What a strange winter.  Last thing I remember, there was a summit about global warming, then I opened my presents, and next thing *BAM* – Britain is covered under a sheet of snow and ice.  I can barely get my car out of the street, let alone think about what to cook next. What happened there, then?

Britain Under Ice

In amongst all of the snow slush, I’ve somehow managed to salvage the entries for Christmas 2009′s Seasonal Food Blogging Event “In The Bag“.  For this even I challenged food bloggers to come up with a dish using the ingredients of cranberries, clementines or mandarines, and nuts.  We’re not exactly bursting at the seams with entries, but what we have are corkers; check them out below.

This month (January) sees In The Bag return to Julia at A Slice of Cherry Pie. What will she have in store? Only one way to find out, details soon…

Can you believe it is that time already? It seems only a moment ago when I started preparing for Christmas, and yet it is probably already too late to tell you about our Christmas Tree Cake. Still, there’s always next year, and this cake would work just as well baked in any bundt pan, not just the incredibly festive shape pictured.

When I first heard about the new River Cottage book (Everyday) coming out this year I asked practically every family member to buy it for my birthday. Luckily for me one of them agreed, and I can now happily confirm that this is yet another great book from Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall.

This recipe is part of my new found love of pomegranates; a leafy salad with pomegranates and feta cheese. It’s surprisingly good, and a great festive alternative to all the turkey you’re likely to be eating. We cheated and used a bag of ready bought salad leaves for this (hey, Delia gets away with it), but it would be even better if you made up your own.

At Christmas I always find myself reaching for one of Nigella Lawson’s great cookbooks. This year is no exception, and I make no apologies for reproducing this fantastic recipe from Nigella Christmas

Give this version (or Nigella’s original Lamb Tagine) a go and your house will be full of the smells of Christmas while it cooks. You won’t regret it!

I’ve been a little quiet with food blogging since the birth of Mia in May this year, and one of the things I just haven’t had time to be involved with is the great seasonal food blogging challenge “In The Bag”, which instead has been held by co-host Julia over at “A Slice of Cherry Pie”.

Czarnina is pretty much a traditional Polish dish, yet shows just how much we in the Western world (UK, in my case) have become detached from our food. All meat has blood in it, but the mere mention of a soup where blood is the primary ingredient still never fails to raise an eyebrow.

The challenge is on. Can you do an even better job of baking a Zebra Cake than Jane did?

To make cheese, you need milk. Milk is basically made up of water, protein, fat and lactose, and what we need to do is make the proteins stick together by adding an acid (forming curds), then sieve away the liquid (the whey).