Our Blog

We’ve got more weeks of this, you know, and it isn’t too late to make the best of it. The one thing that you may have more of on your hands than you did before is time, and time is one of the key ingredients for learning new cookery skills, and experimenting with new dietary choices. You can even start to change your underlying habits to make your kitchen a more sustainable place. I have jo ...

Known also as the Lunar New year, or the Spring Festival, it’s the most important of the many Chinese festivals and can trace its origins back into the time of the Bronze Age. The idea started off as a date that marked winter sacrifices to gods and ancestors, a pagan festival that brought people together at the turning of the year. One idea was that a mythical beast called Nian needed simultane ...

Tucking into pasta made from scratch in a rich ragu it isn’t hard to conjure up why I find plant based eating a joy. Through plant-based eating I’ve been led to understand food, appreciate seasonality (though if we could not be in leek season any more that would be wonderful), and actually learn how to cook properly. Much like the banana bread and sourdough moments of 2020 as people returned t ...

We were thrilled to receive Dexam’s wheat fibre measuring cups. These were a fabulous way to support our latest six week food education programme as all our recipes were converted into cup measurements to avoid the need for weighing scales, which ensured everyone could participate using them from home.  This format is something we are hoping to repeat again with different groups throughout ...

Whether fondue for you means cheese or chocolate; there are so many unknown uses that your fondue pot holds….or could do, if you owned one. Let us enlighten you on a few of the surprising wonders of owning a fondue set Fondue. Whether you prefer to dip strawberries into a warm chocolate sauce or bread into creamy cheese, using your set for its original function is fun and exciting every time ...

  When you are trying to prepare a delicious meal in the kitchen, it can be frustrating and annoying to find that all your knives have dull blades. This can make chopping, slicing and dicing more time consuming and difficult. Having a manual or electric knife sharpener to hand can quickly fix this problem. Therefore it is important to have a knife sharpener handy but it is even more import ...

  The chances are that you’ve thought about it for months, had it on order for weeks, spent north of £50 on it and dedicated most of the last 24 hours to preparing and cooking it. So you might as well get that last little bit right, and it’s a lot easier than you think! Here are some of the golden rules we follow at home: 1. This is a job for the scientist or craftsman in the family, a ...

The vast majority of mitts, gauntlets and double oven gloves come in cotton; a few come in silicone (very heat resistant but also very difficult to manipulate) and in other flameproof materials. Let’s stick with the cotton ones. Most of the safety thinking has been done for you already, and you should therefore always look for British Standard mark on a product that you are considering buyin ...

Stir-up Sunday, which this year takes place on November 22nd, is not necessarily what you think it is. Not in its origins, at least. It seems to have been a tradition that was willed down to us by the Victorians, that first started with the book of Common Prayer, and the collect for the last Sunday before Advent, that ran: ‘Stir up we beseech thee, O Lord, the will of thy faithful people’. ...

As a knife supplier, we get asked this question surprisingly often, so we thought that it would be useful to give a summary. Obviously, the overarching concern must be safety, particularly where there are children regularly in the kitchen. But there are other factors, too, like convenience, cleanliness, knife care and price. Fundamentally, there are five ways to store your knives: magnetic ra ...