Tere

I quietly raged at Thomas Keller for the dreaded cup measurements, though. Give me grams anytime!

Delia Smith is foolproof but her older stuff sometimes needs a little more spicing. The white books you can't see the spine of next to her Winter and Summer Collection books are all three of her How to Cook books which are fantastic and turn up regularly in charity shops. Great reference for basics - if I need the proportions for bread and butter pudding custard I go there, for example. Her damson chutney is delicious. Nigella Lawson writes brilliantly about food but her recipes can be a bit scatty. I've been tripped up before. Read all the way through. But she's great for when I want to make bread sauce or proper stuffing and her lacquered quail recipe is to die for. I just wouldn't try a new recipe of hers for a dinner party. I've tried several Tom Kerridge recipes and they are good but goodness he uses a lot of salt. I am more judicious (but I had to cook low sodium in my teens for my grandparents so my salting preferences are quite low). I go to Pru Leith when I need to remember how to do a specific technique and some of her recipes are very tasty also! My favourite writer is Nigel Slater by far. Simple, tasty and divinely described. Reminds me I need to stick some of his recent cookbooks on the Amazon wishlist

EatmyBooks tells me I have 127 cookbooks / food related books. The prettiest / most used are in the kitchen island bookcase. I know I just took a photo of that but I tried to make this one a bit clearer spinewise. The series of small books to the right are all the River Cottage Handbooks, I am collecting them as they come out having been given a starter set of 10 at Christmas. Overflow in the kitchen has smaller books. I should probably move the historical cookery to the overflow section and bring in my foraging or local cookbooks. Overflow section in the hall aims to have more theoretical reference books and books about food. The Nigel Slater on the far right is a duplicate. The bottom shelf of the overflow is the "Ooh Ahh" section. I found the Heston Blumenthals for a song at a local factory clothing outlet, of all places. The Thomas Kellers were a pre-emptive strike by hubby to thwart my rage when he came back with way too many Folio Society books from our local very good second hand bookshop!

Me too, in theory - but I keep on looking at the Sodastream and musing about moving it to under the sink, which would free up some more space, I am pretty sure....

We're fortunate in that the previous owner installed a ground source heat pump which keeps the running costs down - or at least it did once we figured out the installer had never connected up the thermostats to the boiler! (It had on or off before that, which was ouchy price-wise). But now it works, it works well.

Ooh I love ElsieD's cupboard! The one thing I wish I had considered more in the pantry unit was visibility - I cope by mostly having stores of jams and chutneys and my store of sugar for jam and wine making in the top section, making lucky dip less of an issue. I can see everything else even if I have to stand on a mini stepladder for the upper sections, which also contain backup sauces, tins and rarely accessed replacement stuff. Plexiglass would have been better but I don't know how the fitters would have coped with it and I didn't want to bring another supplier into the mix! We were supposed to have mesh Hafele fittings which would have been ideal, but they screwed up the cupboard measurements and made the wooden drawers for the cost of the Hafele units as compensation.

They are wonderfully tactile as well. There's better pics on his site at http://www.gedkennett.co.uk/handmade_FPB_bow.html and the knobs are a scaled up version of http://www.gedkennett.co.uk/handmade_CPTB_button.html. He's very expensive on his stock items but since it's a forever kitchen we bit the bullet. Fortunately he was marvellously accommodating on giving a decent discount on the custom knobs. Just as well really!

The high level cabinets require a full size stepladder and my hubby to wield it, as even on the top step it's a bit too high for me! Luckily they really are things that are only required once or twice a year at most, so I can plan for the taller person to retrieve them for me. I've not tried the branded up stuff but I am quite partial to Wensleydale cheese

Heh. The fitters couldn't believe how much space I wanted - they kept on asking if I was sure. It's not just the kit (although I do have a fair few toys), it's the space to store damson gin in the process of stewing, batches of jams and all sorts of things. I am spoiled for space but it's amazing how quickly it fills!

Well, I was going to show you the before photos, but I cannot access the network drive it's on for the life of me. So you just have to imagine a space with a grotty Belfast sink, two side cupboards, a terrible unrestored coal fired Aga that didn't work very well, a Baby Belling on a little stand with a microwave below it, 2 basic beech Ikea shelving units for storage, a grotty table for food prep, and a fridge. All on a grotty flagstone floor full of stains, with badly plastered walls. Put up with this as a kitchen for 4 years after moving in here. It looked very country but was just terrible. Prep work involved rewiring the whole thing, replastering, sorting out the chimney so it had a legal flue and installing a venting system for the bread oven, sandblasting a feature wall, sandblasting and numerous coats of sealant on the flagstone floor, and a complete oil of the beams and a repaint. I moved out of the kitchen for 6 months and used the kitchen in one of the holiday lets. Here's the view towards the door. The dining set is Ercol "Candlestick", probably from the 1950's. I bought it off eBay and my carpenter refurbished it. Bonus pic up the valley which is the view from the kitchen door! Our two duckponds are directly in front but there is so much vegetation this time of year that you can't tell. What you see from the kitchen door if you turn around: Tall unit that goes all the way up to the ceiling. I store little used items like my wine making kit, my jam pan, my fruit press and party wine glasses in the top sections. From left, shelves with bottled things and wild bird food, drawer with scrubbers, pull out unit to house our coal hods. Second section has pull out shelves for our spirit cabinet, another drawer of spare cloths, bucket and vegetable basket below. Third and fourth sections are my full size pantry larder, with herbs and spices and oils on the doors. Final section has some home pressed apple juice for applejack, spare storage containers, cakes and breads, and cat food, with drawer for garden gloves and another pull out hod container below, with Simba's throne in front. The doors are all oak and the brass bronzed handle were made by a wonderful chap called Ged Kennett. The knobs were a custom make for the kitchen. Obligatory bookshelf pic. I have overflow in the housekeeper's cabinet and also in a bookcase in the hallway. The rest of the island unit has three drawers for pots and pans (and the IP) the oven side, three for plates and mugs and other stuff in the sink side and one traditional cupboard where I keep big stuff like the sous-vide and the breadmaker and the like. The housekeeper's cabinet is inspired by traditional Marches cabinets, except with bifold doors to save space. Fridge with rumtopfs to the left. I am hoarding panettone because Lidl and Aldi Panettone keep forever and hubby is a fan of bread and butter pudding. Japanese dishes on top (with festival mugs), then from left to right teapots, a caravan microwave which just fits the space (and I pull out slightly if cooking something steamy), serving bowls, glassware, a lovely fruit bowl from Ireland, serving cutlery (and a posh glass bowl for trifles), odds and ends, bookshelf, Kilner jars and my Sodastream, toaster and small grinder station. The drawers house small things at the top, then casserole dishes and the like to the left and mostly baking stuff to the right. Sink run has Miele dishwasher, effectively 5 drawers but two are insert drawers to make the look cleaner, utensil drawer and pull out oil / utensil unit, cupboard for the usual stuff under the sink, and a recycling centre. Tea station lives on top with the Londinium, kettle and whatever the grinder was called. We are long on teas and coffees! Spares are at the top as I need a small stepladder to reach them. Knives on strip to the left. The inglenook houses a board for sweeping out the bread oven ashes tucked in to the left, a refurbished coal fired two oven AGA, a cupboard for Aga tools and baking trays, then a Neff oven and hob for in the week (we usually only light the AGA when hubby is home). The bread oven is original to the Victorian extension although the door has been raised in the past to accommodate worktop heights. We have tried it once, it worked surprisingly well although it was a big smoky in the room still even with the new vent! Peels live in here to keep them out of the way. It was an awful lot of effort and disruption but I am pretty happy with how it's turned out. The kitchen was cold, draughty and unpleasant before and now it's a pleasure to cook in.

Apologies for the slightly fuzzy nature of the pic, but here's the drawers within drawers that I have that are very useful for flat things. Here they corral my collection of foil, clingfilm, ziploc bags and greaseproof paper and the like on the bottom, with placemats on top. I'll stick the rest of the kitchen in the kitchen thread proper.

Classic Gin and Tonics on a hot summer's day.

Using up the last of the rocket and some of the spinach beet a few days ago. Petits pois a la Francaise of a sort, with water bath chicken on top and the pea broth as a side. I am not sure there is such a thing as too many peas...

Umami rich roasted mushroom and parmesan risotto from when my vegetarian friend stayed. Looks terrible, tasted amazing

It rather reminds me of this! http://www.thousandeggs.com/ttem.html

From the dinner challenge thread: "In the fridge .... 34 lbs of assorted chocolate"

Heh. When asked to describe my time there my shorthand is usually "something like living in a Stephen King novel, except without zombies and vampires and whatnot". I realise he's actually a Maine resident, but his depiction of small town rural Maine was very recognisable to me! At least there were a couple of OK Mom and Pop pizza places we got to eat at once in a while.

Sounds like a wonderful way to give a dinner party. I used to love entertaining and my main motto was either prepare in advance for quick reheat (or not) or as simple as possible

It basically smelt like a descendant of Cockney rhyming slang as soon as I read it, but I didn't want to ride on in and declaim that as truth. The flow looked very very similar though!

I love this, this is like the S hooks either side of my inglenook that hold stuff with holes in, except more hard core

Rereading this thread and seeing DianaB's comments on lamb it might soothe you guys to know that lamb is a very good price for the farmer this year - over £2 a kilo on the hoof. It was almost £30 a lamb less last year so it's good to know the farmers are getting a decent price. I get a blow by blow account from my next door neighbour. We have the largest halal abattoir in Europe down the road that mostly export whole carcasses and I was expecting them to be busy in the local markets given the weak pound (they mostly export to Muslim countries and China) but apparently the price is so buoyant they aren't buying just yet! Just shows how strong the market is. Such a strange thing, the volatility, I can't understand why a lamb is £30 more this year than last year, and neither can either of the farmers who rent grasskeep from me.

Sadly I don't think I've ever seen this in UK Aldi. Sounds like a good deal!

I found the dead horse thing fascinating (and wondered if it was a cousin of Cockney rhyming slang) so am just dumping my brief research here. I guess it's the same roots but a different branch? http://jendi.bowmeow.com.au/rhymingslang1.html

No pics because I got engrossed in putting everything away but it was our 3 or 4 monthly trip to Ludlow Food Centre today. Survived relatively unscathed - a £50 bill is cheap for a visit there! We got: Cheese with no Name, a Neil's Yard goat's cheese that looks yummy, some Cornish Yarg, a hard cheese I can't remember off the top of my head, local muesli, spicy tomato ketchup made on site which knocks Heinz out of the park, Agen prunes for the fruit cake I am making for hubby tomorrow, dried cranberries for same and what we went in for: 24 sausages (6 wild boar, 6 Gloucester Old Spot, 6 Cumberland, 6 pork and apple) and 24 rashers of their unsmoked back bacon. Now all bagged up in individual breakfast portions (2 rashers, 2 sausages) in the freezer. 3 month's supply. Hurrah for ziploc bags!

Actually my regular oils (rapeseed, olive, spicy / herby olive that came from infusing olive oil with a dried herb pack I bought in the Languedoc and gets regularly added to with whatever interesting oil gets drained off something) are one of the things I store in the random stuff unit next to the sink. I agree it makes it a lot easier to find