This has very little to do with salvaging but i just wanted to rave a little about my saturday lunch experience at Jamie’s new restaurant in Glasgow, a coalescing of my two loves – interiors and food. Albeit with a fairly corporate edge to the whole operation, i still would struggle to think of anywhere with a better combination of menu choice and careful style. Often i find you get one or the other when dining out. Firstly, the place is huge, meaning more room to display the vast collection of Le Marais and Bentwood bistro chairs. The antique pine shelves and sideboards are positively heaving with italian delicacies and voluptuous vegetables, whilst cured meats dangle invitingly from the ceiling. Napkins are (faux) vintage personalised linen. Food is served in a wide array of receptacles, from little cardboard boxes stuffed with fresh bread, copper bowls delicately lined with illustrated paper, beautiful rustic pottery pasta dishes, mini-wooden platters, cast iron teapots….

We struggled to choose from the well-composed menu, featuring many of Jamie’s signature ingredients (lemon, mint, chilli, cinnamon, anchovies). Ingredients are sourced both locally and from Italy – smoked mozzarella, tuscan fennel salami, sicilian cracked wheat, burrata…..not your average supermarket fare. Pasta is made fresh every day, and you can really tell. We went for the rice balls stuffed with mozarella and porcini, polenta chips and stuffed courgette flowers to start, followed by prawn linguine and the most intensely lemony ravioli…oooh it was good!

Now all i need is a valid excuse to go back very soon.

Shopping for cookbooks in second hand shops can be quite unsatisfying. Rows of 1980’s m&s freebies, rubbish cupcake booklets and the odd obligatory delia smith classic. Purchasing cookbooks is something i would suggest requires considerable selectivity and deliberation, given the vast array of options on the market. Which means buying second hand becomes even more of a challenge. In general, i tend to only buy books written by specific favoured chefs, ones who have actually written the book and thus tried and tested all the recipes themselves. I can heartily recommend the following 4 books, all lovingly discovered in my local charity shops.

This completes my set of much loved covent garden soup books, the above one containing more pulse and beans recipes in addition to yummy soups and other liquid glory.
Sam and Sam Clark wrote this one some years after the original Moro cookbook, both of which are based on mediterranean/middle eastern cuisine. Before opening their london restaurant, they drove from spain to the sahara in search of recipes and ingredients. This latest one is based on using ingredients grown in their london allotment, together with sumptuous spices and sweet flavours from the med.
I can’t recommend highly enough Allegra McEvedy, she is my favourite food writer having discovered her a few years ago via the guardian food supplement. Her Leon books (1 & 2) include all the recipes from the london-based fast food restaurant, plus a ton of other family heirloom kitchen secrets, plus fabulous styling to boot. This latest book was recently a bbc 1 series of the same clever name. The ‘economy’ is not based on buying cheap food, but buying something exciting (eg a massive leg of lamb) and then using it in various ways over 3 meals.    These books need no introduction! I recently toyed with buying them on amazon at a hefty cost (for, realistically, a set of book that i will never use, but feel the need to own having enjoyed the film a lot). So i was pleased as punch to pick these up last week for £1 each. Who knows – maybe one day i’ll try my hand at Quenelles de poisson, or Rognons de veau en casserole…