Madame Guillotine

One of the things that I love most about Bristol is its fine tradition of independent shops, restaurants and retailers. In fact the people of this fab city can get quite militant about maintaining independence on their local streets, which I think is pretty great.

Along with Pieminister, which I have visited in the past, I think that the Thali Cafe chain is one of the jewels in the Bristolian Crown of FOOD. There are four branches of the Thali Cafe in Bristol but their reach is actually much wider as, like Pieminister, they are staples on the British festival scene too so people from all over the country have sampled their thalis and aromatic sweet chai tea while sitting in a field at some point. Here in Bristol we’re lucky enough to be able to either visit one of their gorgeously bright and colourful restaurants or get a takeaway in one of their iconic tiffins.

For the uninitiated, a tiffin is an exciting metal Indian packed lunch container that the spouses of Indian workers pack with fabulous curries and rice – the metal keeping the meal warm for several hours. Customers of the Thali Cafe can buy a tiffin from them and then for about £8 get it refilled with three curries and enough rice for two. I send my husband out about once a week to the Totterdown branch with ours (which you can see at the top of this post!) to get our curry and I absolutely love it because a. it’s kind of fun, b. it’s cheaporama and c. it always makes me feel pretty healthy. Oh and d. it’s delicious.

The Thali Cafe team were kind enough last week to offer me a chance to try out their new lunchtime menu and so I very gladly trotted off on a gorgeous sunny day to their Easton branch to give it a whirl. I hadn’t been to Easton very often before but fell a bit in love as it is such a vibrant and diverse area, reminiscent of my beloved Spitalfields. It was the perfect day to laze in a beautiful hot pink Bollywood inspired restaurant and watch the world go by outside the wide windows.

To start we had poppadoms and a selection of interesting chutneys – tomato and tamarind (my favourite and seriously yummy, like a pungently spicy jam); yoghurt and ginger; mango, chilli and lime and mint raita. There was also salad and a selection of samosa, bonda and pakoras, all of which were fantastically tasty. To drink we had their own homemade lime drink (delicious!) and ginger beer (also delicious!).

After this our main courses arrived – as usual I picked a muttar paneer, which arrived with pilau rice and a large helping of salad while my husband had a Mogul chicken curry and the Three Year Old had a special fish and chips, which is described as ‘Masala fried fish with Bombay potato chips’.

My curry was delectable – creamy and not too spicy with plenty of paneer. I really love how at the Thali Cafe, salad is never just a mere garnish but an integral, delicious and important part of every meal.

We were intrigued by the Three Year Old’s Indian fish and chips, which is one of two child options on the menu, the other being a scaled down version of the usual adult thali with rice, lentil dhal and a choice of either fish, chicken or pakora. The fish and chips arrived on a traditional sectioned thali plate and comprised salad, sliced banana (which was eaten first as he is a FIEND for bananas), gorgeously spicy potato slices and what I am told was a perfect crispy but not too oily spicy battered fish.

I felt absolutely STUFFED after all this – it’s described as a ‘light lunch’ but thanks to a combination of scrumptuous, fresh tasting Indian food and all the sunshine I was starting to think longingly about going home for a really refreshing snooze on the sofa. However, we rallied a bit and ordered a kulfi to share between us. George, who looked after us, recommended the ‘choc-praline cluster’ and so we duly ordered one.

Oh my. Words cannot describe the heavenly deliciousness of this chocolate and praline kulfi, which becomingly arrived, bedecked with toasted coconut, in a glass jar. My husband, the lucky sod, doesn’t really have much of a sweet tooth but there was definite spoon clashing going on as we worked our way through the ice cream. The biggest fan of all though was, not entirely unexpectedly, the Three Year Old who sat like a plump little bird with his mouth wide open waiting to receive the sweet coconut riddled goodness and even, on occasion, swooped in to try and steal my portions. All in vain!

Anyway, we had the most superb time and will definitely be making a regular habit of visiting for lunch from now on as it was just the most lovely way to spend an afternoon. Thank you so much to George and all at the Thali Cafe for letting me come along! It was superb.

As a bit of a diversion, I have a cookery post for you today! Apologies in advance for the frankly ropey photography – I hastily took photographs with my iPhone before everything was devoured!

We were supposed to go down to Cornwall at the weekend for a pre-Christmas meet up with my husband, Dave’s family but due to various stuff it didn’t happen, alas. I was a bit upset actually as I was really looking forward to visiting the Eden Project Christmas thing again as it involves a walk around the rainforest biome in the dark! We went to the Enchanted Christmas walk at Westonbirt Arboretum instead, but it wasn’t really the same! It was infinitely muddier for a start…

Anyway, thwarted of Cornwall, the plan instead became to have a Christmas lunch somewhere in Bristol which should have been straightforward except that we are vegan and Other People are a bit fussy and there was a lot of fuss about parking and stuff. In the end, I got so fed up with Dave getting upset and the suggestions that we just go to Harvester (I can only assume that anyone who suggests Harvester for a meal has never actually attempted to eat there) that I offered to host the bloody thing myself at our house.

Now, this was a bit brave as I don’t actually rate my culinary skills all that highly despite evidence to the contrary. However, I was emboldened by the fact that I spent my formative years helping my grand mother, a former army wife, cater for huge formal dinner parties, shooting lunches and so on so cooking for large numbers isn’t actually all that terrifying to me. Or at least, it shouldn’t be. Yes, that’s right, I was raised to be at least VAGUELY ladylike. It’s much more fun to forget about all of that though.

After much lugging around of cookery books, Dave and I decided on a menu and off we went to Sainsbury’s to buy STUFF and also many MANY bottles of J20 Glitter Berry drink (it’s a spiced cherry drink with gold shimmery glitter inside!) and Schloer. Dave’s father was paying and no one other than Dave and I seems to drink so I manfully resisted the urge to add a bottle of Hendricks gin and a bottle of Captain Morgan Spiced rum to the trolley. I am very good.

Yesterday passed in a blur of cooking as, like an idiot, I had failed to prep a single thing. Other than cupcakes. Anyway, this is what we had:

Spiced pumpkin and chocolate chip cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. These are SERIOUSLY DELICIOUS. Not being American, I have always been vaguely wary of the whole sweet pumpkin thing but it’s amazing how a bit of sugar and spice transforms a tin of squished pumpkin. Miraculous even.

Chocolate and peppermint cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World, surely the greatest cupcake recipe book ever. These were gorgeous as well, although the icing was way too runny, which is why there is no photographic evidence! It still tasted better than good though!

For the main course, we had:

A courgette and chickpea filo pie from the Pieminister cookbook. This turned out to be a lot spicier than expected but was still very nice! I love cooking with filo as it makes me feel like I am really creative and competent but is actually a doddle to work with.

A pistachio and cranberry roast from the 2011 Jamie Oliver Christmas magazine. This was the hit of the day, I think! It was pretty simple to make – you caramelise some fresh cranberries and put them at the bottom of a loaf tin and then put the rest of the mixture on top. The actual recipe called for a mushroom risotto base to the nut roast, but as Dave loathes mushrooms, I made a sweet potato risotto instead, which worked very well. You can see the recipe online here and I wholeheartedly recommend it if you are catering for vegans and/or vegetarians over Christmas or, indeed, EVER.

All of this was served with new potatoes roasted with olive oil, sprigs of rosemary and slices of lemon (Dave was dubious about adding the lemon but was glad that he trusted my judgement in the end); stuffing, gravy, carrots and home made vegan bread sauce from another Jamie Oliver recipe (torn up bread, soya milk, cloves and some bay leaves) which turned out brilliantly and was seriously delicious.

We bought one of those Christmas puddings with cherries inside from Sainsbury’s (not vegan, alas) and I made a gingerbread and caramelised clementine pudding from the 2011 Jamie Oliver Christmas magazine, which we were all too full to eat but made our kitchen smell like Tudor Christmas while it was baking. I’ll be having that later on with some custard, I think!

And that concludes our vegan Christmas feast! The Jamie Oliver magazine is still in shops here in the UK and is brilliant if you are vegan/vegetarian and like me, enjoy his sort of rustic rough around the edges culinary style. I’d also recommend the vegan cupcake book of JOY – I thought they’d be really difficult to make but actually it’s SO simple and, BONUS, you can eat ALL THE BATTER without being scared of catching weird egg diseases (is that just me?).

(In my next post, just wait and see what my father in law gave me for Christmas! It’s brilliant.)

This is me. The reason for the shark teeth may (or may not) become clear later on…

I’ve been a vegetarian ever since the age of seven thanks to a dislike for the taste, smell and texture of meat and then, a bit later, a genuine distress at the thought of eating animals. This is partially down to the vile and inedible gristle that the nasty little Scottish primary school I went to served up (hey there Oldmeldrum School, I still have nightmares about you!) and which proved too much of a challenge for my painfully sensitive hyperdentic teeth (I had dozens of teeth removed as a child thanks to extra chompers growing through and have stitches right across my top gums where some were cut out – I know, ewww). I don’t know what the correct term for ‘extra teeth’ is and can’t google it as I have a phobia of sharks…

Moving swiftly on! Veganism followed as a natural progression when I was at university and I really did love it – I was thinner, more energetic and also a lot more grumpy and with rather more spots. My love of soured cream with Mexican food did for my blossoming veganism back then but I’ve remained wistful ever since, to the point that my hatred for dairy and longing to become a vegan became impossible to ignore and even my husband suggested that I just give in and do it as after all, there’s even vegan soured cream these days so what’s stopping me?

How times have changed though! When I first attempted veganism as an undergraduate back in the 1990s, there were only a few dedicated ingredients available to me and I could only find one cookbook, which was full of unappealing recipes involving a lot of grains, nuts and pulses. I must be the worst vegan in the world as I actually can’t abide anything more beany than Heinz Baked Beans and pulses terrify me a bit thanks to a slight paranoia about the precise cooking times required to stop kidney beans being poisonous.

Nowadays though, we are spoiled for choice and a whole new and exciting vegan cuisine appears to have burst onto the scene. Back in the 1990s, vegans were considered to be a dour, smelly, preachy and miserable lot with dreads, army surplus combats and more than their fair share of facial hair – nowadays though they are likely to be tattooed, rainbow haired, sassy and in love with cupcakes, music, art and having fun.

It’s amazing and I think that there is no better time to embrace the dairy free lifestyle if that is what you have a yearning to do. In fact, it’s clearly so amazing that my meat loving husband (but not the boys – they can make their own minds up about it later on) has decided to join in! This is great for me as it means I have some moral support and also the benefit of his own rather more methodical approach to these matters – I’ve been obsessing about mayonnaise, sandals and cool American vegan cookbooks (there’s some amazing ones out there, some of which I plan to review on a future post) while he’s been busy emailing all the major UK supermarkets and cross examining them about their attitudes towards food labelling, with Sainsbury’s being the best and Morrison’s being by far the worst. No surprise there then.

We’ve been vegans for three months now and it’s been a really good experience so far. I’ve lost over two stone, despite eating better than I think I have ever done – ably assisted by the fact that Bristol, the city we live in is incredibly switched on to veganism, with a plethora of shops, cafes and restaurants that serve all manner of treats. We even have vegan cupcakes!

The thing about being vegan is that you have to be a bit more adventurous about cooking if you’re going to have any semblance of variety in your diet and at times you will find yourself doing things like having onion bhajis or beans and mash for breakfast (this happened on Friday morning at Camp Bestival). So far, my husband and I have been enjoying burritos, curries (both Indian and Thai), chilli, pasta and all manner of stuff. It’s been a bit exciting actually. I may never entirely get over my dread of beans and pulses but I’m getting there…

How about you? Do I have any vegan readers out there? I’m a bit worried about the fact that I will be a vegan next time I visit Paris – I’ve always been vegetarian during my many visits to the City of Macarons and have found that a mixed experience so this is a bit daunting as cheese, eggs, butter and cream are now all off the menu for me!

We’ve only just got round to uploading the contents of my old phone camera folder after my rather nice husband got me a lovely new iPhone 4 for Christmas and I thought I’d share some pictures with you all as I often feel like I write and write and write but you don’t know me at all!

The picture above is of the Circus in Bath, which is a very stately round square indeed. Um, a round square? You know what I mean – it’d be a Square if it was square but it isn’t, it’s more of a circle, which makes it an um Circle? Anyway, it’s very nice.We’re lucky enough to live quite near to Bath so I get to go there quite regularly – I’m going at the end of this month in fact to visit the Fashion Museum and study some eighteenth century dresses.

This is me. I thought this haircut looked terrible but actually it’s not that bad is it? I don’t know where this photograph was taken – I think it might have been in Giraffe in Bristol, thus the red tinted glooooom. I look a bit WILD EYED don’t I? Sadly, I was probably sober when this was taken.

The Eden Project in the winter dusk.

SNOW. Yes, we’ve mostly all seen it before but I love the eerie almost neon blue of the light in this picture.

Bristol Suspension Bridge.

This is why I have trouble losing weight.

Trafalgar Square on a sunny morning before I ventured into the bowels of the National Gallery to see the Lady Jane Grey exhibition.

Christ Church, Spitalfields. There’s only one thing to be done when in the grip of a merciless GIN hangover – head to Whitechapel…

The Ten Bells, Spitalfields.

A bright corner of Bristol.

A happy young man.

Yo! Sushi, Cabot Circus, Bristol. The tower on the left is mine, the one on the right is Dave’s.

A metro station by the Palais Royale in Paris. This was our view as we ate our supper on our first night there last year.

Vegetarian lunch on the Rue Bac in  Paris. Dave and Felix were at the top of the Eiffel Tower while I ate this.

A Queen’s head that had mysteriously appeared on the side of a dryer in our local laundrette. It’s okay, I don’t live in Eastenders – we have a functioning washing machine but it decided to break so off to the laundrette I went for a very happy hour of reading and crisp eating.

At some point I realised that as I work from home and don’t have to see anyone if I don’t want to, I can go back to my sad youth and have pink hair again.

Well, I like it anyway.

The view from our bedroom window at The Hurst Arvon Foundation centre in Shropshire.

More reasons why I will never be slender – these beauties are from Swinky’s on Park Street in Bristol.

A fake incident room at the Whitechapel II advance screening in Mile End.

Montacute House on my last birthday.

Felix and I.

I think that sums me up quite nicely actually! Even if I missed out the random photos of gin bottles, miniature Marie Antoinettes, boots, sandwiches and curry…

If you’ve been to a festival in the last couple of years then there’s a fair chance that you have encountered the awesome majesty that is Pieminister, who spend the summer months sending their mobile stall up and down the country to cheer up thousands of famished and hungover festival goers with wholesome, delicious pie, mash and gravy.

It was funny though that at Camp Bestival we mostly ate at Pieminister or the Thali Cafe, both of which are stalwarts in the Bristol food scene. We might as well have stayed at home! I feel no shame though as I think that outside London, Bristol has one of the best and most thriving foodie scenes in the country with a rightly famous farmer’s market in the centre of the city and a great array of cafes and restaurants that cater to pretty much every taste.

I always think that we are especially fortunate to have Pieminister here though – people elsewhere in the country have the option of ordering a box of twelve pies from their website but that’s a bit of a pricey way to get a hit of pie goodness, although still considerably less than a ticket to Glastonbury. Here though we have two very fine Pieminister shops as well as spots in local markets where we can give in to our need for pastry cased goodness.

I was lucky enough to visit Pieminister HQ yesterday to meet one of the co-founders, the very charming Jon Simon who was happy to talk about his company, of which he is rightly extremely proud but also food culture in general. It was a fascinating chat.

Pieminister itself was founded in Bristol in 2003 but quickly found a spot in London’s Borough Market before working on spreading the word via their now well known festival spots. At the time that they started out, Jon and his co-founder Tristan were disappointed about the fate of the Great British pie and I think that it is definitely partially down to them that pies have had quite a bit of a resurgence in recent years to become much more interesting and wholesome than the vile sloppy items that can still be found in the bewildering synthetic light of service stations.

As a vegetarian, I thanked Jon for Pieminister’s clear interest in catering in an interesting way for non meat eating fans and for their attention to detail. He admitted that at the outset they weren’t sure that vegetarians would actually be interested in their wares but were clearly swiftly disabused of that notion as if there is one thing we vegetarians like, it is pie. Unless it is made with lard of course.

The luscious goats cheese and sweet potato Heidi pie is a permanent feature on the menu and I can’t, to be honest, imagine the meat pies being nicer. However, yesterday I sampled the vegetarian special pie, a Mexican bean one, telling myself that it was in honour of the Chilean Miners (hurray!). I know, I know that Chile and Mexico aren’t the same thing at all and I’m betraying an almost imperialistic ignorance about foreign countries here, but it was the best I could do.

But oh that Mexican pie. Demolished, it was. So delicious and scrummy with just the right amount of give in the pastry, a perfect hit of chilli and a careful balance of chunky butternut squash and coriander. If you ever get a chance to go to a Pieminister shop and eat on the premises then you really must as the mashed potato is perfection and they are justifiably proud of their (vegetarian!) gravy. Also recommended is going for the extras of a scoop of dried onion and some grated cheese on top. Delicious.

The Mexican Mean Bean pie is a seasonal offering, but luckily for me Pieminister have just introduced a range of mini pies, which were destined for children but work just as well for bigger appetites too! Anyway, they come in three varieties, including Mini Amigo, which is the same as the Mean Bean, only smaller. Excellent!

Now, I am quite a big fan of mushrooms but often feel like I am very much in the minority. They are one of the banes of the average vegetarian’s life though as funnily enough a lot of us don’t like them either! It was interesting to hear that at Pieminister’s pie tastings, mushroom pies tend to be amongst the most umpopular so I asked what other ingredients haven’t worked out as well as planned.

Peanuts, was the reply. Apparently they tried them in a Thai curry type pie and they were really quite horrible so if any of you are thinking of making a Thai Pie (I’m a poet and etc), the Pieminister advice is to leave peanuts out of the equation.

Fish pies are also awkward to work with, which Jon, who is a fan of seafood, seemed really regretful about. I don’t eat fish but think that a one off Pieminister reinterpretation of that Cornish classic, the Star Gazey would be pretty awesome. From an aesthetic point of view, of course.

We had quite a long chat about the changing face of food culture, for want of a better term, in England over the last few decades and where Pieminister and its ilk fit into that. There is a tendency to mock the rather pretentious food of the eighties and the fads for foreign delicacies like ciabatta, quesadillas, goats cheese and gastro pubs but I think it’s rather ace that we as a nation are so adventurous and not adverse from borrowing from other culinary traditions.

Of course, nowadays there seems to be a decided and welcome move in the opposite direction with the slow food movement and so on and a heightened interest in getting back to basics and appreciating a rougher, more traditional and artisan sort of food, which I think that the success of Pieminister fits into perfectly. There is a definite preference for the home made these days and the more lop sided and misshapen our food is, the better we seem to like it.

Pieminister really pride themselves on using local produce in their pies, including cider, as befits a company based in Bristol! Dave tried their Mr Porky Pie yesterday, which has West Country pork, smoked bacon, shallots, apples, leeks, sage and Somerset cider and pronounced it ‘very good’ in a reverent manner.

Jon and I also chatted about a few news articles that I have read recently about food bartering, which has started to become more common in some places. Basically, some pub and restaurant owners are encouraging customers to bring in produce from their gardens and allotments in exchange for either a pint or something from the menu. It works out really nicely for both parties with the owners being able to work with very fresh, organic produce and the growers getting something delicious for their labours! What an excellent idea!

Although Pieminister buy their ingredients in from local growers, they actually do maintain a large allotment for the benefit of the people who work for them, which is really cool, I thought. Jon told me that they had a big summer barbecue a few weeks ago where they cooked their own produce and it sounded wonderful.

So is there a Pieminister near you? Check out their website for a list of restaurants and stockists. My vote is for the vegeterian pies obviously but their meat offerings are very special too. The restaurants are really great, if you can get to one. The Stokes Croft one is their flagship and has a lovely welcoming feel, with an array of wonderful foods on display (not just pies, but also sausage rolls and slabs of caramel slices and flapjacks NOT cupcakes), tile topped tables and food served on lovely enamelled metal plates. I don’t know about you, but I seriously LOVE enamel plates and swear that everything tastes better on them!

While we were there, tucking into our pies and mash, the restaurant started to fill up with customers, all cheerfully queuing up and bantering and chatting to each other about which pie they were planning to have that day while the air filled with the happy clatter of fork against enamel. It was really lovely.

Many thanks to Jon and Romany of Pieminister for meeting up with me and for being so lovely and helpful and, of course, for the pies!

I think I have written ‘pie’ so often in this post that the word has now ceased to have any meaning.

People who append ‘Surprise’ at the end of meal names really irk me. It’s so twee and annoying and instead of making me want to eat whatever rancid leftovers have been placed before me, it just makes me want to poke it half heartedly with my fork, slap the cook upside the head and then retch enthusiastically in their waste paper basket. Maybe that’s just me though.

Anyway! Inspired by both the purchase of my Nigella cookbook and also the arrival of my Riverford box, I decided to face up to one of my biggest fears: leeks. I know they look innocuous enough but for some reason, leeks and I have never really hit it off, mainly because I don’t know what to do with them and also because they are grumpy and never do quite what I want them to do.

Well, that’s all in the past for I have tamed the savage leeky beast and also (and I am very proud about this so I hope you will allow me a moment of gloating) come up with a surprisingly jolly nice recipe at the same time:

Ingredients

One large leek

1 tsp cumin seeds

Some double cream

Butter.

Pinch of sea salt.

Grind of black pepper.

Method

It’s really very simple – first of all you chop the leeks while chatting in a charmingly winsome and self deprecating manner about your previous lack of success with them then you melt the butter over a spanking flame before adding the leeks and stirring them in what you hope is a competent and also flirtatiously Nigella like manner until they are nice and soft and vaguely translucent.

Pausing to peer flirtatiously under your eyelashes at either a camera man/your partner/a bag of flour, you then ramble for a moment about the sultry lemony unctuousness of cumin seeds before adding them with a flourish to the pan and stirring them in, ensuring that you take the time to savour the scent with eyes rapturously closed.

Now for the cream. Remember to give a wry little apologetic smile as you acknowledge the fact that this recipe is not perhaps the healthiest but temper this with a brief and wistful reminisce about eating this straight from the pan on winter evenings so everyone forgets about that health nonsense. Cholesterol? What’s that then? Quick, flutter your eyelashes again before they remember! Add the cream then stir until the sauce has thickened before scattering on the salt and grind of pepper and stirring them in too.

I served this with baked potatoes, unsalted butter and with a handful of really good organic Cheddar grated on top but for authenticity’s sake you might prefer to stash it in the fridge then set your alarm for 3am so that you can eat it cold from the bowl in your pyjamas, while bathed only by the fridge’s flatteringly mellow light. It’s your call.

People always seem to want to know where I get my plates from. The one in the photograph is from Portmeiron as usual.

And there you have it, creamy leek non surprise!

Sometimes I think I need two blogs or maybe three or possibly four to cover all of my interests and the things that I am really passionate about but then I am too lazy to actually set any of them up so you sometimes get a real mish mash of posts on here, which I do apologise about!

It’s mostly history and art, of course but I hope you don’t mind my occasional mumblings about cute T shirts, days out and um cookery magazines in amongst the portraits, French Revolution and Versailles!

Anyway, I bought a copy of the UK’s latest vegetarian magazine yesterday and was so impressed that I felt compelled to write a post about it. I’ve been a vegetarian for almost as long as I can remember for many and varied reasons and am now on the So Strict That I’m Almost Vegan side of things although I have had to temporarily stop being vegan for health reasons – not that veganism makes me unhealthy, I hasten to add (in fact quite the reverse, it makes me feel extremely healthy), but I got a protracted bout of sinusitis which knocked me sideways for a couple of months.

We are a nation of very enthusiastic cooks here in the UK, despite what people from other countries may like to say and there is a plentitude of foodie magazines about the place but until now, only one specifically for vegetarians, Cook Vegetarian with seasonal specials from Vegetarian Good Food at Christmas and in the Summer (there used to be a monthly Vegetarian Good Food magazine, which was brilliant and is much, much missed).

I picked up Vegetarian Living yesterday at Sainsbury’s (who knew that a trip to the supermarket could inspire so many blog posts?) and was pleased by its glossy look and the fact that it’s due to come out monthly, which is great as I love my cookery magazines!

Anyway, the first thing that I noticed about Vegetarian Living is that it is incredibly vegan friendly too, which is a rarity. A lot of the adverts and featured products are suitable for vegans as well as many of the recipes and most of the recipes that aren’t vegan have got a suggestion beside them for how they can be made so, which I thought was really great.

They also have some really great features – interviews with Sadie Frost and features on Riverford Organic boxes, a vegan boutique bakery in New York and lots more. You would imagine a magazine aimed at the vegetarian market to have a worthy, preachy feel to it but this is a fun, rather high end publication that appeals to the sort of people like me who buy Olive and Delicious every month and like to dine out and experiment a bit with their food.

My favourite article was one in which a journalist and her son had to live an entirely organic lifestyle for a fortnight, which I found very thought provoking, amusing and also useful as I’d love to be able to commit to a 100% organic life or even just a 95% one but am never sure how that would work out!

Definitely recommended and if you go here, you can order the first edition for £2 instead of the usual £3.50. I think I will be getting a subscription, personally!