Category: Lifestyle

Pets come with some powerful health benefits. Here’s how caring for an animal can help relieve depression and anxiety, lower stress levels, and even improve your heart health.   The benefits of pets Most pet owners are clear about the immediate joys that come with sharing their lives with companion animals. However, many of us […]

The stretch of North Street that Wen’s calls home, just up from where arterial routes snake around the city centre, is not one of Leeds’s loveliest. Although there are other destinations here – the much-admired Reliance, the idiosyncratic Swine That Dines – it still feels like it’s competing with the traffic. Even so, when my […]

Ithink I have found my calling in life. I love to make dishes that are typically savoury and transform them into sweet, glorious delicacies. Here’s a banger of an example: apple pie tacos. They’re super-easy and make for the perfect sharing food. Apple pie tacosPrep 30 minCook 30 minMakes 14 For the filling5 granny smith […]

Serves 4haddock fillets 4 x 170gsalt and freshly ground black pepperplain flour 50g For the batterlager 330mlself-raising flour 160gcayenne a pinchsoy sauce a dashsalt and ground white pepper For the minted mushy peasunsalted butter 50gonion 1 small, finely choppedpeas 500g, shelled or frozenvegetable stock 100mlmint ½ small bunchsalt and freshly ground black pepper For the […]

Unpacking my shopping basket, the kitchen table looks like a Dutch still life. There are late, locally grown tomatoes; the last of the gold and ruby plums; and long, pink-skinned onions. The autumn raspberries are with us now and yet there are still some fat cucumbers, small beetroots and herbs from the garden. For someone […]

Aromantic mini-break in Cheshunt is rarely included in elegant broadsheet “Tips to Save your Relationship” articles, because people are very shallow. Paris or Lisbon, they always say, as if two, maybe three days just off the A10 would not bring back the magic, too. Well, those people don’t deserve Birch, a mind-bendingly ambitious project that’s […]

Possibly it is a memory of a Curly Wurly which, like all childhood sweets, replays golden in my mind, but my search for the perfect chewy caramel never ends. The important thing is the consistency. It must have some resistance – we’re not talking about free-flowing caramel, like butter out of a hot chicken kiev […]

There are often days when I want something tasty with minimal fuss. Traybakes give me that option, not least at the moment, in the midst of moving house during a global pandemic. Oven roasting has many advantages, from concentrating the flavours in tomatoes to bringing out new ones in root vegetables such as carrots and […]