food

Mention the topic of English wine in polite conversation, and it is likely to go down about as well as Dan Ashcroft's dutch wine recommendation during his Weekend on Sunday job interview.

The controversial subject recently found itself at the centre of a Today programme debate, where Guardian wine overlord and Superplonker Malcolm Gluck managed to incur the wrath of the writers of the English Wine website. Meanwhile, over in TV land, Fiz's new boyfriend in ITV's premier kitchen sink drama Coronation Street recently did his bit to spread the English wine gospel, bringing his own low food miles offering for Roy to drink with his rolls.

My only personal experience of English wine is the light and summery 2006 Limney Horsmonden dry white produced by the organic Davenport Vineyards in Kent and East Sussex, that actually kind of reminded me of apple juice (which is perhaps not so bonkers as it sounds, given that the grapes are grown in the same place as lots of our traditional English apples).

A sparkling wine produced by Britain's largest vineyard Denbies in Surrey apparently recently beat off some of the best champagnes in blind tastings to be awarded a gold medal. The Hilton Cobham hotel is currently offering a hotel and vineyard visit package for £94 per person per night, if you fancy taking a look for yourself.

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Public opinion is by now pretty much sold on the idea of eating seasonally, such are the column inches devoted to the issues of food miles, buying locally, organic produce and farmers markets in the national press. This weekend's Guardian even handed over a whole supplement to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Seasonal Food Guide.

But as anyone who has watched the contents of an organic box delivery scheme slowly turn to mush inside their fridge (along with all your good intentions) will testify, sometimes this is a lot easier said than done. Thinking of ways to use up the rather alien contents of your weekly box can require the skill and imagination of a Ready Steady Cook professional chef: coming up with any recipes at all which require the dreaded fennel or celeriac is challenge enough - but thats only if you can even identify these strange unfashionable vegetables in the first place.

This is where the Eat The Seasons website comes in: a weekly updated guide to which vegetables, fruit, meat and fish are currently in season, complete with all-important pictures, preparation guidelines and recipe suggestions for many ingredients. A good place to start to help you get the most out of your box of vegetables, although sadly the ingredient profiles are still not yet 100% complete (I still don't know what to do with that bloody fennel!).

Fans of celebrity cookbooks can also download the Eat The Seasons Cook Book Companions E-books for £1.50 a piece, providing a by-season navigational tool to find your way round your Nigella Lawson, Nigel Slater and River Cottage tomes, thereby ensuring the use of the most seasonal produce at every turn.

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Perhaps you also received your McDonald's voucher book through your letterbox this morning - a PR stunt set at rebranding their food as not as bad as everyone says it is through the testimonials of various real people involved in the McDonald's chain. Perhaps you even made it as far as their Make Up Your Own Mind website, where members of the public are invited to put any question they wish to the McDonald's team.

If you didn't make it to the site yet, The Monobrow recommends you do next time you have a spare minute to fill, as there are some real gems on there. Aside from the general illiteracy, some of the questions must either be jokes or the work of a real life Vicky Pollard.

For example: "Is it true that a child once lost an eye on your happy bus and then you used it in your burger and someone found it there and it was all over the papers. Ronald McDonald the clown was also blamed for poor child care." (Answer: "No, this is not true").

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The thing about this modern breed of ethical companies, is that some of them just seem too good to be true. Surely there must be a catch somewhere - it is still business after all. But if there is some hidden shadiness in all-round nice guys and all-round nice smoothie makers Innocent, I certainly haven't found it yet...

Unlike many of their supermarket shelf neighbours, their smoothies genuinely do contain 100% fruit - three quarters of a pound of the stuff to be precise - and no concentrate, vegetable oil or any other sort of additives which would tarnish the purity of the fresh fruit experience. But producing honest healthy drinks - as opposed to just marketing their drinks as healthy - isn't enough for them: how about a free annual festival raising money for their chosen charity Wellchild, just to prove how deep this all-round nice guy thing goes?

Head to Gloucester Green in the north eastern corner of Regents Park on the weekend of August 5th and 6th for the proof in the Fruitstock pudding. To be fair, certain corporate associates may be taking advantage of the promotional oppurtunity along the way - hamper providers Carluccios, Pimms, Mumm Champagne, The Times and Penguin books for starters - but with free entertainment from the likes of French new wave cover-merchants Nouvelle Vague, West London legend Norman Jay and nineties right on types Arrested Development, you really have nothing to complain about.

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Summer is here, there is no avoiding that – it doesn’t get dark until 10, your flat is like an oven, and every other car that goes past is flying an England flag - yes, it is summer alright. And what better way to make the best of the weather than to head to the nearest park or beach, and spend the whole day eating, drinking and watching the world drift by? But there is absolutely no point in ruining your day with warm and limp refreshments, so you might want to consider tooling up with a few essentials now, writes Rob Masterton. read more...

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As a hardened vegetarian who has gotten quite good at this cooking lark (even if I do say so myself), as well as a spoilt bitch who has had far too many free lunches in her time, I've got beef with just about every vegetarian restaurant I've ever been to. And darling of the London restaurant press though it may be, I'm afraid we're going to have to add The Gate vegetarian restaurant in Hammersmith to the list. read more...

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Everyone needs a little help once in a while figuring out what meal they can create from their barren fridge and storecupboard. Let's face it, we're all a bit too lazy to leave the house unless we have to.

But this is the computer age, and gone are the days of trawling through recipe books looking for dishes you can make with your last potato, a lump of cheese and a couple of carrots. Simply punch the meagre contents of your fridge into Google, and up pops a whole host of pertinent recipes from a whole host of sources. (Hint: if searching for aubergine or courgette recipes, also run a search with their eggplant and zucchini US equivalents to double your chances of success).

But if you don't quite trust some of the more random recipe pages which Google throws up, there are a couple of failsafe authoratative online resources which are also worth a blast. BBC Food allows an ingredient search of their recipe database, featuring creations from the whole gamut of past food broadcasts, from Ready Steady Cook to Rick Stein and Masterchef. Waitrose also offers a online recipe archive in the name of encouraging you to shop with them.

On an alcoholic tip, discover new cocktails by entering your available spirits and juices into Webtender, or download the Pocket Bartender for your fancy phone or PDA.

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You have probably already heard about the crisis in French wine, as cheaper Australian imports flood our supermarket shelves, and even the French themselves drink less wine.

Now I am all in favour of a cheap bottle of wine - The Monobrow was founded on several bottles of the stuff - but round here, a bit of personality and individuality goes a long way. Plumping for your mass-produced Jacobs Creeks and Ernest & Julio Gallos everytime just because you have seen them advertised on TV is a cop out - and you know it.

But going out on a limb when choosing a wine is a risky business, so it is always nice to have someone else guiding you along the way. Which is where bulk buys of mixed cases from UK wine merchants Laithwaites come in. 12 bottle cases start at around £50, working out at the supermarket-beating price of around £4 a bottle.

Each wine is specially selected directly from a small independent vineyard, cutting out the middlemen and ensuring personality, value for money and the feelgood factor of knowing you are supporting the grassroots.

The whole buying process with Laithwaites is a much more personal experience than with famous competitor Virgin Wines, and they offer the same money back guarantee if you don't like a wine and sensible drivers who will find a safe hiding place out of the sight of the road if you happen to be out on delivery.

This is exactly the sort of thing we approve of at The Monobrow. Well done them.

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We take our cheese seriously here at The Monobrow. But we just don't get Cheestrings.

The idea of getting kids to eat cheese by letting them use their grubby little fingers and grimy nails to peel it into individual strings before inserting into their mouths is surely totally unhygenic.

Conceived as a marketing ploy to make eating cheese more fun, I've no idea what is 'not fun' about cheese in the first place. But to describe the Cheestring experience as fun is certainly pushing it: more like the most tedious and time-consuming way to eat some plasticy cheese which doesn't even taste that nice. They are the opposite of convenience food.

They don't even have a fun name. 'Cheese that is like string, I know, Cheestring.' I certainly hope they didn't come up with that one by analogy with "G-string" - this is a children's snack!

Whoever invented the Cheestring ought to be locked up for crimes against cheese. I think it was an American.

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Storage jars are not normally fun, but lego is fun, so by that logic storage jar lego must be quite fun. I know they’re only storage jars and I am probably still too young to get excited about this sort of thing in public, but I do really like these Koloni jars from Ikea, available in a variety of shapes and sizes priced £1.30 to £4.00. They stack like lego, and you need never have a messy kitchen again. Though lets face it, you probably will.