Category Archives: Cooking
Jet lag? Pfft! Wait ’til palate lag gets you!
At 3pm on Friday 16 September, Maggie and I boarded a train in the French city of Rouen, to commence our return journey to Melbourne. 32 hours later, at 7am Melbourne-time on Sunday the 18th, we wrangled our luggage and … Continue reading
Orange cake with low degree of difficulty
You could think of this cake as being no more difficult than performing a single somersault off the 1m springboard, compared to the Middle Eastern orange cake requiring you to make a giddying dive, with all the bells and whistles, … Continue reading
In-digest: fortnight ending 17 July 2016
In the southern half of Australia, we are experiencing our most severe winter for several years, with plenty of rain, strong winds and low temperatures. So, while our Weber Q sits idly outdoors, Maggie and I have retreated to a … Continue reading
French fish frolic
Our latest foray into the recipes from Mastering the art of French cooking took us into unfamiliar territory – poached fish. Not that I’ve never eaten fish that has been poached, I’ve just never thought to try it at home. And … Continue reading
Election Night triumph for novice Pizza Party candidate
Here in Australia, we’ve just had an election for our national parliament. Despite my best efforts – one vote in each of the two assemblies – it became clear yesterday that the incumbent conservative government has been returned, albeit with … Continue reading
Dietary dialects: the English languages of cooking
George Bernard Shaw – critic, playwright and practising pedant – once wrote that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language”. He could well have had cooking terminology in mind. Add Australian English into the stock-pot and … Continue reading
A very special cake
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was planning to make a ‘Middle Eastern’ orange cake. It goes by this name because this type of cake was brought to the attention of a wide audience in 1968, with … Continue reading
Mastering the art of Julia Child’s boeuf bourguignon
I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of words have been written about the recipe for ‘boeuf bourguignon’ in Mastering the art of French cooking: many hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines; cross-references or modified versions in numerous subsequent cookbooks; … Continue reading
Menu-ready index a recipe for excess?
I established this blog site about six years ago by copying & pasting a small collection of posts that I had written on a previous site which, vexingly, had a dysfunctional host. Most of those posts have been superseded, then … Continue reading
I’m puffing, but filling up-beet
We buy either spinach or silver beet about twice each month. We also grow it at home from time to time, although we usually struggle to keep it out of the reach of marauding possums! I have cooked with these … Continue reading
Rick and Maggie's food and travel adventures 