When I get a new cookbook I feel it deserves some quality time to be looked over and thumbed through. Normally with a nice cup of tea. I was really looking forward to taking some time to read through the It’s All Easy Cookbook by Gwyneth Paltrow. The title got my interest first; a whole book full of easy recipes. It sounded right up my street! The photography in the book is lovely; the emphasis is on lifestyle rather than just food and I think that makes it easier to see how the recipes might fit in your day to day life. Gwyneth Paltrow wrote the book and recipes along with Thea Baumann and there are some great ideas in there that I can see appearing on my kitchen table. read more

If you follow me on Instagram you may have seen some of the weekly meal plans I put up. I can’t live without a meal plan; I think I would implode. As I find them so useful, my thinking is that other people may find them handy or take some inspiration from them. Looking at how my meal planning has changed and what I choose to eat now there has been a real shift in my kitchen and I now eat vegetarian meals four (and often more) times a week and I’m always looking for new vegetarian recipes to try out. read more

I was given The Glasgow Cookery Book a few months ago; I’m a sucker for an old and worn book and everyone knows it. I put it to one side to have a look at later and forgot about it until more recently. An old book that smells like it should deserves a proper going over and a nice cup of tea. I sat down to enjoy a flick through the aged pages and got a lot more than I bargained for.

I was hoping to find an interesting recipe that had perhaps been forgotten about or a take on something I make regularly. What I found instead was a myriad of lists, scribbles, notes, pieces of paper, recipe cards and more. The picture below is the inside front cover which is plastered in words and phrases, for example, ‘Russian Fill Pie’ or ‘Grilled Kidneys’ amongst others. read more

A dear friend of mine bought me a blank recipe book for my birthday 4 years ago. She must have had foreknowledge of what was to come! It is a place for favourite recipes, creating new combinations and exploring ideas. Now, I have probably 4 pages that have not been written on but I’ll never buy a new one, I’ll just keep adding pages to this one. The book is severely thumbed but I think this makes it look well loved.

So where do we all keep our recipes? My recipe book has been written in by me, my Granny has filled in her favourite baking recipes and I have leaflets and clippings from so many places. Because of the various additions over the years and the different people who have contributed to it, this recipe book is inexplicably treasured. I also have many old cookery books, late 1890’s and onwards and things have not changed much. These old recipe books are full of newspaper cut outs and notes from the previous owner. I have one book from 1936 which belonged to a lady called Eileen. She has written in many recipes including lemon pie and ham soup. Some of the recipes have notes on top of the originals where amounts or methods have been changed. 
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