Alright, there’s a chance I’ve gone overboard with the Ps in that headline. Yet ever since I wrote P-p-p-p-p-p-pick up a pepper all those years ago, I’ve been itching to let my little finger get another chance at glory on the keyboard.

Pierogi. Poland. I’m afraid it got carried away.

You know it comes to something when your own computer tells you to slow down (Wordpress, my blogging platform, often thinks I type too fast.) Now it turns out there’s a book that’ll tell you to do the same thing.

Go slow.

Picture the scene. You’re walking through a Swedish market, your young daughter holding your hand. She sees row upon row of sweet candy canes, bright luminescent swirls of sugar and mint that gleam in scarlet and white, holly leaf green and ivy, forming…

As I come to the end of my time in Sydney, I’m thinking about my next stop: Warsaw in Poland. And I’m just wondering whether I’ll find Bison Vodka there, as I did in Krakow.

That’s vodka served with a blade of grass.

The older I get, the more I enjoy cooking classes. With an opening statement like that, I’m in danger of whirling around in a cartoon swirl and remerging as an immaculately groomed housewife from the 1950s: hair set, rosy-cheeked smile, skirt that sticks out like a snipped triangle and the scent of freshly baked cookies following me around like a caricature cloud…

From the moment I opened the parcel, I could tell it was going to be special. I’d expected a standard “how to cook book” but instead I discovered a dreamy journey to India, bound between hardback pages adorned with purple and gold. Tasting India by Christine Manfield is clearly a labour of love. With India, [...]

I hope to bring Ljubljana to life for you here on Inside the Travel Lab, piece by piece, over the course of 2012 as part of my #IronRoute Project. Yet to spare you the overload experienced by my hard drive, oh long-suffering reader, I’ll start with this bite-sized list and fill in the gaps later.

Italian food. There was a time when I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about, but I can barely remember that now. The moment my train slowed to a stop in Trieste (and, if I’m honest, quite a while before that) my daydreams wandered…

The icy winter winds have really started to bite as I’ve travelled north. Arriving in Slovenia was the watershed. It is cold. That’s what makes jota so perfect. Warm, hearty, bursting with flavour from beans, pork cubes and sauerkraut (don’t laugh, it tastes better than it sounds,) this dish of jota was enought to sweep [...]

Mmmm…Rich chocolate cake in Caffe Tommaseo, allegedly Trieste’s oldest cafe. Trieste is also home to the international Illy coffee… …and James Joyce used to write here. So, you see, it’s an essential part of my research… (Brushes chocolate crumbs off iPhone screen…)