Kitchen Alchemy

Bruscetta (pronounced bru-sketta) actually refers to the bread, olive oil and garlic part of this antipasto dish. Dating back to the 15th century, it was a way to turn stale bread into a delicious snack. Italians enjoy many different toppings on their bruscetta, including roasted peppers, salami, tuna tonato (tuna blended with white beans, lemon juice and garlic) and even cheese. But nothing beats the flavour of perfectly ripe tomatoes, seasoned with salt and fresh basil. This bruscetta combination is a wonderful breakfast for a very hot day. I have heard people dismiss bruscetta as nothing more than tomatoes on toast. But this is a far cry from the taste sensation of a properly made bruscetta. The key, in my opinion, is chosing the juiciest, most ripe tomatoes you can find, and combine them with beautiful fresh basil. As a breakfast meal bruscetta will leave you feeling like you have done something good for yourself today. I invite you to try. Ingredients Loaf of sour dou

When my husband arrived in my life, I was surprised to find how much he loved poached eggs. We would go out for breakfast and he’d order Eggs Benedict with beautiful poached eggs enveloped in delicious hollandaise sauce. At the time I was travelling a lot with work. One morning I found myself dining in a hotel that had the chef standing in the dining room at a table ready to cook eggs for me on the spot, exactly how I liked them. I noticed he had a pot of water gently simmering over a hot plate – clearly for poaching eggs. I asked him if he could show me how it’s done. The chef told me the first and most important tip was to have very fresh eggs. He said eggs more than three days old just weren’t good enough for the job. Second, he said you needed to add a goodly amount of vinegar to the water. And finally, he said you needed to simmer the water just so. No rolling boil! I went home a tried to cook poached eggs for my husband. The farm fresh eggs were not available at my

I’ve often said that chocolate is one of the two original and best flavours on the planet. What I don’t often mention is that vanilla is the other. I recently discovered, much to my surprise and delight, that vanilla is the fruit of an orchid plant from Madagascar. In fact, the vanilla planifolia vine was transported to Madagascar from Mexico (and other French colonies) in the early 1800s. The vanilla plant is actually a vine, usually found winding itself around a bamboo plant or coconut tree, which grows an orchid-type flower. In Mexico, the vanilla flower is pollinated by a bee. Outside of Mexico, the bee cannot survive, so pollination is undertaken by human hand – a laborious process which is responsible for the incredibly expensive price of vanilla bean pods. The mature pods are harvested from the vine and dried to reduce the moisture content, thereby producing the distinct vanilla aroma we all know and love. I never stopped to question where vanilla came from before. Yet li

When I was a kid I ate a lot of eggs. Both my mother and my father served them up to me in all manner of ways – soft boiled, as omelettes, and scrambled. I think my favourite might have been soft boiled, but only because Mum also made me very excellent toast soldiers slathered in butter to dip into the runny egg yolk. Yuk! I would never eat such a thing now. I had a bad run in with eggs in the late seventies, thanks to my Mum taking up a job as an egg collector on a Steggles Chicken farm. That job knocked two stone off my mother’s figure in a matter of weeks! It was totally hard yakka – dirty, hot and the chickens, especially the roosters, were not friendly in the slightest. Mum came home one time with a massive gouge down the side of her face – a rooster had gone for her and sliced her cheek open with one of its claws. She didn’t need stitches, thank God, but the attacker left his mark. Even after all these years, there’s still a feint line across Mum’s cheek. Mum used to