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.