This weekend we flew to Edinburgh for our friends' wedding. We left our house at 7.15am and were enconsed in the lovely Hotel du Vin by 11.15am - amazingly quick and about half the price of the train. I've never been to Scotland before, which is fairly shameful, so wanted to make the most of it and slowly eat my way around the city and it made sense to start with an early lunch to line our stomachs before all the wedding fizz. I started with the oysters tempura in the shot ab

The Woodstock Kushiyaki is a new opening just off the South side of Oxford Street and a very welcome one it is too. There is hardly anywhere decent to eat or drink around there, and indeed the Woodstock is flanked by a terrifying Angus Steak House (read this great piece about Hawksmoor exec chef eating at one) and a Spaghetti House. One of my friends once got taken on a date to a Spaghetti House; I think we can guess how that one turned out. The idea behind the Woodstock, I'm

I'm not a sweet person (in any sense of the word!) but if there's one thing I like then it's a seasonal bake, and hot cross buns are very much up there after my weakness for mince pies. After visiting The Bread Shop (St John's Wood and Brent Cross) and SJW's Maison Blanc to no hot cross bun avail, I tried some of the best supermarket versions for you: here is the verdict. 4th - Tesco Finest Apple & Cinnamon Hot Cross Buns £1.50 for four (bottom left) In the interest of fairne

Friday deserves a cocktail, so this is the first of a new series of regular posts to make sure no-one forgets Cocktail O'Clock. The nice people at Appletiser sent me some of their new flavour to try, Apple & Blackcurrant, and yes sure it's a perfectly delicious drink to have if you're on the wagon or taking it a bit easy but it's a lot better with the addition of gin. I made this one up with the current contents of my fridge and drinks cabinet, give it a go and see what you t

When my friend Julia and I went to New York a couple of years ago, we went on something of a culinary mission. We ate at the famous Brooklyn pizzeria Grimaldi's, visited the Chelsea Food Market, ate an amazing pig head sandwich, did the duck shepherd's pie at Balthazar and generally swanned about on each and every rooftop bar we could find brunching. One of the things I tried there and loved was grits. A favourite of the deep South, grits are a staple breakfast food of ground

It's almost a week after I finished my three day juice fast now; I wanted to give myself time to think, to properly process the experience and also to allow the results to show in full. I went into the juice fast wanting to shift a tiny bit of weight and just feel a bit healthier and better in myself after three weeks of enjoying myself. It's worth saying that I am fanatically healthy anyway in my life around 90% of the time, and I genuinely like being this way, so those thre

In honour of #meatfreeweek, I thought I'd pop this little salad on today. If you're eschewing all meat and fish products then the overall calorie content of a dish tends to go down (this is not a hard and fast rule!), so you can often afford to add some high fat ingredients instead. On this occasion, I used some nice crumbly goat's cheese for protein, and crushed up about five or six walnuts for ooomph. The star of the show though is the homemade aioli, which is a piece of ca

Seafood is a big passion of mine, which I think became pretty clear in my post on Soho's Rex and Mariano. I love what they do there, so when a friend came over from Bangkok and wanted to eat somewhere great in London, I took him there, confident in my choice. We ate the red prawns that everyone quite rightly goes on about: He was unimpressed. I know. Apparently living in Thailand for years with constant access to gigantic prawns for very little money will do that to a person

I was lucky enough to spend three beautiful weeks in Thailand recently, staying in Bangkok, Phuket and Krabi, and unsurprisingly ate such great food there that I have got lots to share with you. Thai flavours and cooking is not something that comes naturally to me, but the dishes I ate were so inspiring that I'm definitely going to have to make more of an effort with Thai cuisine. Here's a snippet of some of the highlights... First up: the holy coconut... I LOVE coconut. Coco

Finally I'm on the home stretch and I find that day three is the easiest of them all. I've got into the swing of fasting and no longer expect to eat food at traditional mealtimes, instead find myself other things to do as a means of distraction. Hot water and lemon is my new favourite way to start the day and now even my prized black coffee feels too 'toxic' to drink first thing. I easily wait for my 11am smoothie and actually almost forget to drink my 1pm Protein offering -