If I didn’t have to shelter in a bookshop during a torrential downpour in Port of Spain, I might not have picked up a little gem called A Taste of Nature Island Cooking: The Cuisine of Dominica by Hyacinth Elwin.
I’m always on the lookout for cookbooks that give some insight into how people eat in the rest of the Caribbean and I’ve always been intrigued by Dominica’s interesting history and so I was keen to read about how this history has informed their cuisine.
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What a week the last one has been! I’ve been recovering from a nasty ear infection and trying to get my act together for a trip to Trinidad for some much needed relaxation and rum.
But the thing that caught my eye in recent days was the ruling by an Australian court that deemed a bad restaurant review to be defamatory.
The food critics and bloggers around the world were shocked by this, after all, it’s a critic’s right to criticise isn’t it? I think it’s a ridiculous decision and aparently it’s not the first, I understand that a jury in Belfast, Northern Ireland, upheld a restaurant owner’s claim that a review in the Irish News was defamatory and awarded him £25,000 earlier this year.
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I just read an article in the Guardian about one of my heroes, Sir Alex Ferguson, manager of Manchester United who admitted that cooking is tougher than football.
I already know of Sir Alex’s passion for top notch wines but I’ve just learnt that he loves cooking Chinese meals.
“Ferguson also revealed that he regards being a chef as harder than being a football manager. “I worked in a kitchen for 18 months. I bought a site in Paisley for a restaurant; I was about 30 and I felt that, if I was going to run a restaurant, I needed to work in one to see what it was like.
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I will be celebrating my birthday in a few weeks time and my friends have already started bringing on the gifts. Krista gave me a copy of The Caribbean Cook by Patrick Campbell and Lisa bequeathed me Culinaria Europe.
I’ll have a time going through them and experimenting. Not to mention Angela Hartnett’s Cucina which I bought as an advanced birthday gift for myself last month.
I’m accepting gifts of gadgets and books, so take note.

Usually it takes a lot to shock me, but a recent edition of Whistleblower, one of the BBC’s investigative programmes left me sick and totally speechless.
In Whistleblower: Supermarkets, two reporters went undercover to expose health and safety issues around food in some of this country’s supermarkets. I was left stunned at some of the appalling breaches of food safety committed by the workers at Sainsbury’s and Tesco. The workers on the fresh meat counters were caught re-labelling food that was past its sell-by date, falsifying food records and using meat scissors to cut their nails. But I won’t relate too much more of this story, I’ll quote from the reporters themselves as they tell the story the best.
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Stargazy Pie. It’s such an evocative name, Stargazy - gazing up to the stars. But Stargazy Pie? I first heard about Stargazy Pie a few weeks ago when top London chef Mark Hix cooked one for the Great British Menu, a cook-off among the UK’s top chef that’s televised on the BBC.
In Hix’s book British Regional Cooking (which I blogged about here), he says Stargazy Pie is a traditional pie from Mousehole (pronounced Mouzul) in Cornwall which is served up on Tom Bawcock’s Eve (23 December).
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