Celebrating seasonal, homegrown, and wild food
Autumn is a beautiful season full of colour and feelings of warmth as the days grow shorter and the weather cools down. One of my favourite places to experience the essence of autumn is in the New Forest in Hampshire which, as you can imagine, is just stunning at this time of year. We spent [...]
Today is the last day of my Instagram virtual holiday with a French theme, and is there anything more quintessentially French than the madeleine? These tiny, shell-shaped cakes with their plump little bellies are the perfect accompaniment to a cup of coffee or tea. The inspiration for this recipe was the combination of blackberry and [...]
This week on Instagram I'm doing a virtual holiday where each day I'm sharing a memory of the time I've been lucky enough to spend in the Loire region of France over the years accompanied by a suggestion or prompt that people can use to join in. I’ve been thinking recently about how the current [...]
Rosebay willowherb is a perennial native to the UK that flourishes in disturbed soils. It has become widespread perhaps owing to the two World Wars as large areas of land were damaged or burned (which explains one of it's common names "Bombweed"), allowing it to colonise much larger areas than it had previously. Its grand [...]
If you've been following along with this blog for a little while now, you probably know that we got our allotment just over a year ago. However, for years before that I've been growing what I can in our tiny London gardens in our various flats. One of the things I've managed to grow consistently [...]
Every summer, I make a batch of elderflower cordial and it has become a bit of a lovely summer tradition in our household. The delicate syrup diluted in some refreshing soda water really makes a summer day. Homemade elderflower cordial has become quite popular over the past few years during the elderflower season, and this [...]
Each time I start writing a new blog post, I'm always tempted to say that the current season is my favourite one, or that it's all about this ingredient or another. However, if I did that it would soon be very clear that all of the seasons are my favourite, and that within each one [...]
May (well towards the end of April until the start of June) is all about asparagus in the UK. This crunchy, tender, delicious veg has such a short season which makes it all the more exciting to many of us Brits alongside our propensity to lose our minds over Jersey royals and, more recently, wild [...]
You know you're well into the spring season when the lilacs start to bloom. Shrubs put on huge shows of beautiful flower clusters with an intoxicating floral scent that infuses the air. Like most spring blooms, their show is short-lived and only lasts a couple of weeks, and if you bring the cut flowers into [...]
Spring is well and truly here now (in fact you’d be forgiven for saying it was summer already with the +20degree weather we’re getting!) and the wild garlic is out in full force across the country. It seemed to appear quite early this year, particularly in the south, but April is pretty much always the [...]
Plot & Lane 