This is a simple side dish, full of Mexican flavours and heat, cooked from ingredients everyone has on hand. The delicious, albeit quite an apparent combination of black beans and tomatoes has been enhanced with spicy chilli flakes and aromatic ground cumin. Mexican Black Beans with Tomatoes get more flavour with time, so prepare this dish in advance and keep it in the fridge at least overnight. Reheat and serve warm with tacos or Mexican crisps Totopos. Find the recipe here.

If you are a rye fan, for a real treat try this double rye sourdough bread. It contains dark and light rye flour as well as bread flour to give light texture. Double rye requires overnight sponge made of light rye flour starter and some amount of dark rye flour, but on a baking day, it needs only 3 hours to be ready to pop in the hot oven. The bread is delicious, moist, sweet and tastes great next day if kept in the container. Great served with herring tartare or pickled herring. Find the recipe here… 

This is dark, moist and dense bread with a hint of sweetness - a bit in Lithuanian-style. Barley malt syrup and a little of honey give this beautiful colour of the crumb and a caramelized crust. My recipe uses light rye sourdough starter and a mix of bread and dark rye flour. It requires patience as the sponge needs to be prepared a day before and give it time to rise. But as a reward, the final rise of bread takes only two hours. Malt and Honey Dark Rye Bread is the perfect winter bread which tastes amazing with hard cheese, pickled herring or paté. Find the recipe here…

This is my everyday bread. Very comforting, healthy, delicious and far different from what is mostly available now in local shops. You can buy the sourdough loaves in many artisan bakeries across London, they are decent but unfortunately pretty expensive. Making the sourdough bread at home is neither costly nor difficult however requires a bit of patience, effort and experience. You can read a lot of recipes on the Internet and in cook books but the sourdough bread is something you learn by doing. Anyway, you need to start somehow so let’s get started together. Find the recipe here...