It all began with a bit of idle wondering Working alone as I do, I sometimes find myself lacking a little fresh inspiration. 2019 was an interesting year for me as it saw huge changes to my personal life (my husband decided the life I had devoted myself to was no longer what…
From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science I have always been a woman with a plan. From being an intense teenager building up a rather ridiculous Record of Achievement for my university applications to today being almost halfway through a twenty-year plan which incorporated home ownership, motherhood and then financial freedom, I’ve always liked to…
My posts may contain affiliate links. If you buy something through one of those links, you won’t pay any more, but I’ll get a small commission. Thanks! Love in a Covid climate Ah Jenny Harries. We knew her words were coming but when she confirmed that if two halves of a couple are currently…
A break from the normal Pyromaniac Chef Blog. It’s not written by Kathryn and it’s not about cooking as such. However it is about fire, but from an Archaeological perspective. The morning started at the Archaeology Department building and when we’d all assembled, we walked over to the Harris Gardens, a lovely part of the…
Most of us know you can’t copyright a dish (see this article on The Guardian) but the correctness of dishes is highly debated from Chicken Tikka Masala (is it Punjabi… or Glaswegian?) to Jamie Oliver coming under fire last year for putting chorizo in a paella recipe. I must admit that the latter caught me…
As we were waiting to pick up our kids recently one of the other mums asked me how my restaurant, Gloucester Studio was going. I gave her a brief update of what’s been happening since it appeared on Hidden Restaurants with Michel Roux Jr and suddenly it was as though everyone wanted to talk to…
I’m not a cool girl. I don’t do elegant detachment, or raising a perfectly sculpted eyebrow when something interests me. No, when I’m having a perfectly sensible conversation and I spot Michel Roux Jr taking a carrot cupcake I baked, I go mute. ‘Kathryn?’ ‘Oh my god.’ ‘So, as I was saying…’ ‘Michel is eating…
I happened across a copy of Broccoli and Brains recently and my curiosity was piqued (enough to order the other copies). As a complete nerd, reading material on the topic of dieting which wasn’t illustrated with women laughing at salad was something I could actually sink my teeth into (so to speak). Before I reached…
This month Karen Keygnaert made news when she rejected a Michelin star. Her reasons make a lot of sense. As she told The Independent, “The star brings along a whole circus that’s outdated. If there’s even a crease in the menu card or a crease in the tablecloth, people soon end their sentence with: ‘I don’t…