Tag: Valentines Day

This St. Valentine’s Day, Skip the Stove – and Cook Each Other Instead

Cordon Noir, a new anti-cookbook for couples who would rather flirt than flambé, launches just in time for St. Valentine’s Day.

As restaurants fill up and home cooks everywhere brace themselves for another stressful “romantic” meal, Cordon Noir offers a radical alternative: stop trying to impress each other with food, and start enjoying each other instead.

Playful, seductive, and quietly subversive, Cordon Noir is a book for couples who are hopeless at cooking, bored of recipes or simply more interested in intimacy than ingredients. It’s part manifesto, part relationship companion, and part mischievous gift, designed to be read together, dipped into, laughed over, and occasionally ignored in favour of more pressing pleasures.

“There’s something deeply unromantic about sweating over a hot stove while your partner waits,” says Penny Moon the book’s creator. “Cordon Noir is for people who would rather burn dinner than burn out.”

Perfect as a Valentine’s gift, a cheeky addition to the bedside table, or a knowing present for couples who already own too many cookbooks, Cordon Noir gently dismantles culinary pressure and replaces it with connection, humour, and permission.

Cordon Noir is now available through the NOP Shop and in all great independent bookshops.

This Valentine’s Day, the most important thing you can cook… is the mood.

Cordon Noir

Cordon Noir

A reflective, gently humorous book about change, patience, and preparation.

Cordon Noir uses the language of cookery to explore what happens when something new is quietly coming into being — best approached at low heat and in your own time.

Hear all about it on our podcast here!

£9.99
Shop now

JIT for St Valentine’s Day: listen to the lovely Martin John Milner’s Never Too Late For Love!

“What can an artist musician do in the face of war? Ultimately there may come a time when the choice comes down to fight or flight. Until then, and as long as there is even the smallest hope that other activities will help to promote peaceful solutions, I think one has a responsibility to not look away but instead call for kindness and compassion in the face of violence and anger.

What can an artist musician do in the face of the seemingly relentless and apparently unthinking, uncaring ruination of the planetary ecosystems that support the web of life? While I still have life and the ability to love, I feel a responsibility to acknowledge the challenge and say: people, we are all in this together. My wellbeing depends on yours. Let’s work together for our collective survival. Let’s celebrate what we have in common much more than what we see differently. Let’s rise above the past and let every day be a new chance to love and be loved. And let’s do this at every level, from the ordinary everyday to the global emergency.

These are some words attempting to explain the origin of the song ‘Never Too Late For Love’ and the video created by Serg Collaiber. But of course a piece of art has a life of its own and belongs to everyone who experiences it. I hope the song-video will be an ambassador for kindness wherever it lands.” “

(Martin John Milner)

Martin is a musician, community musician, teacher, poet and facilitator. He grew up in the global North (Liverpool, England, and Nova Scotia, Canada), and since 2008 has lived in Potsdam, Germany.  He was deeply involved in Community Music in England 1998-2008. and was a Teaching Fellow on the B.A. Honours Community Arts degree and the Performing Arts For Disabled Artists courses at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (2002-04) . We met soon after when he became Musician in Residence for the Aspire Trust’s Deschooled? Re-engaged! project at Oldershaw School and Riverside Primary School.

We’ve kept in touch even since and contributed to his recent production, Never Too Late (for Love) which you can see here:

or hear, here:

The Deschooled Re-enagged Project became the subject for a chapter in the International Handbook of Creative Learning. You can download that here:

International Handbook of Creative Learning DEREDownload