La Couronne La Couronne Yes we two look similar, but no we are not related. We just happen to have the same body shape, hair, complexion, wear the same types of clothes, and live 5 minutes down the road from each other in the middle of nowhere. Yes we are plump. We love our food and wine. Pl...

Rouen Rouen The train from Paris to Rouen gave us the first instance of the 2 doppelganger dodue (of a certain age and from New Zealand) getting away with something. We had bought 2nd class tickets so duly found a carriage labelled 2nd class on the platform and boarded. We went down with our s...

Paris Yes we two look similar, but no we are not related. We just happen to have the same body shape, hair, complexion, wear the same types of clothes, and live 5 minutes down the road from each other in the middle of nowhere. Yes we are plump. We love our food and wine. Plump and happy. Yes...

Bohemian Roast Duck My first interview with Kathryn Ryan on RNZ's Nine to Noon back in July, was on all things duck. Of course it was duck season. You can hear the interview here. https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018799637/cooking-duck-with-jenny-garing There are q...

One of the things I fell in love with at our new home in the Marlborough Sounds, was the huge fig tree at the end of the deck. By the end of summer it was completely covered in masses and masses of figs. I had dreams about all the things I was going to do with kilos of ripe, luscious figs come aut...

Finding the real Korea When travelling in a foreign country you probably want to experience the real thing, get a feeling for the local people and their life, what they really eat and how they live, how they entertain themselves, how they interact. But more often than not, as a visitor to the coun...

Having bought a packet of fresh curry leaves from my local Indian supermarket, I was determined not to waste any. You can’t get fresh ones all the time (usually only dried) so I wanted to make the most of them. Fresh Curry Leaves Curry leaves do not taste like curry. They are called curry leaves...

Whenever we have a good length of time in a foreign country, we hire a rental car and just go where the moment takes us. We're notoriously lax at planning in advance so, using local maps, a Tom-Tom or our phones, we often head out without bookings or a plan and just trust in following our noses (or...

I make my own cheese, which produces a lot of whey. But rather than tip it out, there is so much that can be done with this “by-product”. When you make cheese, enzymes added to the milk causing it to separate into solids and liquid. The solids, or curds, are strained and become the cheese. The rem...

Are you looking for something a little different, but traditional that you can do with eggs for Easter with the kids I have been cooking Sephardic eggs (sometimes known as Brown Eggs), since finding this recipe in the mid 1980’s, and being fascinated by the colour and flavour of the eggs. The...

I started feeding my Border-Collie/Labrador cross  home-made food a year ago. The lab in her wins out too often and she gets too fat on commercial food. I wanted food that wasn’t full of fillers and additives, or suspect ingredients. She is not allergic to any foods that I know of, but I wanted to...