Fairtrade Fortnight is running from 23rd Feb to 8th March this year and the theme for this year’s fortnight is: choose products that change lives. For me, the most important thing about choosing a fair trade product is knowing that I am making a difference to someone by making that choice. I don’t know about you but the most common fair trade food I see available is: bananas, sugar, coffee and chocolate.

For some reason I didn’t even think about tea being fair trade even though I have been buying Clipper tea for a while and it has the fair trade logo on and everything! Last year I made some Fairtrade shortbread to use as many fair ingredients as possible and I wanted to raise awareness of Fairtrade Fortnight again this year because as the film here shows, it is certainly worthwhile. read more

I like the idea of a recipe box. Coming home to find all your meals ready weighed and ready to cook, no need to go to the shops and no wandering round the kitchen wondering what you’re going to cook that evening. I have been so busy recently that my recent recipe box from Gouso couldn’t have come at a better time! I was sent a box containing ingredients to make three meals for two people: Macaroni Cheese, Asian Pork with Rice and Pak Choi and Sweet Tahini Chicken.

We tried the Macaroni Cheese first. It was made with Tallegio which made a nice change and there was added bacon for flavour and tomatoes for freshness. It was easy to make (you did need to make sure you had butter, milk and flour to make the sauce) and I really enjoyed it. read more

There have been a few new products in the kitchen recently: Rachel’s Divine Pots and a Degustabox box. The Rachel’s Dessert Pots are relatively new to the market and the whole point of a Degustabox is to bring you a box of the latest food products and both made welcome additions to my kitchen. I certainly wasn’t short of snacks for a while.

I really like the yoghurts that I’ve tried from Rachel’s in the past so I was looking forward to trying their new Divine Pots. I thought they were similar to Gu in principle (you eat them straight from the fridge) but they are organic. I liked that they came in little glass pots; a bit more special than plastic! I tried the chocolate and the vanilla; they were both good but the chocolate was my favourite as I liked the slight bitterness from the chocolate. read more

It may be slightly gloomier outside than we’ve become accustomed to over the last few months but that doesn’t mean BBQ season is over. At least not as far as I’m concerned! There’s not much weather that will stop my family from cooking alfresco; indeed one memorable snowy day saw us making gravy outside as the roasting tray was too big for the hob. Stokes sent me some yummy sounding products to try which lend themselves to a BBQ really well: Ketchup, Bloody Mary Ketchup and BBQ Sauce. So it was time (but certainly not the last time this year) to fire up the coals and get cooking. read more