Galette is pretty much the simplest French tart you can make. It’s just a flat sheet of pastry with a filling tumbled in the middle and the edges folded over. It can be sweet, filled with anything from apples or blackberries to figs or plums. Or it can be savoury, like this onion and tapenade galette. The inspiration for this [...]
Provençal tomato salad – it’s not actually a ‘real’ Provençal dish, not in the way that pissaladière, aïoli and ratatouille are. But for me this recipe encapsulates the essence of southern France. Ripe-red firm tomatoes, bursting with sunshine. Pungent, juicy rose garlic. Anchovies, salty, rich and deep. It makes me think of rolling purple fields, cicada song at midday, and [...]
Baby marrow (aka courgette/zucchini) spaghetti... It’s the food equivalent of a bottle blonde with saline implants – not the real thing. But as many a Hollywood starlet has proven, done well, fake can be fabulous. We revere carbs here at M&M and pasta made of anything other than wheat and egg is unthinkable. But I get that there are those [...]
Old recipes, in case you didn’t get the memo, are the bomb. While I still haven’t really gotten my head around shrimp cocktail (iceberg lettuce and thousand island dressing may have scarred me for life), I am falling in love all over again with things like Beef Wellington, Crepes Suzettes and one of my all-time favourite retro nibbles, Caesar salad. [...]
Men just don’t get it. A woman’s almost pathological need to taste what’s on everybody else’s plate that is. I guess that’s why I love the tapas and antipasto way of eating. A bite of this, a bit of that. Grab a huge platter. Olives, salami, ripe red cherry tomatoes, bottled artichokes all go on it along with a [...]