chilli-lime butter

chilli-lime compound butter

Compound butters are a brilliant and easy way to inject a bit of flavour into your food with minimal effort, which frankly is my favourite type of cooking. Smother chargrilled corn-on-the-cob or roasted pumpkin with a generous slice of flavoured butter.

labneh cheese balls

From left to right : labneh rolled in sumac, in crushed nuts (a mixture of toasted sesame seeds and peanuts), and in Aleppo pepper.

Have you ever thought about making your own cheese, but worried that you don't have the right gear; that it's too difficult or technical?

a cooling summer courgette soup

a cooling summer courgette soup

A cooling summer soup is a welcome way to use up a summer glut of courgettes. This vegetable's beautiful delicate flavour is perfect in a chilled soup and I thought would be a really good way of cooling down on a baking hot day. I've read somewhere that you can cool yourself down by not just drinking cool drinks but eating cold food. I think this may be right - well it certainly worked for me!

mouthwatering velvet chicken and summer vegetable stir fry

velvet chicken

If you have ever wondered why the stir-fried chicken at your local Chinese restaurant is so much more moist and succulent than the version you make at home, the chances are that there is a really simple reason. It's a Chinese cooking technique beautifully known as "velveting".

a quick midweek curry: malaysian-style chicken curry

easy Malaysian-style chicken curry

This Malaysian-style curry is wonderfully scented, quite hot, and a little creamy. It is the perfect way to use up any leftover chicken from Sunday's roast.

I like to make my own curry spice mixes, but there are some really good ones out there. If you are looking for a Malay spice mix, then you really need a sweet curry blend that includes aniseed flavours, including star anise and fennel - this is what sets a Malaysian curry apart from an Indian one.

roasted parsnips with gingerbread magic cookie dust!

roasted parsnips with magic cookie dust!
(or gingerbread crumbs)

I wasn't kidding when I said I had found all sorts of uses for my magic cookie dust (or the ginger biscuit crumbs I had whizzed up after almost burning a load of ginger biscuits).

Some years ago at a restaurant in New York whose name I have forgotten, our meal came with a few roasted parsnips sprinkled with gingerbread crumbs. The parsnips were fabulous - not surprising since they have a total affinity for spices such as nutmeg and ginger.

how to fix a baking disaster - make magic cookie dust!

Magic cookie dust

Another day, another baking disaster. Welcome to my world.

These days I don't panic, although there is usually quite a lot of swearing involved and occasionally the quaffing of cooking sherry, to aid the recovery process. But usually I don't panic too much. 

I had made the dough for some spicy ginger biscuits. The dough was chilling and I had just put my oven on to pre-heat. My wits were wondering again; although to be fair, I think I should be blaming Eddie Mair, the Radio 4 journalist. He has an awful lot to answer for.

how to fix a baking disaster: bread and butter pudding

bread and butter pudding

In the scheme of things, flooding, war, hurricanes or volcanic eruptions, my baking misfortune is hardly a disaster. But in the sense that things in my kitchen took a decided turn for the worse, it was a definite catastrophe!

I had found a recipe for a yeasted fruit loaf that I thought might be seasonally festive. It was based on a recipe found in an unpublished 18th century manuscript and was crammed full of dried fruit and spices. So far, so good. I did think that it was more a case of a lot of fruit held together by a little sweet dough, but hey ho.

tips: parmesan or pecorino rinds

slow-cooked Parmesan rind
for added flavour

Continuing with top tips and fabulous facts blog posts, here's a tip and quite a good one at that and it involves old cheese. Not any old cheese and certainly not beautifully aged cheese. No, what you are looking for is that dog end of Parmesan or my favourite Pecorino rind, (or perhaps Manchego or other very hard cheese). I am talking about the last bit of rind, where the cheese has been so far grated that to grate any more would lose the skin on your knuckles.

The rules of béchamel - good advice for a perfect sauce every time!

a good cheese sauce

If the wisest film advice on classic blunders came from The Princess Bride, "Never get involved in a land war in Asia and never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line . . . ha, ha, ha, haaaaaaaa (thud)," then the best food advice was from my friend Katy, who 20 odd years ago when we were impoverished students in Yorkshire cooking over an ancient Baby Belling, taught me how to make a white sauce with the words "and when it starts to look like honeycomb then you're ready to add the milk . . . " The best advice I have ever had in making a perfect white sauce, advice that has never failed me!

perfect fluffy mashed potato

perfect mash
(Sainsbury's Heritage potatoes)

Do you really need me to give you a recipe for perfect mashed potato? Perhaps not, but since I have the photo, I thought I would lay out to you the key to a gloriously fluffy, buttery mash.

Many of us are scarred by the horror of school dinner mash - watery, lumpy and a peculiar grey colour, slopped on the plate using an ice-cream scoop. For years I thought I didn't much like mashed potato, until I had the real thing and realised that something so simple can be most sublime.

the idiot's guide to making mayonnaise

homemade mayonnaise

I have mentioned before that I think that every cook should have at least one good sauce in their repertoire. Actually they should have more than one - enough to create the building blocks for other sauces. One of the best of these is mayonnaise.

an italian-style bread salad: panzanella

panzanella (Italian bread salad)

I was in a hurry and needed to throw together a quick lunch for two and the cupboard was almost bare. Almost bare, but not quite. Even when I am down to the basics and a few crumbs, I will always have a chunk of bread (since I bake about twice a week), a heap of tomatoes (whether fresh, tinned or dried) and a few jars of olives. This is life in the Kelly household; you can never go hungry.

brined roast chicken

alien life forms! (Ok, Yorkshire puds!)

Have you ever walked into your kitchen and felt a slight Twilight Zone moment? (And cue the music . . . ) Da na, na na. Na na, na na . . . I was cooking Sunday lunch and returned to the kitchen with a distinct sense of unease. Something wasn't quite right but I wasn't sure what it was. Nothing was on fire. There was no smell of burning. But I just had a sense that something was up, a prickling sense of unease . . . 

I opened the oven door and was confronted with something out of a 1950s sci fi movie . . . my Yorkshire puddings had evolved into some kind of alien life form and were bidding to escape in a determined attempt at world domination! Hey ho, that's the price you pay for using strong bread flour; they were not the perfection of flying saucers but they were rather splendid nonetheless, if a little misshapen!

tip: tinned tomatoes

tinned tomatoes

Continuing with top tips and fabulous facts blog posts, I have discovered a new tip, which I have only ever seen in one cookbook. This is the sort of tip that a friend might mention to you in passing, to which you guffaw, a little unbelieving.

Where did I see it? Jocasta Innes' The Pauper's Cookbook, actually my mother's copy from about 1976. Does it work? Yes it does. Get to the point, Kelly. What is the wretched tip? (I suspect the clue is in the picture).

boum-boum sausages

boum-boum sausages with onion jam

It is said that to be truly happy, you should take pleasure in the small things in life. There is no doubt that I am really enjoying the process of emptying my freezer since I keep finding little frozen nuggets of unexpected pleasure.

A small plastic box contained six small patties of . . . who knew what? They looked suspiciously like my fish cakes, but lacked any fishy smell. On defrosting it was quickly apparent that they contained breadcrumbs and some peculiarly dark flecks of something that I couldn't identify. I was baffled; I had no memory of making them. (Note to self - remember to label everything with smudge-proof, indelible ink.)

tips: 4 interesting things to do with vinegar

I have recently been having a bit of an autumn clean up - cleaning my windows with a final spritz of vinegar which makes windows seem to glow and stops them looking streaky.

I was curious about what other household uses vinegar might have, not just in the kitchen and I was able to find a whole plethora. In fact I found so many that I think there might be a book in it! (I suspect it has been done before!)

when life gives you lemons . . . make lemons awesome!

heathcliffe's mead

Let me introduce my guest blogger, Heathcliffe's, first post. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. (Yay, Heath!)

This week I've made mead and a fridge.

See, the big problem here is that I've just moved into a new flat and, right now, I have no appliances and no money left. I have an Argos catalogue shining out from my lone bookshelf like a beacon of all my life could be, but my bank account says no. So I figure a plan is in order.

So when life gives you lemons . . . let's make lemons awesome.

tip: making breadcrumbs

a simple loaf of white bread

I suppose I am lucky that I've always got a loaf "on the go". I make my own bread and if a loaf doesn't turn out so well then it is sacrificed to the altar of thrift. When life gives you a bread disaster, you make breadcrumbs! 

tips for lemons . . .

lovely lemons!

I mentioned in a previous blog posting that I wanted to run an irregular feature on kitchen tips; the sort of things I have learned over the past 20 years that don't always get mentioned in cookbooks - such as how you can get more juice from a lemon. 

Well there's a lot more where that came from, so when life gives you lemons, there are so many things you can use them for, and not just in the kitchen.