How to make tap water taste good

I was blogging this week for The Guardian about soft drinks - mainly from the point of view of what to drink when you don't drink alcohol. One of the points that came up, however, is how expensive many soft drinks are - volume for volume, often as much as wine.It prompted me to point out (in the unlikely event that you're not already aware of it) how good basic tap water can taste if you tart it up a bit. Step one obviously being to chill it and add some extra ice cubes then to add some extra ingredients as they did in this hotel I stayed in in Chile (above) where they flavoured it with peaches,...

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Leftover patatas bravas

Or, to be more accurate, leftover roasties given the patatas bravas treatment ....Here's how it came about. We roasted a chicken last night with some new potatoes, rosemary and garlic having started a meal with a green bean and tomato salad. I had two large roast tomato halves left over plus some roasted garlic cloves and enough potatoes to feed four (although I have to admit we managed to demolish them between the two of us which wasn't exactly healthy or frugal).It suddenly occurred to me that I could make patatas bravas by reheating the potatoes (easy in the Aga but I could have dry-fried them...

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Why isn't soup sexy?

This week I ordered a chilled watercress soup (not the one above) in a smart London restaurant. Nothing remarkable about that you might think but in fact it's an all-too-rare occurrence. So rare in fact that they clearly didn't know how to make it. Blending it with cucumber rather than with some sweated off onion and potato, chicken or vegetable stock and a dash of milk or cream, resulted in a dark green pool of what looked - and I suspect tasted like - pondweed.So why don't we see soup more often? It's great for restaurants - a cheap and easy dish to make and good for lunchtime customers who...

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Rescuing beet greens and bean skins

Frugality, as I've said before, isn't just about buying cheap but making the best use of what you buy. And nowhere is this more true than of beetroot leaves and broad bean skins, that get discarded from the now seemingly compulsory double podding process. This week I've found uses for both.First the greens, because that was a triumph, though I say so myself. I turned them into a Greek style spanakopitta by wilting them then mixing them with chopped spring onions and a little garlic softened in a mixture of oil and butter and some feta-style ewes' milk cheese I'd impulsively bought in the farmers'...

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