Black pudding is really decadent. The cooked blood of animals prepared for our deep viceral satisfaction make it a real treat. Silfield Farm make an array of black puddings and this is one of the best:

Yorkshire Sliced Black Pudding - Breakfast Fry.
It's quite grainey with noticably sized lumps of fat. It's really good. This is an incredibly hedonistic expression of black pudding, bettered only by Silfield Farm's Bury-style. I'll have that tomorrow...

Every one needs to know how to make: mashed potato.

For this you need:
800g peeled King Edward potatoes
250g good-quality unsalted butter
150ml double cream
Fresh ground pepper to taste.

Chop up the potatoes into small-ish pieces and boil vigorously for twenty minutes in a large pan filled with well salted water. Drain the potatoes and place back in the empty pan over the lowest heat possible. Mash the potatoes until reasonably broken-up. Add the butter in five stages, mashing vigorously between each addition of butter so that the butter is completely incorporated before adding the next batch. By the time all of the butter has been added the potatoes should be mashed enough to be lump-free. Pour in the cream and mash/stir this in with the masher. It will initially go a bit thin, but if you mash and stir for a minute or two it will thicken up again to result in a very pleasing mashed-potato consistency. Grind in black pepper to taste and serve.

Mashed potato is an essential ingredient in such sophisticated nursery-dishes as smoked eel with bacon and mash.

Look at that bacon! 'Iron age' bacon from Silfield farm. Shame they so rarely have it these days.

I have a dinner party organised for tonight and as I am feeling quite rotten it will be a simple meal; chicken in cider. For four people you will need:

4 chicken breasts
4 chicken thighs
1kg decent mushrooms sliced
3 large onions
750g streaky bacon cut into 2cm lengths
Fresh chicken stock
2 dessert spoons vegetable stock powder
Plenty of decent dry cider
Butter

Chop and fry the onions in a bit of butter until soft, transfer them to a stew pot. Fry the sliced mushrooms in plenty of butter until just cooked then add them into the stew pot. Fry the bacon until cooked but not crispy, put it in the stew pot. Fry the chicken pieces quickly until the outside is cooked, then put them in with the other ingredients. To the stew pot add the chicken and vegetable stocks then add the cider until all of the ingredients are covered by it; this will require roughly a litre of cider. Get the stew up to a simmering temperature then simmer on the lowest possible heat for two-three hours. Low temperature simmering is the key to slow cooking. The surface of the stew should just be quivering with heat, not boiling.

This is normally served with rice.

David.