Lunch brunch snack recipe – easy, fast and delicious
This ham, cheese and tomato brunch snack was ridiculously easy to make. Five star comfort food. The secret of course is putting grated cheese and tomatoes under the ham as well as on top. This gives a glutinous squish that perfectly counterbalances the crisp underside of the toast. I really enjoy making savoury snacks and came up with the cheese under the ham idea this morning whilst I was lying in bed thinking about brunch. Perhaps I need to explain a little more about why we eat brunch everyday. It’s an important meal – we eat just that...
read moreEggy bread and cheese toasties recipe
Reading a review of a biography of Eva Braun at the weekend, I discovered that I have something in common with Hitler. He rarely got up before midday. Since developing CFS a couple of years ago, I tend to spend my mornings in bed. Propped up with my laptop and the Min Pins I do a bit of reading, writing and planning. The latter is generally not plotting world domination but rather what I’m going to prepare for brunch. This morning it was going to be toasted chicken club sandwiches until D confessed that he had picked the carcass...
read moreSimple baked eggs recipe. Halogen oven recipes.
When I lived at home with my mum, we always ate lunch – main course and pud. Supper was an ad hoc affair – we could have whatever we liked that from the bounty of the fridge and larder as long as we prepared it ourselves. Quite canny of my mum as she could put her feet up and enjoy the evening without having to cook a proper meal. One of my favourite supper snacks were baked eggs. Delicious and dead easy to make. If I dallied up in my room they were quick to prepare. We’d eat our supper on trays balanced on old coffin stools (don’t...
read moreRevisiting oven baked cheese toasties
I was going to write about Darina Allen’s toasties and when I looked the recipe up on the Internet I discovered that I’d written about them before. On Friday, faced with two crusts of bread, a lump of cheese and two bantam eggs I made them again using Andrew this time. They were scrummy. If you are going down the Andrew route put the toasties on the metal tray on the lowest rack and grill for 12-15 mins at 200c. Just enough time to have a shower and dress before brunch! And of course, cheese on toast is the perfect excuse to tuck...
read moreHalogen oven recipes: Making brunch with Andrew
“What do you think of breakfast?” “It’s not nearly as good as yesterday. Are they the same sausages? They taste cheap.” We’ve had Andrew around for a few weeks now. He always makes us weekend brunch with delicious results. This morning he was busy defrosting a chicken so I had to use the conventional grill (broiler) on our old oven to prepare the sausages and homemade bacon. It was a palaver – I had to keep on pulling out the grill tray to turn the sausages – in Andrew you can see what’s going on in the giant glass bowl,...
read moreAnother deluxe cheese on toast recipe
Last night Danny went out for a meal with his brother Mike. “You can have your cheese on toast thing.” Danny thinks of this as a snack but it was a staple supper with me for years. Last night I supplemented the cucumber with thinly sliced raw courgette and used a mild goat’s cheddar. The result was a superb combination of flavours. The trick to this delicious light dish is to grill the layered toast very gently for about 20 minutes until the cheese layer is just melting. Its perfect partner is an ice cold beer. Deluxe cheese on toast...
read moreSummer Crudités salad with toasted cashews and lemony dressing recipe
When I was a teenager my mother often took me and my sister to Paris for a month. It was always in August when a lot of Parisians are away from the city. Quite a few shops and restaurants were closed but the art galleries and the big shops were open and we generally found somewhere good to eat lunch. It was in one of those little left bank restaurants that I discovered the delight of Crudités – a plate of raw vegetables and aioli mayonnaise for dipping. The diffused light of the restaurant and clean tastes of the dish contrasted with...
read moreBest budget recipes for 50% or less: Warm chicken liver salad with chicory and pears
These are a collection of recipes inspired by cut price, soon to be out of date, supermarket food. I have discovered that this sort of shopping has made my cooking a lot more inventive and it’s really satisfying to create something delicious out of ingredients that would otherwise be destined for landfill. Many years ago I was very keen on a tall dark stranger that moved up to live with his sister in the vicinity. He invited me to lunch and made a wonderful warm chicken liver salad. I was so goofy and overawed that I was shy and...
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