 I love bits of retro kitchen gear and I'm a real hoarder. Now take this. This coffee pod is the first thing I ever bought in my first ever flat. It's called La Signura to denote its curvy shape. This casserole was my mother's. I think she got it as a wedding present and I still cook from it although it is a bit on the gotty side inside my fault. And both these salad bowls where my granis, oh, there's a ton, it's not a bad nick considering how old it is. The thing is my granis we said to me do not use soap when washing wood and I don't. Look, you see it's gleaming and clean and still in use. Ah, the fondue set. Now the sad thing is when I was really in my fondue making days I just supplied the hardware after other people in the hardware but now I'm a fully fledged member of the fondue set. The cheese fest continues with another blast from the past in the form of a fruitful fridge raid to make my cheese fondue. When I was a student I had to say I wait for a lot of what I ate really was the leftovers from the fridge at the restaurant I worked at but I'm afraid a lot of the time too I used to make raids on fridges in the halls of residence and come away with many many different sorts of cheeses which I'd melt down into a cheese fondue for us all. I still love a fridge raid and I've yielded quite well for different cheeses, all of them good for cheese fondue, got Gruyere, Emental, Brie and Camembert. You need 600 grams of cheese all told. Don't bother to grade it's easier just to chop. That's the Emental done, now the Gruyere. My love, the nuttiness you get from these two cheeses and together with that rich creamy silkyness from the Brie or Camembert or both in my case. Fabulous. Look I'm not trying to sell this as health food but think of it this way. This comes from a more innocent age when people just didn't worry about the amount of fat in their food. You can go for a run tomorrow if you want. Now for the soft cheeses, try and take the soft white skin from the Brie. The softest those kiddler of the gloves they sell in Italy. Delicious. Finally the Camembert. I have to say a cheese fondue is the most express route to a meal that's convivial, filling, pretty well unbeatable. Right, the cheese is ready to go into the fondue pot. Gorgeous. You need to scrape some of the soft cheese in. It's ready, begun to get gooey. You need 300 milliliters of white wine, two glasses, the easiest measure to understand. Heat on. Let's go a little stir to help the cheese melt into the wine. While the cheese is melting into the wine, I'm going to mix cornflour and kish to a paste which will just help it go into the fondue without making any lumps. You don't need much corn flour, two teaspoons is fine. Kish just means cherry in German and this is a cherry liqueur but it's not thick and sweet like cherry brandy, it's really cherry fire water and although it may seem odd to put a cherry liqueur however unsweet into a fondue, believe me it works. You can't taste cherry in it but nevertheless it just gives us a deep resonance, a hit from the woods. In the old days people would get a bit of garlic into their fondue by cutting a clove and half and just using it to wipe around the pot but I am just putting the whole clove in, it'll make the garlic very mild because I'm not mincing it or grating it and some pepper, always love white pepper and some freshly grated nutmeg because little pixie town greater. So it's time to whisk in the corn flour and kish and really in toy town now, eby whisk. You can see that it's the corn flour which emalgamates everything and thickens the fondue, makes everything satiny smooth. All I need to do is cut up a green apple, some bitter ridicchio and some sprightly fennel, I want some cubes of sourdough bread. Though when my friend arrives I'll light the burner, take this over to the sofa and we can lie back and guzzle to our hearts content. I just hope this self. I've been looking forward to this. I'm doing a bit of glass from the past. I haven't tried it before with apple, whose idea was that? My mother always had apple and cheese. I love the sharpness.