Friday food links – 27 Mar 2015

Mar28

This week’s food has been anchored around Sunday’s roast chicken. Having acquired a gruesome cold from my daughter, I had very little energy, so did no more than throw a bit of salt on it and put it into a hot oven for half an hour. I added potatoes and some chunks of sweet potato when I turned the oven down, and roasted for another hour. The bones were cooked for stock on Tuesday, and the cold chicken made into curry, and then fried rice. We’ve also been snacking all week on the coffee and walnut cake I made from the Konditor & Cook book – pictured above. Unfortunately, I’ve completely lost my sense of taste and smell with this cold, so I have no idea if it tastes of coffee or not!

Recipes:

Coffee and Walnut cake – Konditor and Cook (above)
Hot Cross Buns (again) – this time with fruit!
Tarka Dal – Diana Henry’s Change of Appetite

Without a recipe:

Roast chicken with potatoes and broccoli
Chicken stock
Chicken and mushroom korma (Spice Tailor)
Charlie Bigham lasagne
Chicken and egg fried rice with broccoli and spinach
Fish curry (from the freezer)

Reading:

The 2015 James Beard Award nominees have been announced, and there is British representation from Diana Henry and Yotam Ottolenghi in the book awards. These awards are for food books, broadcast programmes and food journalism, so this list is a good place to find some of the best US food articles from the past year – scroll down to the journalism awards and then seek out some of the articles that have been nominated.
An old piece, but a good one: American chefs on the kitchen gadgets they wish they had (apparently drying salad leaves could still use a better mousetrap).
Diana Henry’s new book of chicken recipes, ‘A Bird in the Hand’, is receiving praise all over the place. Excerpted recipes can be found here and here.
Some light and spring-like dessert recipes appeared last weekend. I particularly liked the sound of Nigel Slater’s Passion fruit madeleines, and Yotam Ottolenghi’s lemon millefeuille. Of course, for a full round-up of last weekend’s food supplements, you can check out Rocket & Squash’s Supplemental post.

Friday food links – 20 Mar 2015

Mar20

We’ve been living in a plague house this week. Little E became ill on Sunday, and we’ve both had milder versions of her symptoms. As it happened, we were supposed to be on holiday this week, so while we had to cancel going away, it did mean we could both be around to look after her.
So comfort food has been the order of the week: lots of eggs and potatoes in various forms.

Recipes:

Lamb and split pea stew (Khoresh) from Persiana
Chicken chili, loosely from Serious Eats
Sourdough English muffins from Brilliant Bread
Sourdough from Bread, Cake, Doughnut, Pudding
Hot Cross Buns (but forgot the fruit!) from Brilliant Bread, and then
Hot Cross Bun Bread and Butter pudding, loosely from Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries II

Without a recipe:

Takeaway Byron burgers 🙂
Cod with potatoes, leeks and fennel, a bit inspired by @bartsfishtales on Instagram
Bubble and squeak

Reading:

The Evening Standard’s 50 best bakeries in London
Orangette: everyday cake with ricotta and raspberries
Lottie & Doof has weighed in on the Piglet sexist cookbook discussion. ‘You’re boring’ suggests we could all benefit from more diversity, more constructive criticism, and less groupthink in food writing
OFM have published a list of 50 ‘hot’ food people, places and things.
this four ingredient Nutella mousse feels like it’s a way of accidentally consuming an entire jar of Nutella without noticing
Mildly intrigued by this wheat-free vegan seeded loaf
If you’re after a good food read, I pretty much agree with this Food52 list of great food narratives (and this Buzzfeed of great food films).

Friday food links – 13 Feb 2015

Mar13

Excited to have got my hands on the new James Morton book, ‘How Baking Works‘. This feels like the book I should have written, so very interested to see what he has to say. I also cleared out my cupboards a bit (with a little help from my mum) and unearthed an ancient tin of condensed milk (which can’t go off, right?). This prompted me to make a Dan Lepard chocolate cake, and a tin of no-boil fudge. Unfortunately, the oven decided to break while I was baking the cake, meaning I baked it for twice as long as I should have, the first stint at a very low temperature. So I’ve ended up with something much drier than it should be, and singed around the edges for good measure. It’s a testament to Dan’s recipe that it tastes good nonetheless.

Recipes:

Cow pie (pictured above), with handmade puff pastry made on my Bread Ahead course – The Recipe Wheel, Rosie Ramsden
Brown sugar chocolate cake (aka the cake of sad – see above) – Dan Lepard, Short and Sweet
Cheat’s fudge – Sweets Made Simple
Chicken Shawarma – The Five O’Clock Apron
A four-strand plaited loaf – plaiting directions from Brilliant Bread

Without a recipe:

Sausage pasta
Chicken burritos
Parsnip risotto (from the freezer)
Fish curry (with Spice Tailor sauce)

Reading this week:

Amateur Gourmet wonders what’s going on in food blogging. Those ads just aren’t bringing in money any more, at least for him – now the demand is all for sponsored posts. It looks like online advertising and publishing are changing again. I know that for me, blogs that mainly run sponsored posts aren’t that interesting – even when scrupulously disclosed, and well done.
Just a flat-out compelling piece of writing – and not what it sounds like at all: How to lose weight in 4 easy steps. (via Jenny at Dinner: A Love Story)
Paul A Young and Morgaine Gaye have collaborated on some futuristic sweets for FutureFest, on at Vinopolis this weekend (full disclosure: this event is being organised by Nesta, my current employer).
Why children should be fed adult dishes – some of the ideas behind Claire Thomson’s book, The Five O’Clock Apron.
The ever-wise Bee Wilson on the inexplicable Bulletproof Coffee, and why lots of butter won’t make us better: “we search in vain for the single substance that will make us healthy”

Friday food links – 6 Mar 2015

Mar6

This week has shown a hint of Spring. Sunny days have brought out crocuses, daffodils and the first spikes of tulip leaves. The wind is still cold, but at least it shows that things are moving in the right direction. I’ve once again been spoilt by my mum’s cooking all week, so not much to update on for my cooking. We’re trying Five O’Clock Apron’s Chicken Shawarma for dinner tonight.

Meanwhile, I have a day off from being a mum, and I’m very excited to be heading to Bread Ahead’s cooking school at Borough Market for a day all about pastry. I’m hoping to get comfortable with pastry again. Lately it seems like my shortcrust always shrinks, my choux generally comes out lumpy and under-inflated, and there’s never time for flaky pastry or puff.

Reading this week:

I seem to have been drawn to chocolate recipes this week – make of that what you will. Either that or the internet is in a particularly chocolatey frame of mind this week. Thus we have Smitten Kitchen’s I-need-it-now chocolate cake, choco tacos that I have just discovered from Molly Yeh, and the Observer/Guardian collection of the 20 best chocolate recipes.
The NY Times has a roundup of tips for reducing food waste. Some of these strike me as a bit unnecessary – do you really need to use up all your carrot tops, radish tops and turnip greens? Is it really reducing waste to take old carrots, boil them until soft and blend them with oil and egg to make a sort of mayonnaise? But there are a few good ones in there.
Food52 has an interesting piece, arising from one of their Piglet cookbook head-to-head competitions, on how we judge a cookbook. The debate is whether you should just judge a cookbook by the recipes, or by the recipes plus the design, layout, photos – the whole package. [Edit: Eater has a very good piece on this debate, and identifies the big question lurking behind it, which is why do cookbooks continue to lead the publishing sales lists, when you can find any recipe with a quick search?]
This years’ Piglet also put Diana Henry’s A Change of Appetite up against Maria Elia’s Smashing Plates. The reviewer touches on something I haven’t been able to articulate about Diana’s book, that might explain why I like the book a lot, but haven’t cooked much from it so far.
This article suggests that three meals a day isn’t necessarily the right way to eat, and contrary to popular wisdom, breakfast isn’t that important. (I mean, on average – for me, it’s essential)
As an antidote to all the chocolate, this California Miso Avocado salad on 101 Cookbooks sounds like a good way to pretend it’s spring, we’re in California, and all the gorgeous fruit and veg is appearing at the market. Sigh. Although, California without the drought, please.
And to prove that this is definitely London after all, Shoreditch now has a pop-up porridge cafe. I feel a bit of a food bubble inflating in East London…

Using Mainly Spoons

Reading between the lines of recipes

Monthly Archives: March 2015

Friday food links – 27 Mar 2015

Friday food links – 20 Mar 2015

Friday food links – 13 Feb 2015

Friday food links – 6 Mar 2015

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