It’s amazing the lovely colours that we can still achieve even in the heart of winter. I always used to  imagine and think that winter food was dull, heavy and mostly brown until fairly recently. Winter has become one of my favourite seasons to cook as I can experiment with meat cuts that require long and slow cooking times and also it’s the time of year when we have plenty of game and alternative meats available to us.

Pheasant is one of my seasonal favourites. I get my pheasants from a local butcher, I know they are fresh and local which is always a bonus.

Curly kale is in season at the moment and is part of the cabbage family. It is rich in iron with it’s bright green leaves, perfect to liven up my winter plates. I like most of the cabbage family but I have a golden rule

When it’s cold and miserable outside, my body does not seem to want to co-operate and function as it should. It feels as if I want to go into hibernation, curl up under a blanket and not move. After 17 years my body still has not completely adapted to the cold and with the temperatures hovering round zero you can understand why it’s even harder for me to jump about. Over the festive period I was doing a lot of curling up, watching endless weird TV, mostly on food and cooking.I paged through hordes of the last decades magazines and paid recognition to the shelves of cookery books that we have collected over the past 10 years.

My cookbook favourites seem to change every 6 months and  appear to follow the seasons. One of my seasonal favourites is ‘Saha’ by Greg and Lucy Malouf. Not only do I love the

I have not been this excited about mastering a recipe in years! Reading the news paper and Delicious magazines predictions on what’s  ”hot” this year in the line of culinary arts, I could not stop myself from flying into the kitchen to bake up an enormous storm  as whoopie pies are going to be in vogue this year.

We had a lot of fun making these outrageously indulgent and seriously delicious whoopie pies. At first the song “Makin’ Whoopee” by Frank Sinatra got us going, singing in the very non musical voices that we have. It bugged us for a while at first as we knew there was a song with these words, well I hope you get the idea and feeling of the amount of fun we had creating this incredibly yummy cake.

I was reading up about whoopie pies and it’s said that they apparently originated

This lightly coloured Seville orange and vanilla bean marmalade is enhanced by the inclusion of the vanilla beans which gives it that heavenly fragrance. It is luxurious and I love giving a jar or two to friends and family, as it’s a real treat. For me there is not a better tasting marmalade than home made Seville Orange Marmalade.

The Seville orange season is short and is over before you realize it. The season runs from December to February. I love using the Seville oranges for making marmalade, as they are extra bitter and somewhat uncomplicated but sophisticated at the same time. I have cooked and eaten several various marmalade combinations in my life time but in my opinion the absolute sophistication of Seville oranges makes the best tasting marmalade.

The oranges also freeze well, so if you buy some but  do not get the chance to make the marmalade