Side Dish

Orzotto!

Uncooked Orzo Pasta

I love risotto but sometimes I do not have the time, patience, or maybe the inclination to commit to the neediness required to make a good risotto. A nice swap is a dish I call Orzotto.  It is Orzo pasta cooked in the manner of a risotto.  The joy is that it requires very little …

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Spaghetti grows on trees

Spaghetti squash with sun-dried tomato dressing

On April the 1st 1957, the BBC broadcast a 3 minute segment on the bumper spaghetti harvest in Southern Switzerland. As you will have noted from the date, it was an April Fool’s Hoax and it has been recognised as the largest and most successful hoax ever carried out on television. So much so, that …

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It’s Pumpkin Time – Stuffed Mini Pumpkins

Sweet Dumpling Mini Pumpkins

At this time of year, throughout the US, there are pumpkins for sale everywhere. Outside supermarkets, at stalls at the side of the road, outside garden centres and on the lawns outside churches. They come in all shapes and sizes from the very small, to the one weighing well over 50lbs, and they are all …

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Tip-top Tapenade

Tapenade Ingredients

Though tapenade is best know as a dish from Provence, France, there exists very similar olive pastes throughout the Mediterranean. The word ‘tapenade’ hides a history in one of its ingredients, capers. In Provence, the caper plant is called ‘tapenei’, and capers used to be stored in vessels filled with olive oil. The capers were …

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Save Money and Marinate your own Olives

Simple bowl of marinated olives

The mountains of glistening olives that you see in supermarket deli bars sure look tempting and they are hard to resist, but they can make quite a dent in your wallet. With a couple of ingredients, you can make your own at home, for a fraction of the cost and enjoy this little treat more …

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