When I first moved to Edinburgh in 2001, I spent a lot of time in its second-hand and antiquarian bookshops, which were more prevalent then than they are now. On one visit I found a small hardback with a title and author that seemed to come from one of those “awful books” compilations, and picked it up for a pound on a whim.
Read More · 22 January 2015 · x2 · Site News
My first reaction to the events in Paris this week was, obviously, dismay, not just that this depressing drumbeat of the 21st century was still sounding, but that this time the target was a satirical magazine, an enterprise close to my heart. My only previous exposure to Charlie Hebdo had been seeing it at magazine stands in French-speaking countries, but I knew it was something like the French Private Eye, and that was enough to empathize with the French people’s reaction to, not just an act of terror, but an attack on a beloved national institution.
Read More · 10 January 2015 · Events
Bread is a large number of small holes entirely surrounded by bread. —Lennie Lower
Now that the year has got going properly, I’m going to have to get this blog going again, so here it is. This month’s banner theme, if it isn’t clear, is bread: I’ve been baking a lot of it in recent months, trying out recipes by Paul Hollywood and the Bourke Street Bakery, getting a sourdough starter going, and wondering why all my baguettes end up as flat as ciabattas. For Christmas, I got a baking stone and a copy of Brilliant Bread by past Great British Bake-Off runner-up James Morton, and tried out several of his recipes. At this point I can confidently say that it’s the only bread book you really need; it’s certainly the only cookbook I’ve read cover-to-cover in 25 years of cooking. I would start recipe blogging to document it all, except that it’s hard to take photos of wet dough when your hands are covered in it, and I’d just end up plagiarising all of James’s recipes. Buy his book instead.
Read More · 8 January 2015 · Journal
December 2014