legend. inspiration. ''gorgeous''.

''Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do'' - Think Differerent campaign, Apple 1997. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX9GTUMh490
thanks for everything.

Apple Store Covent Garden

Stepping into any Apple Store is always a great experience, but when the man and me popped into the Covent Garden store the other day (their 300th and largest store - Grade II listed) we got more than we imagined. Whilst admiring the MacBook Airs, we got to talking to one of the many helpful members of staff (big shout out to Adam) who gave us a guided tour of all four floors - including the business briefing room which has a stunning 17th Century fireplace. Like all of Apple's stores, Covent Garden  has beautiful design features - befitting of the brand -  with numerous examples of structural brilliance (see spiral glass staircase below). Glass being a main feature material in all of their stores. What i love about Apple (and no, they're not paying me for this) is that the design process is followed through the whole experience...from stepping into one of their stores, through the products, packaging and user experience. That's good business.

The 17th Century fireplace in the Business briefing Room - a private area used to acclimatise business to the brand and it's products.


If you can prize your eyes away from the glossy ipads and look up you will see where all the natural light is streaming from. Apparently each one of these glass panes can support a baby elephant! I love these kind of facts, would be cool (if maybe a little cruel) to look up and actually see baby elephants lounging on the roof.

Beauty personified...the iPad 2

A tenuous link to London maybe, although in my defence the genius designer that is Jonathan Ive (the man behind imac, ipod, ipad...basically all the amazing design to come out of Apple in the last 15 years) is a Londoner... Ah, Jony Ive, you have brought such happiness to my life and you just never stop giving.


Do i really need an excuse to display such beauty though? I can hear a few non-believers out there scoffing away, but i am not going to let that spoil this moment. I'm not here to convert anyone to Apple, you will have to find the light yourself! If you are curious though, just pop into one of their stores and let the magic wash over you. I converted 6 years ago and i know that the lack of PC related stress has definitely added years onto my life!

What makes this ipad even sweeter, is the fact that there were no queues involved. Oh yes, you heard it right. The man decided to drive outside of London and was able to walk straight into a '3' store and buy with no hassle - the kind of efficiency Apple would be proud of. Although this did mean missing out on the celebratory atmosphere and traditional high 5 from all the Apple staff (i am sad enough to have queued before!).

Now, this iPad isn't actually mine (officially) and the man is glaring at me as he is yet to play with it, so i am signing off before i get a punch in the head! I am sure i will be posting a review as soon as i get my mitts back on it...what i will say though, it's a dream to type on.

Cantaloupe-Pear Tart with Apple Glaze

The origins of this cantaloupe-pear tart with an apple glaze began some years back, when a friend mentioned a wonderful cantaloupe pie she’d had at a bed-and-breakfast when she was young. That sounded good to my wife, but she doesn’t bake pies.


Then she remembered. “Wait a minute,” she thought. “I have a husband who bakes pies.”


That being the case, I was given the happy task of putting together a cantaloupe pie, and it worked out pretty well. When the cantaloupe I was making it with one day was a bit too small, I supplemented it with a similarly sliced pear, and found it became even better. Before long it became my go-to recipe for "everybody bring something" events. People seemed to like it because it not only tasted good on its own, but had the added appeal of being just a bit unusual. And so when I received a tart pan as a gift this past Christmas, I knew what my first tart had to be.


Like many tart recipes, then, this one also adapts very easily back to a double-crust pie, either solid-top or lattice-top, if that’s what you prefer to make. The biggest difference here is that the tart version also has a glaze made from a Granny Smith apple, with a gentle tartness that contrasts nicely with the sweetness of the filling.



This recipe makes one 9-1/2” tart. 
Preheat your oven to 375 degrees, and blind bake a pastry shell in a 9-1/2” tart pan. (Clicking on the links will take you to previous posts featuring a tutorial video on blind baking and a pie crust recipe.)


Place a small glass plate in the freezer. (This is a technique borrowed from the world of jelly-making that will be useful when we make the glaze.)


Slice a cantaloupe into ¼” thick slices and cut off the rind. Peel and core a pear and cut it into similar ¼” thick slices.


Put ½ cup of brown sugar (firmly packed), 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, ½ teaspoon of ground nutmeg, and ½ teaspoon of kosher salt into a sealable plastic bag. Add the cantaloupe and pear slices and toss to coat.


After the pastry shell is blind-baked, arrange the fruit in the pastry shell in two layers, dotting each layer with about 1 teaspoon of butter substitute. Bake till done, about 60 minutes. (Similar to when you bake a pie, keep an eye on the crust and cover the edge with aluminum foil if it starts to get too brown.)


While the tart is baking, prepare the glaze as follows. (If you prefer, simply warming your favorite preserves to a brush-able texture would work too, if you don't mind the glaze being a bit sweeter than the Granny Smith apple version.)
Peel, core and coarsely chop a Granny Smith apple, putting the pieces in a bowl with the juice of one lemon and tossing to coat as you go to prevent the apple from oxidizing.


Put the apple pieces and the juice into a food processor and puree until liquid.


Put the pureed apple into a small saucepan with 2 -3 tablespoons of sugar and cook over low heat to a jelly-like consistency, checking the readiness of the hot liquid by putting a few drops on the frozen plate and seeing if it gels.


When the tart and glaze are ready, and while the tart is still warm, gently brush the glaze onto the fruit filling to finish the tart.


Hope you like it! If you prefer a cookbook-style, notebook ready copy of this or any other Kissing the Cook recipe, just let me know in a comment or e-mail and I'll send it right along.


See you next week with another kitchen-tested, user-friendly recipe! Till then, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)

Electric Cranberry Sauce with Apples and Apricots

Aside from being easy to serve, canned, jellied cranberry sauce has this redeeming quality: eating it is such good-tasting fun that you forget it doesn’t have any other redeeming qualities. I confess, with just the right amount of righteous guilt, to being a big fan of the stuff.


Still, with Christmas dinner barreling toward us at high speed and us staring at it like a reindeer in the headlights, it seems as good a time as any for "electric cranberry sauce with apples and apricots." It's a delicious, easy, and just a bit grown-up cranberry sauce I think you’ll like.


In a cup or small bowl, soak ½ cup of chopped dried apricots in 1/3 cup of brandy while you prepare the other ingredients. (It's this touch of brandy that gives this sauce both its deep taste and the word "electric" in its name.)


Combine 2 cups of cranberries, 1 large chopped apple, the juice and zest of one orange, 1/2 cup of sugar, ¼ teaspoon of salt, ½ teaspoon of cinnamon, and ½ teaspoon of nutmeg in a saucepan. Heat it to boiling, then reduce it to a simmer until the cranberries are tender and start to burst, about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.


Combine 1 tablespoon of cornstarch and 1 tablespoon of water, and mix into the cranberry mixture, cooking until thickened. Add the apricots, including the brandy, and heat until cooked through and the smell of alcohol subsides, about 3 minutes. If necessary, add additional sugar to taste. (I've found adding another 3 tablespoons works for me, but you may like more or less.)


If you’d like a cookbook style, notebook-ready copy of this recipe, just let me know in a comment or e-mail and it will be on its way, guaranteed to arrive in time for Christmas.


See you next week! Till then, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)

Paul Smith Podcast

The podcast of the Paul Smith: Design at Work interview, (held at the Apple Store three weeks ago) is now available to download from iTunes...and it's free! It really is worth a look. Not only is the man a genius designer, he's also really nice with a brilliant sense of humour. Sit back and enjoy!

The Legend that is Paul Smith

I am still on a massive high from this unbelievable experience! Being a huge Apple fan and a huuugge Paul Smith fan this event was just a dream come true. The new Apple store in Covent Garden hosted an evening with the man himself, with Dylan Jones (Editor of GQ) in interviewer mode. Although, they are obviously good friends, so it felt more like a friendly chat! As well as being an amazing designer, inspiring businessman and all round creative genius, Paul Smith is also a really nice bloke! He had us all in stitches with quirky little anecdotes and stories of how his career began.
There will be a free podcast of the interview to download from the Apple website soon, (keep an eye out for upcoming events whilst you're there) which I thoroughly recommend you sit down and watch with a cuppa. As always, he looked amazing, in one of his beautifully cut navy suits with printed purple lining and a sharp white shirt with mother of pearl popper buttons...style personified!







I loved the 'lived in' look of his shoes and the polka dot socks.

Oh Crepe!

Ok, I admit it. I messed up.

Normally I'm fairly rigorous about my mise-en-place, that French cooking term which translates, roughly, to "Exactly how dumb would you have to be to start cooking without checking first if you have all your ingredients?" (It does lose something in the translation.)

A couple of weekends ago, my vision of a perfect-50's-television-family Sunday morning breakfast of freshly made peach crepes came crashing back to reality when, part way through mixing the batter, I found I didn't have the milk called for in the recipe. Rummaging through the refrigerator, the closest thing to milk I could find was sour cream. Hardly an ideal substitute, but it's my firm belief that if an idea is the only one you have, it doesn't matter much if it's good or bad. (MacGyver would be so proud.)

As you might expect, the sour cream made for a much thicker batter than would the milk. If you've ever made crepes, you know that, while they're not at all hard to make, the thickness/thinness of the batter is critical. I found that increasing the amount of water called for in the original recipe brought the batter back to its intended thickness, while still allowing the nice flavor added by the sour cream to come through. The disaster for which breakfast was originally headed was, I am happy to report, avoided. It turned out so well that the sour-cream version has now become my go-to crepe recipe.

Crepes, of course, are one of the great, versatile foods. Fill them with fruit for breakfast, with meat for dinner; I've even heard of filling them with lunch meat and cheese, similar to a wrap, for lunch. Remember, it's your crepe. Have fun with it! (My son did try using peanut butter and it was terrible. Even crepes, it would seem, have their limits.)

For the filling, a peach-compote of sorts was easy to make using an approach that will probably seem familiar to anyone who has ever made fruit jam.


To make about 8 crepes, combine 1 cup of all-purpose flour, ¼ teaspoon of salt, 2 tablespoons of butter substitute (melted), 2 egg-substitute eggs, 1 cup of low-fat sour cream and 1/2 cup of water in a bowl and mix well with an electric hand mixer on high. Add additional water, ¼ cup at a time, until the batter is the consistency of heavy cream. Cover with plastic wrap and let rest in the refrigerator for 1-2 hours.

After the batter has finished resting, heat a non-stick sauté pan over low heat. When it's heated, remove it from the stove, melt about a teaspoon of butter substitute in it, and add about ¼ cup of the batter. (Unlike pancakes, crepes are very thin.) Swirl the batter around to cover the surface of the pan, put it back on the stove and increase the heat to medium. (I recently saw one of my favorite tv chefs, Michael Chiarello, add a teaspoon of toasted chopped hazelnuts to the batter at this point. What a great idea!) When the crepe is browned on the bottom and firm enough to be flipped (usually about two minutes, but keep an eye on it), flip the crepe or use a spatula and your fingers (carefully!) to turn it over and cook it on the opposite side until it has the desired brownness. (If you're new at flipping, don't be discouraged if the first few flips don't work out. It's really the only challenging part of making a crepe, and it does get much better with just a little practice. The first time I made crepes I had to throw out the first three or four attempts. Stay with it. And this is a case where a good pan really does make a difference.) Repeat the process until all the batter is used, rebuttering the pan after each crepe, and stacking the cooked crepes as they finish. Keeping the stack covered with a clean towel to prevent them from drying out.

Of course, even good crepes need a nice filling.


For the filling, combine in a medium saucepan 1-1/2 cups of sugar and the juice and zest of 1 lemon. Heat it over very low heat, stirring often, until the mixture is melted. (This should take a few minutes.)

Once the sugar mixture is melted, add 6 peaches, sliced into eighths, ¼ tsp ground nutmeg, and 1 tablespoon of butter substitute, and increase the heat to medium. Cook until the peaches are soft and the liquid is reduced. Turn off heat and let the peach mixture rest to allow the liquid to thicken. Fill the crepes, roll them up, sprinkle them with a little confectioner's sugar, and serve warm.

(An equally nice apple filling can be made by using apples instead of peaches, and 1/2 tsp of ground cinnamon along with the nutmeg. I used golden delicious and it was delicious, but experiment with whatever your favorite apple is.)


After you've filled and folded over the crepe, don't forget to sprinkle confectioner's sugar on top!

Till next week, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)