This has been a week of marmalade. I set out to made this ‘Good morning’ breakfast marmalade recipe with some blood oranges that were lurking in the fridge, along with lemons and a pink grapefruit. Despite conscientious pectin extraction from the membranes, and boiling twice, it still hasn’t set (I suspect because I didn’t have the crucial Seville oranges). So now I need some good recipes for marmalade syrup. These marmalade brownies are high up the list, as well as a marmalade and coconut bakewell tart from delicious magazine. I also plan to tackle some sort of marmalade granola (maybe this one). Next time, I’ll go back to my June Taylor recipes, even if she does make you segment all the fruit.

Recipes this week:

• Beef braised in stout – Rose Prince’s ‘A New English Table‘
• Rye and raisin (currant) bread and Pain de Campagne from James Morton’s Brilliant Bread (despite the large number of bread books on my shelves, I keep coming back to this one).

Without a recipe:

• Spice Tailor Keralan coconut curry with fish, peas and sweet potato
• Leftover braised beef ragu over pasta
• Tomato sauce and Grandma Turano’s meatballs from the freezer
• Burritos with black beans, avocado and grilled chicken

Reading:

• Comfort food recipes in abundance: the NY Times with various parmigiana recipes; Yotam Ottolenghi making pies; the Wednesday Chef making a big pot of Braised Beans with bacon and wine; Food52 and Brown butter cupcake brownies.
• The madness of a creme egg cheesecake (actually, the recipe doesn’t sound bad at all, and TamingTwins has at least attempted some balance with some sharp lemon in the cheesecake to offset the goo).
• National Geographic profiles what our Palaeolithic ancestors might actually have eaten, through those studying the few hunter-gatherer communities that still exist (tl;dr – a much more diverse range of diets than you would think).
• Watson, the IBM supercomputer that learnt how to play Jeopardy, has been working on a cookbook, trying to create new flavour combinations. With mixed success.