Recipes, produce finds and honest taste notes
The supermarket meal deal is fine. It is also £4 and a bit of sadness in a plastic triangle. Here are five lunches built from leftovers and supermarket produce finds, each with an honest taste note and a rough cost per portion.
The most-grown pear in Britain is also the most badly treated — bought hard, eaten harder, and written off as dull. A short defence of the Conference pear, how to tell when it is actually ready, and two things worth doing with it in the Harris kitchen this month.
The smallest tin in the cupboard, the one that sits behind the sweetcorn and gets bought once every eighteen months. A short defence of anchovies as a working ingredient rather than a dare — with brand notes, a twenty-minute pasta and a lamb shoulder that would be duller without them.
Cheddar has become a byword for beige — a colour, a block, a default. So we spent a Saturday and a Sunday driving between Somerset and Dorset in search of three wedges that actually taste of somewhere: a young one, a mature one, and a cloth-bound one with a coat on.
We poured, sniffed and slurped our way through six supermarket gravies before the 2026 Sunday-roast season gets serious. Here are the honest Harris Kitchen taste notes — texture, seasoning, savouriness and value — plus the one carton we would actually put on the table.
A cheap spud can be a great supper — or a sad, soggy compromise. After a week of testing oven, air fryer and microwave methods in the Harris kitchen, here is our practical manifesto for crisp skins, fluffy middles and toppings that earn their place.
A shelf of cookbooks, a drawer of gadgets, and the one thing that genuinely sharpened my seasoning, sourcing and instincts cost about the price of a coffee. Here is how a flavour diary works, why it matters, and two real entries — warts, crystals and all.
It looks like something that grew wrong and smells like a whole greengrocer's, yet celeriac is cheap, British and endlessly useful. A practical defence of the winter root, with buying tips from growers, three very different ways to cook it, and honest notes on that celery-parsnip edge.