Silver Screen Suppers

I LOVE it when other people cook! My darling friend Sanja recently cooked a Serbian feast which involved the most delicious thing anyone has ever made for me.  SAUERKRAUT with bacon and Romanian sausage.  Oh my word it was delicious.  And what’s more, she sent me home with a jarful of this precious slow cooked [...]

Oh what a joy to meet in person the lovely Lauren Hairston Collado of the glorious food blog The Past on a Plate. Lauren was in London from Wichita and I was so thrilled to meet her in person.  I’ve been following Lauren’s blog since the day I discovered that she was a fellow fan [...]

In The Treasury of Great Recipes Vincent announced: “Probably the most glamorous markets in the world are the Food Halls at Harrods in London” and I say hell yeah!  He declared the whole Harrods emporium to be akin to “The British Museum crossed with Les Halles!”  Well, you know how I feel about Les Halles… [...]

My recommendation for Valentine’s Night – whether you will be alone – like me – or cosied up with your significant other is this.  It’s a GENIUS recipe and is designed to impress your guest OR make you laugh out loud if you are eating alone.  The recipe is here (if you are looking in [...]

I have three friends who have birthdays really close to Christmas and they don’t tend to celebrate.  So I decided, as they are three of my very favourite people, to make them a birthday lunch. I love my Vincent Price “Beverly Hills Cookbook” and I am working my way through all of the dinner parties [...]

A lovely new year celebration with Corinna last night.  We ate pretzels, cashew nuts, mini sausage rolls, Vincent’s Goulash and a divine Sachertorte made by Corinna.  We watched Dinner For One as is tradition (Corinna reckons she as probably seen this every year for about 20 years – it’s a must in Austria on NYE), [...]

Mmm – this was lovely but I’m afraid there is no photographic evidence as I was too busy getting drunk with David & Katy.  I was a bit worried that Vincent’s curry powder would be clove-heavy but in fact once it was all cooked up it was lovely.  There is not a scrap left.  There [...]

I absolutely love my Vincent Price “push button cookery” lessons. The Beverly Hills Cookbook tapes were recorded sometime in the 70s and are just bursting with Vincent’s humour, knowledge and joy of cooking.  They are difficult to get hold of but Mike Vines has kindly bunged them up on the interweb here and I do [...]

For the pre-birthday dinner I also made a baked ham to Vincent’s specifications.  Here’s a picture of it when it surfaced from the oven.  Heather kept eating bits of the crust as I broke it all off.  She does love her proper pastry. I didn’t have time to decorate it in the crazy fashion of [...]

It was my birthday on Monday and I decided that I’d invite some friends for a Vincent Price related experience.  As part of my self-made-challenge to visit every single one of the restaurants Vincent mentions in his awesome Treasury of Great Recipes I decided that we should go to Boulestin. Vincent said of Boulestin in [...]

Because I got smashed on cocktails on Thursday at the Kinolibrary launch I was a bit under-prepared for my dinner party on Friday but Cathy came to the rescue with a pastry case for my apple tart.  There wasn’t enough pastry for a lattice but I think it looked just dandy without.  Mary forbid me [...]

This is what the Lasserre looked like in 1965 when Vincent and Mary’s Treasury of Great Recipes was published.  It looked exactly the same last week in 2012.  Except the hydrangeas have been replaced with orchids and there is a new – but very similar carpet.  Everything else stays the same, thank goodness.  I had [...]

In the best cookbook ever written (IMHO) Vincent writes eloquently about the wonderful food available in Paris.  As the lovely people at Eurostar offered me a cheap ticket to Paree recently I decided I would go on the second of my pilgrimages to walk in the footsteps of my food writer idol.  I went for [...]

Any guest who arrives with a Fanny Cradock cookbook as a gift is tops in my book and if my weekend house-guest visits again I will definitely cook him something from “Fanny Cradock Invites…” Maybe “Winged Victory” as I have always wanted to make something that requires the purchasing of cutlet frills… Vincent didn’t let [...]

It’s Halloween, one of my favourite nights of the year, and there is a vast amount of Vincent Price Goulish Goulash in the slow cooker.  My CHARGE is coming for dinner tomorrow evening, and like some Aunt in a PG Wodehouse novel I want to make sure he is fully fed.  He’s here from New [...]