Paneer cheese is commonly used in Indian dishes as an alternative to meat. It is soft non-melting cheese made from cows or buffalo milk and formed with the addition of an acidic ingredient like lemon juice or vinegar.

Label Truths

Cooking for the Season

A favourite hard cheese for many, this fruity nutty cheese is named after two locations in Italy, Parma and Reggio Emila. It is a protected product (PDO) being produced only in permitted regions ensuring its unique quality and link to those regions. It's a key ingredient in many Italian pasta dishes and some even say it is a 'healthy cheese'.

A staple of Middle Eastern & North African diets, preserved lemons are a nice ingredient to have in your cupboard. They can be shop bought or homemade and add a unique tangy, salty & slightly bitter depth to stews, tagines, dips and sauces. 

Umami packed with sweet, savory, and slightly tangy flavor.

If coffee has as many health benefits as some research suggests, I may live to be 100. But like most ingredients in our world, there are conflicting statistics out there with the general consensus that it’s okay when consumed moderately.

Delicious sweet and juicy strawberries are generally good for us being rich in vitamin C, manganese, folate, fibre and other beneficial antioxidants. There are hundreds of varieties of strawberries but there are three main categories... June-Bearing; Ever-Bearing & Day-Neutral. The June-Bearing variety speaks for itself producing fruit for the month of June and sometimes longer. The Ever-bearing variety produces two harvests in Spring and late Summer and the Day-Neutral variety has a smaller fruit that can grow up to October, weather permitting.

Believe it or not, the original pizza type dish may have been born in Ancient Greece where baked flatbreads with various toppings including cheese, garlic and onions were enjoyed by the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians. These were known as plakountos and some say were the catalyst for pizza as we know it today.  

Sherry wine vinegar is often used in cooking, especially to enhance tomato based dishes.  I first used it when there was an open bottle left behind in an AirBnB apartment I rented in Spain. Adding it to the tomato pasta sauce I was cooking, it transformed the flavour ever so slightly giving the tomatoes and garlic a rounded lift.  This gourmet wine vinegar made from sherry is produced in the Spanish province of Cádiz and inside the triangular area between the city of Jerez de la Frontera and towns of Sanlúcar de Barrameda and El Puerto de Santa María, known as the "sherry triangle" (Wikipedia).

A nut or a fruit? Neither, a cashew nut is actually a 'drupe'. Drupes are typically fruits that are fleshy on the outside and contain a shell covering a seed on the inside. The cashew tree grows cashew apples that produce one seed per fruit.  The apple acts as a distraction in nature to protect this healthy seed or as we call it, the cashew nut. India, Cote d'Ivoire, Vietnam and Tanzania produce most of the world's cashews.