Here's a quick recipe for you, lifted straight from Guardian website, and for once made with no alterations so definitely deserving of credit and a link, it's an amazing cauliflower and sweet potato curry, "Leon Gobi". I first saw it in the paper as an extract from Allegra McEvedy's new book, "Leon, Ingredients and Recipes for the Good Life". Despite it's fairly long list of ingredients, it's really easy to make, and incredibly tasty. I saw the book in the shops yesterday and I have to say it looks pretty tasty too. I wanted to hug it (erm is that it bit strange?). It's one of those big chunky books with unfinished paper, loads of beautiful retro illustrations and quirky pages with bits and pieces that you can take out. None of this really has anything to do with food and it being a cookbook I suppose you'd probably prefer to know whether or not the recipes are any good before you'd decide to go buy it. All I can say is that if this recipe is anything to go by then it definitely will be. I was too busy stroking the pages and drooling over the quirky design to actually ...

Guest Post #2 by Master Baker Andy! Apologies first for the terrible title. But as I am currently back at my parents living on Merseyside temporarily. I've had to get used to seeing references to the Beatles everywhere... but you may have realised that I cunningly concealed the subject of today's bread making post in that title? Have you guessed what it is yet? Yup, the humble naan bread. Like fish comes with chips (er, not if you're a vegetarian...), ok then, like sosmix bangers and mash, for me the naan is as much of a part of a curry as the actual curry dish itself. When I was in India a few years ago, myself and my travelling companion John would have a naan bread with every meal. The only difference was that he ate "butter naans" with each meal whereas I would have a plain one. There was a bit of an increase in his weight during those 3 weeks in India. (For those who don't know I was John's best man at his wedding last week so I feel I am still in speech mode... and crucifying his personality... I'll stop now!).. Anyway naan bread. I'd never really thought too ...

Last week when I went to do my shopping at K+N in Birkenhead (top veg shop!) I saw they had a couple of crates of English tomatoes for sale at £2.99 each. £2.99!! The box was over 5kg! So that's less than 60p per kg or about £1 less per kg than normal price. I knew it was good, but I'd never normally get through so many before they went squidgy.  And then a flash of inspiration, I remembered seeing Hugh making tomato sauce for the year from his home grown yearly glut and decided this was my chance to do the same (shame they weren't home grown though). This is really good. K+N probably buy from wholesale market in Liverpool, which I assume works a bit like a normal market, only bigger. Often at the end of the day you'll get people practically giving things away, and they pass this on to their customers. Reminds me of I was walking through Kirkgate Market in Leeds a couple of weeks ago and a guy was shouting "Bag of bananas a pound! As many bananas as you can fit in a carrier bag a pound!" He had a hoard of ladies surrounding ...

When we moved away form Manchester we put our compost bin plus all it's contents on freecycle and it was snapped up in seconds. In fact loads of people wanted it. The guy that we chose to give it to arrived with a big smile on his face, an estate car, 4 bins and a shovel. It was a smelly job, hard work too, but obviously the he knew it was worth it. An estimated 6.7 million tonnes of household food waste is thrown away each year to rot in landfill. This creates a toxic sludge and gives off greenhouse gases which contribute to climate change. As well as looking at how to avoid wasting food by your shopping behaviour and meal planning the harm caused by any unavoidable food waste (eg peelings, cores etc) could be reduced or even eliminated by composting. If you have a compost bin, or wormery your food scraps are converted into a valuable resource. The food breaks down and the nutrients they contained are put back into the soil as part of a natural cycle renewing the earth. It is a potent natural fertiliser that in large scale non-organic farming is replaced by polluting oil ...

Blimey I've been eating a lot of pumpkin! Since the Hallowe'en party last week which left me with about 10kg of pumpkin to use I've made it a bit of a mission to try use the pumpkin in as many different ways as possible and have come up with this list of ten things to do with your Hallowe'en pumpkin. I've tried to make them all quite different, so there should be something to suit everyone so you'll have no excuse to throw your pumpkin away to rot. If you got a bit giddy like I did and bought the biggest pumpkin you could find you should have enough to make all these things. You'd also probably need to be a little bit insane to want to make them all, well at least all within the space of a week, so you might want to freeze some. You can just peel and chop the pumpkin as normal and then bag the bits and pop them in the freezer. I did this last year and they were fine to chuck into soups and things. No reason they shouldn't be good for anything else too. I can't quite believe how much we managed to ...