Cooking with Booze: The Blog

Dominik Diamond gave away some copies of Cooking With Booze on Talk 107fm last week - check the MP3 for his enthusiastic response to some of the recipes - and his interesting take on quiz questions…

[MP3]

Just found out about this: ITV’s This Morning - that show with Phillip Schofield and Fern Britton that my deaf landlady watches at full volume every morning - is running a competition to win copies of CWB! Woo, and indeed, hoo.

Head over to the This Morning site to enter the contest - and watch out, the questions are fiendishly hard!

The above is mine and Ed’s aborted attempt to take on the Wychwood Pumpkin Challenge (I love Wychwood) by buying a load of gnarled pumpkins and winter squashes and attempting to stitch them into some kind of freakish über-lantern. As you can see, curry interrupted (from the wonderful Salt N Pepper), followed by our own lack of imagination and fatigue brought on by the consumption of a couple several a healthy amount of Hobgoblin and Circle Master. We’ll try again next year.

Anyway, the effort provided plenty of raw materials for a week of pumpkin curry and squash soups.

Also, some Friday shout outs to Eat Drink Live, who tackled the Cider Cupcakes this week with their own crumbly addition, Kitchen Goddess, who have CWB in their ‘Books We Soooo Love’ section this week, and to Russell Davies, who was kind enough to send us props.

Russell’s own book, Egg, Bacon, Chips and Beans, based on the blog of the same name, would make a great companion volume to CWB this festive season - as Russell’s agent put it so succinctly: “it’s the ideal Christmas gift for the man in your life you don’t know very well.”

UPDATE: As Ed’s just reminded me, I was making pumpkin soup at the same time as this, which we ate the next day. Quick recipe: roast pumpkin chunks for half an hour, cook a couple of handfuls of toms down a bit in a pan, add roasted pumpkin, cover with stock, season, mush and heat through.

I wrote an article for the 4food website which has just gone live. I talk about making wine in the South of France, cooking for a crowd, and surviving the aftermath.

Check it out.

If you’re interested in the wine harvest, I wrote a slightly less news-y piece about it a while ago: the Wine Diaries. There’s a car crash, a lot of talk about grapes, blood and fertility, and some sex. Probably not for the faint-hearted.