Category Archives: Links

Friday food links – 17 Oct 2014

Copper beech leaves are falling

I managed to get some autumnal baking in this week with grape schiacciata, plum and almond cakes, and oatmeal, raisin and coconut cookies. Hoping to get time today to finish off Mary Berry’s Bara Brith.

Friday food links – 10 Oct 2014

What a stunning morning #nofilter

New food magazines keep popping up at the moment. If you’re lucky enough to live in the US, Jennifer Perillo is publishing her own quarterly magazine on Simple Scratch Cooking. If you’re in the UK, you can always buy her cookbook instead.

And in the UK, Toast, who organise foodie events, have a Kickstarter running to print their first magazine.

I love Shutterbean’s photos of meal prep (there’s also a post about how she prepares for the week ahead)

Justin Gellatly’s St John doughnuts were a major reason for me to hike across London to Maltby Street Market on the odd weekend. Then he went and opened his own bakery and cooking school, Bread Ahead, in Borough Market. They make the same impressive doughnuts in even more outrageous flavours. Meanwhile, I went and had a baby, and haven’t been back to either Borough Market or Maltby Street since. So this film about Justin and his ‘custard grenade’ doughnuts is *not helping*.

And while I pine for Bread Ahead doughnuts, it looks like Joy the Baker’s cinnamon sugar popovers might do the trick. (See also: Bea’s duffins).

Friday food links – Saturday 4 Oct 2014

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Sorry, late with this one – the week rather got away from me. Autumn is definitely here now – a wet and blustery day today. Time to break out the cast iron pot.

Friday food links – 26 Sept 2014

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Friday food links – 19 Sep 2014

Dukkah

Summer is still just hanging on, even as the conkers tumble down (causing me to lower the pushchair hood, just in case). I’m starting to get better at breaking recipes into stages, so that I can get things done between naps/feeds/shouts.

Friday food links

First conker

Glad that the glorious weather continued for a few days after we got back from holiday. However, I seem to have already switched to autumn mode for cooking: we’ve had toad-in-the-hole, mushroom risotto and Rosie Ramsden’s beef shin chilli for dinner this week.

Friday food links

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A brief post due to being on holiday in sunny Devon this week. Today’s mission: cream tea!

Friday food links

I’m finally starting to figure out how to get some time for writing in between naps, nappy changes and feeds, so I’m trying to resume some sort of posting schedule here. What I have the most time for, though, is reading, phone in one hand and (usually sleeping) baby in the other. So here are a few highlights from my food reading this week:

  • New Bon Appetit – September’s Bon Appetit is dedicated to their top 10 restaurants list. Usually the restaurant issues of magazines aren’t that interesting – the last thing I want to make at home is restaurant food. But perhaps because home cooking is now very much in vogue in the sort of hipster places that Bon Appetit profiles, there are quite a few things here I want to make. The Forager sandwich particularly caught my eye: a soft potato roll filled with marinated mushrooms, Swiss cheese, scrambled egg and sauteed kale.
  • Dinner: the Playbook – I’m a big fan of Jenny Rosenstrach’s book and blog, Dinner: A Love Story. Many of her recipes have made it into regular evening meals. So although we’re not quite ready for family dinner, her new book ‘Dinner: The Playbook‘ sounds like it will come in handy in due course. But I particularly love this unique spin on the book launch post, where Jenny’s other half Andy, the co-author of the blog, tells us everything that Jenny won’t about why the book is so great. The pride of a spouse shines through.
  • The FT featured a Food writing special in the FT Weekend magazine last weekend (£). I haven’t finished it yet, but I particularly loved the first piece in the magazine on the language of food, examining the words used in restaurant reviews and menus.
  • I’m a dreadful banana-neglecter, so I’m always looking for recipes to use up ripe bananas. So I can’t believe it took me until this week to read about one ingredient ice cream. On the to-do list.
  • Brown butter pistachio doughnuts – I am staunchly against deep frying at home. The waste oil, the splatter, the smell of grease, the need for careful temperature control – it all means too much hassle for small quantities. But doughnuts are the thing that tempts me to fire up a pan of oil the most. Thank goodness for cake doughnuts.

Friday food links

Food reading I’ve enjoyed this week*:

New Diana Henry book, and the black bread from it.

* Inspired by the regular excellent link posts from Tangerine & Cinnamon and Sassy Radish

June round-up: strawberries, muffins, pasta

July already?? What on earth happened? I’m sure it was only last week that I signed up for Food Blogger Connect, and was sure I would have a plan by the time it came around. I suppose that’s what the best-laid plans are for. Here are some things I’ve been doing/watching/reading in the last month:

Plum-strawberry jam

Bumper crop of strawberries this year

My strawberry crop has been a bumper one this year, partly due to the frequent rain we’ve had for the last six months, and partly because the runners all got out of hand last year, so even after weeding out about half of my strawberry plants over the winter, I still have a pretty substantial strawberry patch. Along with an out-of-season organic box delivery of red plums, I put the two together to make not quite a full jar of jam. But it is beautiful, the plums adding a purpley depth to the colour that the strawberries wouldn’t achieve alone. I like to add an acid fruit to my strawberry jam – I’ve previously used rhubarb, lemon and lime – which as well as contributing a higher-pectin fruit, also adds the acid that helps it to set. Plums seem to do this very well too.

Hedone

We made our first visit to Hedone a couple of weeks ago, after being reminded when it appeared on the World’s Top 100 list. It’s not far from our house, so it seemed particularly foolish to have neglected it for so long. We went for lunch and had the tasting menu, and had a great time (although it seemed relatively quiet for a Saturday lunch). Particular highlights for me were the five preparations of beetroot that came with the duck main course, and a fabulous warm chocolate mousse with dried raspberry powder and passionfruit puree – raspberry and passionfruit must be two of my favourite flavours to combine with chocolate (this blog post has a photo of that dish).

Black bean chili dinner party

I made dinner for some work colleagues a few weeks ago. As the party included a vegetarian and a no-wheat no-dairy person, I went for an easy make-ahead dish – black bean chili, with lots of toppings for people to add, salsa, guacamole and cornbread. Having a main course you can make on Sunday and keep in the fridge for a Wednesday dinner is an excellent idea for mid-week entertaining. (I use Deborah Madison’s Black Bean Chili recipe from The Greens Cookbook).

Scandilicious Queen Maud muffins

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With all of these strawberries, I needed more things to use them up, so I adapted the Scandilicious baking recipe for Queen Maud muffins, and used blueberries with strawberries cut into pieces instead of raspberries. They turned out really well – I’ve kept them in the freezer and brought them out for snacking at work – and produce the most beautiful muffin papers after you’ve eaten one!

Smitten Kitchen fava bean, tomato and sausage pasta

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I’ve started using Pinterest to collect together inspiration for that ‘but what can I make for dinner’ moment: board here. When my broad beans (fava beans) all flourished at once, and I had a huge crop to use, I turned to Eat Your Books and discovered this Smitten Kitchen gem. With so many fresh broad beans, we didn’t even miss the sausage.

Washington

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I took a work trip to Washington D.C. at the start of the month, where it was beautiful for a couple of days, and then a tropical storm moved in and it poured. Still, I got to do a handful of essential things in between meetings: Smithsonian Apollo and Wright brothers exhibits – check. Shake Shack burger – check. Sephora shopping opportunity – check. I also came across people queuing around the block for cupcakes in Georgetown, which apparently is because there’s a TV series based there – strange phenomenon (I didn’t queue up to try them myself). I’m very happy that Shake Shack has just opened a branch in London too, but I don’t think it will sway me from Byron.

Reading list

In things I have been reading, I love this piece by super-geek Sue Black. I saw her speak at a Girl Geek Dinner a couple of years ago about Bletchley Park, and I’ve always been impressed, but I had no idea how hard she had worked to get where she is today – worth a read if you’re in need of a dose of inspiration.

I’ve been slowly working more and more David Sedaris into my life. First the episodes of This American Life. Then the audiobook of Me Talk Pretty One Day. This month I added ‘Meet David Sedaris’, the Radio 4 series, and also bought my Dad ‘Let’s explore Diabetes with Owls’. He wrote a lovely piece on domesticity and guest rooms in the New Yorker this month.