Posted in alcohol, baking, British, butter, Christmas, culture, custard, Delia Smith, dessert, easy, England, festival, festivals, fruit, history, holiday, holidays, nuts, spices, tradition, winter on Jan 2nd, 2012
Most Brits associate mincemeat with Christmas – its intoxicating mix of fruit, spices, booze, nuts and mixed peel provide Pavlovian stimuli, stirring memories of cherubic choirs a-caroling, roasted poultry, and the Queen’s speech – whereas I associate it with Easter, because it was always around then that we finally ran out of mince pies. I [...]
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Posted in ale, America, beans, beer, braised, British, carrots, Christmas, easy, England, family, holiday, holidays, Meat, onions, pork, Potato, rosemary, sauce, stew, tradition, travel, vinegar on Dec 20th, 2011
I often think that living in a small scruffy New York City apartment is akin to a pioneer life in a log cabin somewhere remote. Sure, the commute is easier, but the myriad quotidien affronts and man traps of a city existence certainly resemble the perils of life on the range.
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Posted in beans, British, cognac, easy, family, fennel, fish, France, Garlic, history, Manchester, Provencal, Provence, spicy, white fish on Dec 3rd, 2011
I’m not very old, but for much of my youth in the north west of England, it was almost impossible to find fresh foods that weren’t local. Today such a statement seems like an echo of Victorian times, but, literally, that’s how it was until a supermarket was built behind the Knutsford courthouse in the [...]
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Posted in ale, beer, British, culture, England, Europe, family, holidays, pork, Pub, restaurant, Restaurant Review, sausage, suet, tourism, tradition, travel on Jul 16th, 2011
“A journey is a fragment of hell.” – Prophet Mohammed Regular readers will most likely know a handful of factoids about us WANF-ers and our proclivities, among them: one of us is English, the other Italian-American; we enjoy making a wide variety of dishes, many of which we’ve sampled on our travels; and we have [...]
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Posted in beef, Brazil, British, Caribbean, chili, Chinese, diversity, Garlic, noodles, quick meal, South America, spicy on Apr 18th, 2011
Guyana, sitting on the top right of the land mass of South America, is among the least known and most mysterious of that continent’s countries, something that is almost as true today as it was when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used it as the setting for his 1904 novel, The Lost World. Home to the [...]
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Posted in British, celery, cheap meal, chicken stock, curry, easy, England, Indian, lentils, lime, soup, spices, yogurt on Feb 13th, 2010
One finds mulligatawny soup on an Indian restaurant menu the same way one always finds buffalo wings or nachos on a bar menu. It just has to be there – if it wasn’t on the menu you just know there’s something wrong with the place. But how many of you have ever ordered it over [...]
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In the tiny Cheshire hamlet of Lower Peover (pronounced “peever”) is the delightfully rustic country pub “The Bells”, so-called because one has to literally walk around it to get to the parish church. In fact, so aligned are church and boozer that the two are separated by only fifty feet of graveyard, a low gate [...]
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Posted in alcohol, alcoholic drink, America, apples, barbecue, beverage, British, drink, eastenders, England, holiday, patriotism, Recipe, summer, tradition on Jul 4th, 2009
Every stereotype, no matter how absurd the caricature, has, at its core, a grain of truth. Though I doubt anyone has ever seen him, the beret and black and white hooped sweater-sporting Frenchman with a cigarette hanging off his lower lip and a baguette under his arm, remains an abiding image of France; and in [...]
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Posted in British, coffee, dentist, dessert, easy, eating, healthy, kumquat, pannacotta, Recipe, teeth on Mar 7th, 2009
The 20th anniversary of The Simpsons is being celebrated soon, and our recent long-overdue trip to the dentist reminded me of one particular episode in which Lisa is persuaded to give in and get braces on her teeth just like all the other Springfield kids when she is shown the “Big Book of British Smiles.” [...]
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Posted in beef tallow, British, carrots, chicken, chicken stock, England, flavor, flavour, flour, Garlic, herbs, lard, leek, London, Manchester, onions, parsley, parsnips, Potato, Recipe, stew, suet, thyme, vegetables, weather, winter on Jan 16th, 2009
File this one under “utter fabrications told to you by older sibling and believed for too long”. I must have been very young when my sister (15 months my senior) informed me that I should be wary of eating my grandmother’s suet dumplings because suet was the gooey material supporting bovine eye-balls. Quite where she got this [...]
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Posted in alcohol, alcoholic drink, anise, bay, beverage, British, brown sugar, Christmas, cinnamon, culture, drink, easy, England, holiday, holidays, juice, lemon, orange juice, oranges, Recipe, spices, sweet, tradition, wine, winter on Dec 20th, 2008
Even though mulled wine should remind me of being in the church choir as a cherub-faced youngster and singing Christmas carols with frosty breath overlooking a seasonally-decorated nave and a sea of pink-cheeked parishoners, it doesn’t. In spite of this being the way I was introduced to this most famous Yuletide beverage, my abiding memories [...]
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Posted in America, appetizer, British, Christmas, embarrassment, family, hazelnuts, manwich, top five, tradition, winter on Dec 7th, 2008
Not your average Christmas meal… We couldn’t let this month go by without doing some sort of “holiday themed” post. We were scratching our head trying to come up with this months “Top 5″ contest thinking of such winners as, “Top 5 Most Friggin’ Annoying Christmas Tunes” and “Top 5 Christmas Sweaters Your Mom Owns” [...]
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