How would you fancy celebrating Christmas this year with a delicious feast of caterpillar? Or perhaps a small decomposed bird wrapped in seal skin? Your reaction may be similar to someone who has never tasted Christmas Pudding before and is advised to mix breadcrumbs, dried fruit, treacle, suet and a sixpence in a bowl, then […]

We don’t know about you, but here in the SK kitchen we can’t get past 12.25pm without a childhood memory returning. That’s when the school bell would ring for the end of morning lessons and the lunchbreak began. Fabulous, a chance to stop looking for x in a never ending algebra rabbit hole and instead […]

We are entering that time of year where outdoor fire becomes central to community celebration. And where you have fire, food often follows either cooked on the flames or in the good old fashioned kitchen. Though Bonfire Night might be the most famous of those events in this part of the world, fire customs date […]

Imagine as a child if you failed to do the washing up and then tried to give the excuse that the dirty dishes were in fact part of an important historical record. I suspect most parents would give short shrift to such notions  however it’s thanks to such foresight/laziness that we know the origins of […]

There’s no doubt that plant-based diets are on the rise and with 1st October marking World Vegetarian Day, it seems there’s a variety to suit every taste. Broadly speaking, vegetarianism is an abstinence from meat and by-products of animal slaughter. Veganism extends this to all animal products including eggs and dairy. In between there are […]

Britain’s food favourites are changing and it’s a culinary classic dating back thousands of years that is on the rise. A survey earlier this year by YouGov reveals Chinese is the nation’s favourite takeaway, but delve a little deeper and you’ll find the future is pizza. Fish and chips was number one for senior citizens, […]

One of the joys of a good walk is how the fresh air gets the brain cells working. When I wander I start to wonder, deep stuff like if we get apples from an apple tree and gooseberries from a gooseberry bush how come we get beef from a cow? Well, it transpires it’s all […]

Amidst the rush to return to big-crowd sporting events and nightclubs, it seems lockdown has also prompted a yearning for a more sedate pastime. Angling is not usually associated with stampedes, but it’s now at the centre of a rush to the riverbank. It’s quite a shift from its traditional image. You may recall the […]

As the final rays of the sun slowly faded and I stood there on my patch of soil, I took a moment to reflect on the significance of the freshly harvested, somewhat misshapen, home grown potato in my hand. For me it was the culmination of that eureka moment 10,000 years ago when mankind first […]