Syrup sponge pudding - great comfort food for this time of year. You can't go wrong with Delia's recipe:

http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/ty...

I can't abide slow cooker food as to me it tastes, well, institutional, and a lot of stuff comes out tasting very samey. I know I'm not alone in this, however much some people rave about their crockpots/slow cookers.

I'd try some of the suggestions from other posters, and if that doesn't work, I'd just accept that crockpots just don't work for you. I much prefer my pressure cooker, which is pretty high up on the list of things I'd grab from the house if it were on fire....

I am increasingly cheesed off with people's constant eating at work. It seems like every meeting I go to someone is chomping away at something. Even ones first thing in the morning , when grown adults should be organised enough to get up in time to have breakfast. I can cope with a cup of tea or coffee but the full on cake/sandwich/crisps just does my head in.

I'm in the UK and go to the US for a consortium meeting each year. The meeting has a constant supply of food on tap - bagels, toast, muffins, cookies, fruit, and other assorted junk which is just a total waste as well as encouraging poor eating habits. Snacks are increasingly supersized (not just in the US, but in the UK as well) -for me, a snack is a banana, or a single biscuit (cookie) - something like a Digestive, but not a hand sized chewy US-style cookie. Now it seems like a bagel with jam is a snack - that's BREAKFAST!

Although I'm not practising what I preach at the moment - I'm pregnant and oscillating between eating anything that's not nailed down, and everything making me want to heave :/

Buckwheat pancakes, blueberries and maple syrup, with juice. Gotta love weekend breakfasts.

I usually use metal dishes for cooking pastry/pies in, although I do have a couple of Pyrex pie plates. No matter what I'm cooking in, I always place the pie dish on top of a pre-warmed baking sheet to get good heat transfer through to the pastry.

Fever Tree is the sine que non of tonics, IMO, it's just amazing. That said, I usually just use Schweppes which is good enough for everyday drinking.

I highly reccommend Sipsmith gin if you haven't tried it already.

I got the best peanut butter cookie recipe from here but I have no idea who posted it - I've scribbled it down on a bit of paper. Minimal effort as it involves a food processor.

Try John Lewis. We got our Le Creuset Tri-ply stainless saucepans from there, I'm pretty sure they do an "own-brand" version as well, which should be cheaper. GIven that it's John Lewis, the own brand will be top quality and come with an impressive guarentee.

Lakeland Limited is also worth looking at, although I'm not sure if they carry an own-brand SS line. THey also have legendary customer service.

Ikea's 365+ range is also SS.

freia - here in the UK the sugars you have in your images are the other way round - what is called turbinado sugar is what is sold in the UK as demerara. The second, darker one is dark soft brown sugar. See here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_...

For us, it's spoonfuls here and there - I tossed a tablespoon or two of egg mayo after lunch - not enough to do another sandwich, and I also threw out two parsnips which had gone mouldy when we had been away for Christmas. I meal plan so try to recycle leftovers into packed lunches, and it's (very) rare that I'll through a portion of a meal out because it's gone bad before it can be eaten.

Our council is BRILLIANT about recycling - we don't even have to sort our recycling. Anything recycleable - plastic, glass, batteries, cans, paper etc. just gets tipped into a big blue wheelie bin and the council collects and sorts it. Food waste goes into the garden waste bin. It's brilliant.

I could be wrong, but I suspect that the EU has imposed targets (ie, each council must recycle X% of its collection) which really has helped in the UK.

A huge +1 for Jamie Oliver Ministry of Food/Food Revolution. It was written expressly with people like this in mind, to teach them how to cook good, healthy food for their families.

I just use my hands. Quicker to wash up than my food processor, and I have cold hands.

+1 on the Kuhn Rikon. My mum packed me off to college with one and I've gone through more than one trash can to rescue it when it's accidently been thrown out. I love it way too much for a kitchen implement.

I bought one of the kyocera ones but I just can't get on with it -t he swivel head swivels too much for me to get a grip on anything.

I loooooove weetabix. However if my day job doesn't work out, I'm going to patent a glue made of dried up Weetabix. If you don't rinse your bowl out straight away once you're done, that stuff sets like CONCRETE!

This - there's only two of us and I can't justify having all those sweet goodies in the house! I also don't like the idea of rocking up at work all the time with *yet more* stuff I've baked - for some reason I don't want to be that person, in addition to why spend all the money baking stuff to give it away? (Other than special occasion baking for gift giving, that is).

It's half the reason I love having people around - an excuse to bake!

I love baking but I don't aspire to any gourmet fancy-dan delicacies that would involve spending $$$ on obscure ingredients or bits of kit.

I agree with alkapal when they mention humidity - if brittle isn't stored in a dry environment, it goes all sticky and gooey. If you put it in containers before it's perfectly cool, the condensation that forms inside the container will ruin it.

I also make sure I cool my brittle in a dry place - so it doesn't stay in the kitchen if I have pots on the hob!

For several makes of french presses you can buy replacement glasses for - is that an option?

The Delia recipe referred to in the first reply is a bit of an English institution, and the one I make every year for Christmas. If you are after a slightly lighter fruit cake which is perfect without icing (of course you don't have to ice the Delia one, but it would be a bit naked without it!) try a Dundee cake. I make a few of these every Christmas and give them to my neighbours. Here's the Saint Delia recipe:

http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/ty...

I don't know anything about cast iron composition, or sand casting or what have you. I did, however, buy two new (gasp!) Lodge skillets a few years ago. They were pre-seasoned (double gasp!) and cost me under 20 bucks.

They cook flawlessly. I can happily make anything I want in them - eggs, pancakes, etc and never had any sticking problems.

I really wish I had complained at a gastropub we went to lunch at a fortnight ago. BUT - it was the leaving party of someone who worked for me, and they had chosen the venue, so I was very reluctant to make a fuss in front of them.

I did leave a review on a local review website - to which the management responded, if rather snarkily. I felt heartened that the only other reviews were also negative.

The service was atrocious, the portion of the main course was tiny, and the menu descriptions were so minimalistic that it wasn't clear what was going to turn up. For example, "egg custard" on the menu transpired to be a custard tart, not something like a creme brulee.

Unforgivable however, was the "traditional bread and butter pudding" which came stuffed with dried fruit and nuts, and the bread was not adequately soaked through with custard, resulting in stale clumps of bread.

I did think about complaining but didn't want to spoil the atmosphere.

The orange and lemon cheesecake (might be a citrus cheesecake, don't have my book to hand) in Kitchen Diaries is utterly divine and has NEVER cracked on me once. The citrus makes it feel fresher and lighter than a vanilla cheesecake, even if it is baked.

I also rate his simple miso salad dressing - I think he credits Nigella Lawson with it, but it's basically miso paste with hot water. Brilliant.

I agree - I've barely cooked anything from my copy of the Silver Spoon. It may be a veritable encyclopedia of Italian foods, but it certainly doesn't inspire me. Nor do I want to trawl through thousands of pages in the off-chance I might find something.

I flicked through this in my local book shop but decided it would be too like the Silver Spoon - there may be some gems in there, but they're buried too deep to be any use to me.

My parents are vegetarian, so I was bought up vegetarian and have never eaten meat. I consider myself to be a very healthy 30 year old (touch wood)- only minor colds, fit, agile, healthy weight etc so I've never seen the nutritional need to eat meat.

I do find it increasingly restrictive. I really hate eating out, unless it's somewhere where I know I can get decent choices. I'm not going to let my dietary restrictions dictate where a whole group of my friends are going to eat, so I am used to having the one deathly dull and unimaginative vegetarian option on the menu.

It's a good mark of a chef BTW - if they can't be arsed to come up with a decent, innovative vegetarian option, what else can't they be arsed with?

Awesome! I love this book, it's got loads of great recipes in it! I love the aubergines with spicy peanut sauce, the hot and spicy bean curd and the black bean charros - I cook these all the time! I also rate the rice recipes (there's a great iranian pilaf) and the nigerian peanut kidney bean stew.

A lot of the sauces for the veggie dishes work really well as general stir fry sauces as well.

One thing to bear in mind - I find the serving sizes to be a little on the small side - I think that each recipe is supposed to be part of a meal, rather than a meal in itself.

Heck yeah! Mind you with the hype it could have been *awful* and I would still have loved it. I can totally get why they are so iconic. Kind of like custard creams or jammie dodgers in the UK.

I've just remembered another thing I bring back from the US- Cracker Jack popcorn. A US Coastguard ship once came to Belfast and they did tours around their ship - the sailors handed out boxes of CrackerJack to us kids. I kept the empty box for years. Good ol' Uncle Sam!

As for the junk food, as a kid growing up in Ireland you see a lot of US TV shows, get a lot of US books. They are full of references to things like Oreos etc - for YEARS I wanted to know what an oreo was, let alone what it tasted like. It was one of the first things I begged someone to bring back from the US!!

TK Maxx sometimes have cast iron le creuset - they almost always have the LC poterie stuff as well. You can also find cast iron skillets in my local TK Maxx.

Don't discount Tesco either - I found one of my all-time favourite Brabantia 10-inch skillet with lid there on sale for about £20. I also have friends with the Tesco Finest copper bottomed saucepans and they rate them highly.

If you live near a John Lewis, wait until Debenhams have a Blue Cross sale on - that way you can get the John Lewis guarentee and customer service at the Debenham's sale prices, as JL price match.

I can't comment on the braising meat issue (I'm vegetarian) but for a whole host of veggie dishes (mainly pulse-based) I just can't justify using a normal stovetop pot. I can do chickpeas in 16 mins in the pressure cooker, vs nearly 2hrs on the hob in a normal pot. I just refuse to pay the gas bill!

My first ever saucepan was a bottom of the range, cheap as chips Ikea non-stick milk pan, that I was packed off to college with. That pan will outlast me - it's still as good as the day it was bought, and it's now about 12 years old. I took no care at all with not using metal on the non-stick, and it's held up fine. It's superior to the Le Creuset trivita nonstick milkpan we got 6 years ago for a wedding present - and it was a fraction of the price.

Still use it daily to make my porridge - I think in terms of bang for your buck, Ikea stuff is pretty good.

It could be that the retailer needs to account for extra wastage - they might not have the turnover to use up an entire catering-size carton of soy milk in the time before it would spoil. So they charge the customer more to accout for the soy milk they have to throw away.

I do think that 45cents is a bit steep though.