Home cooked palmiers take a few minutes to prepare, are quick to cook and can be flavoured however you want, be it sweet or savoury, meat or meatfree, cheese or chocolate. Great for kids to play around with and awesome to impress your guests when you whip your home made pastries out of the oven!

Palmiers – The Easiest Baking Recipe in the World

Gavin Wren Baking, Recipes

Today I’m writing about palmiers, one of the easiest baking recipes in the world and also one of the most versatile, allowing you to play around with sweet and savoury, adding your own flavours and additions as you desire. Great fun for kids to make or impress your guests with home baked pastries that take a few minutes to prepare and will re-assure your position as a domestic god/goddess. Clickbait Woes. I received an e-mail this morning from a well known food website whose headline was ‘Ham & cheese toasties will make your Pinterest dreams come true’. It’s a top-hole clickbait title, delving into the murky depths of deceptive titles, really scraping the barrel. These stupendously elaborate and over-promising titles often lead to articles which manage to massively under-deliver their earlier promises. It’s not uncommon to see titles like ‘This recipe will change your life’, ‘You’ll be the most popular…
sun dried tomato pesto rosso serving ideas

Sun dried tomato pesto – pesto rosso

Gavin Wren Basic Ingredients, Recipes, Spreads & Dips, Vegan, Vegetarian

A few weeks ago I posted a traditional pesto recipe and spent some time ruminating on the bastardisation of recipes. This week, I’m going to continue the pesto theme with a recipe for a delicious sun dried tomato pesto, or pesto rosso. I would love to say this is a traditional Italian recipe adhering to the specific ingredients handed down through generations by all Italian chefs, however I’m not sure that’s not entirely possible. Whilst the traditional, green basil pesto has a fairly consistent set of ingredients that are in attendance in all recipes, pesto rosso seems to be a little bit more vague and open to the whimsical tastes of the creator. There are wild variations in content and ingredients from recipe to recipe, and as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is undoubtedly applicable to food as well, leaving a lot of room…
Aubergine pesto tart

Pesto aubergine tart

Gavin Wren Baking, Recipes, Spelt & ancient grains, Vegetarian

By now you’re probably thinking “errr… what’s the deal with this guy and aubergines?”. I’ll admit it, I’m sponsored by aubergines. They called me up from their field based HQ and asked if I could write about them endlessly. In return I get sod all, because they’re a bunch of plants, have no currency nor do they possess suitable ID to open a bank account to store or transfer money. They even asked me for exclusivity rights to break up my talks with the poddington peas about a mutual tie-in. Ok, maybe that’s all fantasy. Maybe. In reality, I just like aubergines, they represent something very summery to me. So on those rare occasions that the weather turns the temperature up slightly, casting sunlight towards us and beaming a gentle, welcoming smile upon our faces, I cook aubergines. I’ve extolled their virtues for quite some time in dishes such as…
Traditional Italian pesto

Traditional Italian pesto

Gavin Wren Basic Ingredients, Recipes, Spreads & Dips, Vegetarian

There are many, many recipes on the internet going under traditional names which can only be described as bastardised. This comes in various guises, such as dairy, gluten, sugar free examples that I confess to having created on occasion, where you could argue the essence of a dish is compromised by the very removal of that element. Alternatively, people take a traditional recipe and affect some kind of alternative, contemporary slant on it, whilst retaining the hallowed name to describe it. “For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” Douglas Adams Of course,…
Spinach and walnut pesto with wholemeal pasta

Spinach and walnut pesto

Gavin Wren Basic Ingredients, Main Dishes, Recipes, Vegan, Vegetarian

Hello folks. Another straightforward recipe for you today, one whose big, powerful flavours bely it’s simplicity. This is something that you can whizz up in the time it takes your pasta to cook and tastes a million times better than anything you might pour from a jar. You just need a blender and your ingredients to hand and you can have this pesto ready to eat in minutes. It also falls into a theme on my blog, something that’s popped up a few times over the most recent recipes. Simplicity. Keeping the ingredients list short and the preparation straightforward can be a winning combination, compared to the easily muddled complication of complex flavours. It allows the ingredients that are in the dish to find their own places and shine through, without getting lost in the fray. Now, the keen eyed among you might have noticed that I don’t include cheese…