Messing with Medlars

I blogged about this strange, old-fashioned fruit, often known as the dog’s butt fruit, not so long ago. Time to revisit for some cooking with them.
Chris and I had harvested a small bag of medlars on one of our bike rides about ten days ago. Half of these were well bletted i.e. soft and mushy, [...]

Quincessentially French

Quinces, coings, are a very French thing. In Creuse, every country garden has at least one quince tree and quince jelly, gelée aux coings, is turned out with great enthusiasm by many people every year. On our daily bike rides, we’ve picked up a few. Here’s a  monster we got the other day. I reckon [...]

Books and Cooking Cupcakes

First up, great excitement on the book front. Do please give Books Are Cool a quick look. You’ll see that I’ve published a free book on Smashwords, now that I’ve finally got to grips with the formatting required to upload your material to the Meatgrinder that converts it.  So grab yourself a copy of Oh [...]

Cherry nice

The cherry trees are overloaded with fruit this year. It’s quite a surprise given that it was such a long, cold winter. But I’m delighted – I love cherries.
Caitlin made a gorgeous cherry clafoutis for us a few days ago. Clafoutis originated in Limousin, our part of France, sometime in the mid nineteenth century. The [...]