We could argue until the cows come home as to how to cook the perfect carbonara; cream, mushrooms, onion, garlic and various other things are frequently found in 'Britalian' versions of this classic. I'm a purist, so for an actual proper spaghetti carbonara you would only find me using spaghetti, pancetta, eggs, a bit of butter and lots and lots of cheese. But, this would amount to approximately 900 calories of indulgence and that is not what I am about at the moment. So, her

Nestling between various bits of Heath, The Spaniard's Inn is a beautiful contender for one of London's oldest pubs. Rumour has it that Keats wrote Ode to a Nightingale whilst sitting in the beer garden and it has various other literary accomplishments under its belt, firmly marking it as a historic heavyweight of the North London pub scene. We don't live far and as a result, can be found at The Spaniard embarrassingly frequently, either dog watching in the pretty garden (com

Duck is one of my favourite meats, but its one that Rich isn't that fussed about so I wanted to make something really tasty to try and get him a bit more excited about it. Tricky, when I'm trying to keep the calories down but I think this recipe helped a bit. I had a look on the Gressingham website for inspiration, and found this which worked really well aside from the fact I was distracted by the baby's bedtime and left my duck in the oven a touch too long but at least the s

Recently becoming an Auntie again thanks to this little one meant I found myself in East London, which is actually my old stomping ground. To be precise, I was in Blackwall which is a relatively new little area (previously some industrial wasteland, now block upon block of high rises) about 5 minutes from Canary Wharf. I lived near here for six years and sometime during that period Il Bianco popped up; I subsequently ate there about twice a week, so I'm pretty familiar with t

You guessed it, I'm banging on about cauliflower again. My Pinterest feed is littered with recipes for cauliflower 'risottos', 'pizza bases' and all sorts of weird and wonderful things, and the world and his wife seem to be getting on the bandwagon, so thought I'd give it a try. I was hugely sceptical as to how a virtually carb free vegetable could resemble anything like a delicious bowl of risotto, but I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. The trick is trying to recreate

Another weekend, another excuse to drink prosecco all day and call it brunching. This time we tried something a bit different and went to Flesh and Buns, an outpost of Soho's ramen based Bone Daddies, serving what Jay Rayner has called 'Asian junk food' and he is right; typical Japanese this is not. Situated off Seven Dials, Flesh and Buns is a basement filled with glossy red tones, dark wood and the standard industrial style lighting, completely removing any concept of time

My freezer has decided to pack up, which is the only reason I am eating something so indulgent and luxurious as scallops for a midweek meal, but you could do this with any other protein really - the key to this one is the courgetti. Courgetti is literally just courgette in the shape of tagliatelle, or linguini if you have more patience and better knife skills than me. Its a great cheat way of still being able to enjoy pasta style dishes but on almost no calories and is super