Details of the meeting times and venue are shown on the Groups Summary page.
For those with an interest in cooking to talk about their craft (art?) and exchange recipes and items to sample.
Meetings:
At the time of writing (May 2004), we have had three monthly meetings (Monday afternoon) are six members and we meet at my home, Valley View, Station Road, Giggleswick. Before the first meeting, I drew up a list of possible topics and activities. These have been added to as we have got to know each other and have considered various options A group such as ours will be dictated to by the talents, experience and interests of the individual members. I have had recipe books, magazines, mail order catalogues, information on food history, cooking utensils and appliances on hand to stimulate discussion, but in actual fact, the discussion just flowed without much of an input from me.
So far, we have not thought about initiating a cookery demonstration amongst ourselves, but members are taking it in turns to bring an item they have cooked or baked for the rest of us to sample. We decide on the item at the previous meeting. We are hoping to invite an occasional speaker and in the autumn we hope to visit the Food and Wine group of the Clitheroe U3A.
Our next meeting is a Safari supper, with four members hosting and serving
a section of the meal in their homes. For the meeting after that we hope to
have a meal together at a pub. in Hurst Green. Meetings at the moment are decided
on an ad hoc basis, but the character of the group is beginning to take shape
and the future looks intereresting and promising.
Useful Web sites
The Internet is fast becoming a primary source of material to cover every aspect of Food, Recipes and Cooking, as anyone will discover who does a Search on the topics. The amount if information available is, in fact, overwhelming. Please note, the vast majority of recipe web sites are American where the ingredient weights in the recipes are often in "cups". This is not a simple matter of working out proportions as, for example, a cup of flour does not weigh the same as a cup of sugar.
The following is a selection of British and American web site addresses which are recommended.
British
This web site is possibly the most useful of all and is a pleasure to surf. The data base of recipes is growing impressively. For example, there are nearly 400 listed under the title Cooking for Two. All the recipes for Ready Steady Cook are here and so are most for Saturday Kitchen There are all kinds of interesting articles, profiles and bits of information.
The web site of the Open University Food Dept. and of the BBC programme All you need to know about Food. There are some recipes, but the information on the history, culture, technology and science of food is really interesting and useful. It is worth downloading the Macromedia device (as instructed) to follow interactively.
This is a truly professional web site with a lot of Delia Smith's recipes from her earlier books, but it is an overtly commercial site and this can mar one's surfing.
This is the colourful web site of UK Food, a programme available on Sky Digital channel 150. There are profiles of some celebrity chefs and a growing data base of recipes amongst other interesting items.
For dedicated Aga users, this colourful and interesting site with some recipes,
is also a rather commercial one.
www.farmersmarkets.net Information on the time and place of some of the Farmers'
Markets held in the UK.
The online bookshop with a most efficient and speedy
service. Do a Search on a cookery title and the odds are Amazon has it.
American
This site offers over 16,000 recipes, many with pictures. Some recipes are from back issues of the upmarket Gourmet and Bon Appètit magazines.
This is a veritable cook's thesaurus and encyclopaedia rolled into one and is a valuable reference guide for all aspects of food.
www.britannia.com/cooking/cook.html
Where you will find, believe it or not, British regional cooking recipes, to
inform the American visitor to the UK.