24 Nov
When my friend Roberta who I stay with when I am in the Bay Area suggested we go for a doughnut, I wasn’t sure at first. The only ‘doughnuts’ I love are the catalan xuxos which I had every morning at Bar Pinotxo in the Boqueria when I was in Barcelona testing recipes for my Fifth Quarter. That was until I went on the scales and saw that my weight had shot right up. No more xuxos for me after that. Not until St John’s opened their bakery in Druid Street. Even then, I only had the one doughnut to try. Great but fattening all the same. Still, when Roberta says something is good I listen and one morning, we went to Doughnut Dolly. Boy am I glad we did! The doughnuts (filled with cream, chocolate or jam) were exceptional. In fact, they are inspired by St John’s. Hannah Hoffman, the owner, had heard about them from a friend who’d been to London and she decided to try making similar ones.
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14 Apr
On 8 May I will be teaming up with Stevie Parle at the Dock Kitchen for a lamb nose to tail dinner. The evening will start with the acceptable face of offal: a welcome drink served with delicious chicken wings marinated in Aleppo pepper, allspice, Lebanese 7-spice mixture and cinnamon, lemon juice and olive oil and roasted in the restaurant’s tandur oven. For starters, we will offer a mini offal mezze: poached lamb’s tongues stuffed with pistachios and served on a bed of lemony mixed leaves and herbs (I learned the recipe at one of Aleppo’s best restaurants, Zmorod); lamb’s kidney baked inside a potato (I found the recipe in Ambrose Heath‘s Meat); and Jerusalem Mix bruschetta (Sami Tamimi gave me the recipe when I was writing Mediterranean Street Food, initially a sandwich, I have smartened it up into a bruschetta for the dinner).
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27 May
I still remember the day clearly. I was at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery and Tom Jaine had just beaten me to buying a beautiful tripiére at the bring & buy stand. We started talking about offal and I told him I was keen to write a book about it. Tom thought it was a great idea but I didn’t really do much about it until quite some time later when I got a call from my then agent to say she had a publisher wanting a book on offal and Tom, who she had approached to write it, said she should speak to me. Read more >