Changing Food… One Meal At A Time!
Spring
Jan Fullwood Food Consultant
(aka JamJarJan)
NOTES FROM A CHAOTIC KITCHEN
Welcome to day to day life in a chaotic well used kitchen…..
A constantly evolving kitchen: always busy, full of cooking and creating (dinner, treats, mess) for work and for play, for family and friends.
Let me introduce myself and my family:
- A Food and Recipe Consultant who is ‘never knowingly under-catered’, I’ll whip up a five-minute muffin mix at a moment’s notice. I’m constantly creating, evaluating and eating, always cooking and learning something new.
- Long-suffering Hub who just wants a clutter-free kitchen (and longs for a bit of peace and quiet). Happiest in the garden.
- Eldest cheffie son and his patisserie chef girlfriend who cook catering quantities of delicious food at every opportunity for us to sample (hard job, but someone’s got to do it)
- Protein & carb obsessed younger son set for uni (cooking not his forte - self survival skills urgently required)
We all eat to live. Let me help you live to eat.
What's in Jan's Pan?
April 2025
With the promise of longer, brighter days and celebrations galore in this household, kitchen chaos reaches unknown heights here in April.
With Easter falling late this year it coincided with both boys birthdays to give a full on weekend of Hot Cross Buns, epic cake making, pizza parties, egg hunts (never too old), big Easter dinners and celebration meals.
We had pork on Easter Sunday, courtesy of Cheffy Son (I know - what 21 year old cooks their own celebration meal? Only in this house).
With lamb being the traditional Easter meat, I've shared some lamb recipes this month, with my go to slow roast lamb recipe for Easter.
We squeezed in an Easter holiday trip to the Devon branch of the family, so I've included a review of places to eat in Sidmouth should you be heading that way.
The celebrations also included a visit to Fallow restaurant, Cheffy son's favourite breakfast haunt in the Haymarket, and having tested their breakfast menu I can see why.
What's in Jan's Pan
This month has seen lamb dishes, porcetta, pizza, cakes, pizzas and hot cross buns.
Pizza dough Foodbod sourdough
My go to chocolate cake Ultimate chocolate cake
Nicola Lamb's hot cross bun recipe from her incredible book Sift
Amazing Malaysia
It's official - Malaysian my new favourite food.
We returned from a wonderful and epic adventure in Malaysia at the beginning of April too, and were welcomed back to Blightly with Spring sunshine. The arrival of British Summer Time meant we side-stepped the one less hour in bed, but our body clocks were completely confounded by the 8 hour time difference anyway. Borneo did not disappoint, with orangutan sightings (and lurking leeches to avoid) in the rainforest, and so many delicious dishes to try.
I've put together pictures of just a few of the incredible foods we sampled in the hotel restaurant and the local food market, with plenty of fresh coconut to wash it all down.
Whilst out there I learnt to make onde-onde - a sweet treat made from a ball of glutanous rice flavoured with pandan and coloured green. Filled with palm sugar, they are cooked rather like gnocchi until the balls rise to the surface, and then rolled in coconut. Much of the sweet dishes are made with these ingredients, all brightly coloured.
Fish and seafood is wonderful, along with fruits such as pomelo, pineapple, melon and dragon fruit, the street markets are vibrant and buzzing and with lots of satay and grilled chicken. Corn seems to feature too, with the kernals flavoured with all manner of things, including biscoff flavoured and oreo of all things.
The hotels we stayed at catered for all tastes so we had the opportunity to try Korean, Chinese and Japanese cuisines. I was interested to try the congee for breakfast, a rice porridge served across Asia, though I confess I drew the line at the black century eggs that come as part of the condiments to add.
Western breakfasts were available too, but we soon noticed the lack of pork, and found that bacon was made from beef or chicken, as a large proportion of Malaysians are Muslim. Interestingly, Malaysia continues to ban the import of pork and pork products from certain countries following the outbreak of African Swine Fever (ASF) in 2018.
They made mean French toast too, all washed down with Kopi susu, the Indonesian favourite style of coffee, mixed with sweetened condensed milk.
Back home, we had our fix with a Malaysian themed takeaway for our anniversary meal from StrEats Hertford. Chef Tig travels extensively to research his street food, which he sells from his home in Hertford (order it direct then pop by to pick it up), so he really knows his Rendang from his Nyonya curries.
He can also be found at the weekly Street Food Heroes which is now based at All Saints Church in Hertford for takeaway food and music
I'll be going along to Norman Musa's Malaysian supper club at Divertimenti in Knightsbridge next month to carry on my obsession, and recreate some of the amazing dishes we had out there, so will report back next month.
Easter generally calls for lamb, and I've enjoyed some great lamb dishes over the last month.
The Doper lamb in Kota Kinabalu in Borneo was amazing. We were there during Ramadan and so every night was a feasting night. This lamb was cooked in a covered pit of stones throughout the day, meaning it was tender and smoky once we sat down to eat after the amazing sunsets.
I always buy my lamb from the 'lamb man' on Hertford market, Peter Gear, of Highbury Farm, who has owned the family farm in Wood End, near Ardeley for 30 years, so I always like to support him. We tend to eat less meat but buy the best we can afford and local if possible. I slow cook it so that it falls off of the bone.
Heat your oven to 170C/Fan 150C/Gas 3.
Put a 2kg shoulder or leg of lamb into a roasting tin on top of fresh rosemary, mint and garlic. Drizzle with oil and season well, add 250ml of stock or wine, and cover tightly. Leave to work its magic for 3-4 hours until the meat is tender and falls away from the bone - you should just need forks to carve it.
Lamb leftovers have so many uses, I used some up by mixing it into the sauce when I made Georgina Hayden's delicious imam biyaldi recipe, and it is wonderful in a shepherd's pie, recipe to come...
To continue my theme of core recipe, level up for inspirational home cooking and Go-pro it seemed appropriate to give the treatment to shepherd's pie this month.
What's on Jan's Must Visit Restaurant of the Month List??
There were high tides in Sidmouth this April during Easter visit to the family. There are some great eateries in the West country, so to prove that it’s not all about London, here's a round up of some of my favourites around Sidmouth.
Our early start to miss the pile up of traffic around Stonehenge (it's the pull of the stones) always demands a slap up breakfast at the end and we usually head for the breakfast at the Otter valley dairy and field kitchen just as you come into Monkton on the way to Sidmouth or the Donkey Sanctuary's cafe The Kitchen for what we affectionally call a big donkey breakfast (no donkeys were harmed in the making of this).
We tested out new Italian restaurant Roma, whose sister restaurant Myca's seafood and grill is just up the high street. Roma boasts a view of the sea through its huge picture windows and whilst not a particularly intimate or cosy restaurant, it was perfect for a family meal out. Whilst by the sea, eat seafood so I had the seafood risotto topped with salmon, scallops and prawns. The dish was creamy and the rice was perfectly al dente as risotto should be. Definitely one to visit and a great addition to the town. You can't beat a beachfront restaurant, and the Mitch Tonks restaurant, Rockfish is due to open at the end of the esplanade in October, but has been delayed yet again due to planning problems in the old Drill hall.
We visited Exmouth and discovered that another beachfront restaurant, Micky's, Michael Caines has been taken over by Swim restaurants which has a branch in Lyme. Michael Caines has taken over as consultant chef at the Stafford Hotel apparently, taking over from Lisa Goodwin-Allen.
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