Tag Archives: cookbooks

Friday food links – 28 August 2015

Fun in the country - getting to grips with a tractor :-)

This has been another week of holiday. We went to visit my Mum and Dad in Somerset with E. Despite the weather, we’ve managed a good deal of slides and swings, pigs and chickens, trolley rides and general messing about. All this meant a holiday from cooking (for me). But before we left, there was a lunch with friends, and while we were away, there have been some notes on things to make next:

Saturday lunch:

Plans to make:

Reading:

  • Ruth Reichl has been to London – and has a blog about the trip in three parts. She took in Barshu, Barrafina, Quo Vadis  and more (and that was just day one!).
  • And she also has a cookbook coming out this autumn – My Kitchen Year. As her memoirs are some of my favourite food writing, I’ll definitely be adding this to the wishlist.
  • I found this in Food52’s round-up of the best cookbooks that are coming out this autumn. The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt from Serious Eats is another wishlist book.
  • Yet more cookbooks: this extract from the new Sally Clarke book suggests it’s going to be beautiful, and beautifully written.
  • Via Signe Johansen, a NYT collection of ‘Do It Yourself’ recipes for preserved lemons, fresh cheese and more.
  • Radio 4’s programme The Reunion was on Food Writers this week. It’s an excellent programme on food in Britain from after the war until the eighties, with Claudia Roden, Mary Berry, Prue Leith and others. Available on iPlayer now.

Friday food links – 15 May 2015

An abundance of strawberry flowers

I have a cucumber! A very small one, but there is a bona fide cucumber on my cucumber plant, so that must mean that summer is just around the corner, no? And my strawberries are covered in flowers. It could be a bumper crop, if I can keep the pigeons off them. It’s been a plain and simple kind of food week – lots of Americana. And probably not enough fish or veggies. But it’s all a work in progress. Isn’t every week?

Recipes:

Without a recipe:

  • Beef shin stew – from the freezer
  • Grilled salmon, mashed potato, chard
  • Takeaway pizza
  • Leftover dal
  • Burgers and grilled vegetables, excellent white bread rolls
  • Roast chicken, new potatoes, asparagus

Reading:

Book review: Slow cooked by Miss South

  
You may have noticed me going on (and on) about my slow cooker cooking in my weekly Friday food links posts. Faced with an imminent return to work, and the prospect of squeezing dinner preparation for a one year old into a tiny gap between nursery pickup and bath-and-bedtime, I decided a slow cooker would solve all my problems. (Well, maybe not all of them.) Aware of how little spare counterspace I have, as well as the number of appliances in my cupboards, my hand paused over the ‘buy’ button a couple of times, but in the end I went for it. I thought I had best get a book to go with this new purchase, and the briefest of searches through Amazon reviews suggested that ‘Slow Cooked‘ by Miss South of the North/South Food blog was the one to get.

In this instance, Amazon reviewers were right on the money. This is a great book, and I haven’t stopped cooking from it since it arrived. It has only a handful of photos, in a section at the start, but Miss South writes such excellent head notes that I have scarcely missed them. The recipe titles and notes are enough to draw me in.

I had expected a book largely filled with stews of various sorts – and would have been content with this. But she goes well beyond standard slow cooker fare, with chapters on currys, pulses and grains, vegetables, as well as cakes and breads, and puddings.

 

white chili

white chili with chicken and haricot beans

 
So far I have made: meat ragu, stewed beef shin, white chili, chicken mole, pulled pork, aubergine ragout, tarka dal, dulce de leche (heating a can of condensed milk), caramelised onions (a big batch for the freezer), chicken stock and confit tomatoes. Everything has worked, and has tasted good. The chicken recipes benefit from a slightly shorter cooking time – although the white chili makes good use of this by breaking up the chicken into shreds with the beans. The dal took longer, but I suspect the age of the split peas was to blame there. The beans in the chili, cooked from dried without soaking, were beautifully creamy and intact, with none of the fuzziness that comes from boiling.

There are still a lot more recipes I’d like to try out, not least the cinnamon buns, so, thanks to this book, I think my slow cooker has earned a permanent place on my counter.

Friday food links – 1 May 2015

I have two punnets of raspberries (about 300g). What would you make? I'm thinking cake....

What kind of week has it been? Busy, as I start to get back into the swing of work. Little E still has a horrid cough, so sleep hasn’t been great generally (although we did get only our second ever sleep through the night on Monday night). Lots more slow cooker meals this week. I’ve decided that on my working days our dinner should either be from the slow cooker, from the freezer or something made of leftovers. I can save the more creative cooking for the days when I have a bit more time to play with. I also found myself with some extra berries, so raspberry muffins were made for work colleagues, and there’s either a raspberry ricotta cake or raspberry friands on the menu this weekend.

Recipes:

Without a recipe:

  • Roast chicken
  • Sausage bap (for dinner? yes, really)
  • Pumpkin filled pasta (from the supermarket) with pesto and ricotta

Reading:

Very little this week, for some reason – lots of catching up to do this weekend.

Friday food links – 24 April 2015

Love the psychedelic colours that emerge in these @signesjohansen Queen Maud muffins

My first week back to work, and my daughter is one today – big milestones. I am trying to simultaneously raise my sights at work, and lower my expectations at home. Looking for ways to squeeze more out of each different type of time I now have – even when that means more fun, more relaxation, more sleep. Part of that is leaning on the slow cooker. I’ve really enjoyed cooking from ‘Slow Cooked‘ by Miss South. It helps that E loves slow-cooked meat of all sorts, and it’s soft enough for her to shovel it in pretty well.

Today’s mission is making some cream cheese icing and assembling the monkey birthday cake for E’s first birthday party. We’ll be having a warm spring vegetable salad, cheese bouikas from the Honey and Co. cookbook, and soup, then cake, and this evening, pulled pork from Slow Cooked over pasta.

Recipes:

Reading:

Friday food links – 10 Apr 2015

Yesterday's no knead bread, this morning's toast.

I’m now into the last two weeks of maternity leave, so this has been a week of firsts, lasts and letting go gradually. I am going back to work three days a week, so there will still be time for swimming lessons, walking to the park to see the ducks, and just lazing around on the living room rug. But it’s hard to ignore the fact that that our lives will necessarily be more planned and regimented from now on. Getting us both dressed and out the door for 7:30am, getting dinner on the table for us both, and organising shopping and deliveries will all be more challenging from now on. Considering a slow cooker, but also knowing that this is not a magic solution.

Fortunately, our last full week of freedom has been warm and sunny. We bought new shoes, went to Kew to see the magnolias in full bloom, rode around the supermarket in the trolley, and played on the swings in the park. The biggest hit with E for dinner (and lunch) was a very mild chicken curry with lentils and cauliflower. She’s been sucking it off bread, eating it by the spoonful and even getting her hands in the bowl and shovelling it in with her fingers. Our sea bass, potatoes and broccoli were summarily rejected in favour of more curry. I’ve also been hunting for some more prepare-ahead baby-led weaning options for when my preparation and imagination fail me (and pinning things I find here). Food52’s Cooking for Clara column is a good one – I made these baked beans this week.

Recipes:
* Earl Grey and Honey tea loaf – Justin Gellatly’s Bread, Cake, Doughnut, Pudding
* Moroccan carrot salad – Diana Henry’s A Change of Appetite
* Baked beans – Food 52
* Chicken stir-fry and broccoli with ginger – Fuschia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice (a library one this, but I think I may have to buy it myself – see also Sassy Radish on this book).
* Chicken Adobado – Thomasina Miers’ Mexican Food Made Simple
* Banana cake for First birthday monkey cake in a couple of weeks – Smitten Kitchen recipe

Without a recipe:
* Chicken stock
* Chicken curry, loosely from the Baby Led Weaning Cookbook
* Saucy Fish sea bass, with new potatoes and purple sprouting broccoli
* Burgers and wedges

Reading:
* This piece on food in Homer, Alaska is a wonderful piece of writing, and is nominated for a James Beard journalism award (via Orangette)
* Apparently merveilleux are the new macarons
* Baking a cake for the first time can be daunting – here a cook (but not a baker) shares her worries
* The head chef at Yotam Ottolenghi’s Nopi restaurant left to be a school cook – inspiring stuff.
* Lots of sweet recipes appearing over Easter: carrot graham layer cake (graham crackers are more or less digestive biscuits); Ottolenghi on chocolate; Diana Henry on pistachios
* Lizzie at Hollow Legs has a new book out on Asian cooking – she lists her 5 essential ingredients here. (I must make another trip to Chinatown soon).

Friday food links – 13 Feb 2015

Cow pie for dinner. @RosieRamsden recipe, @breadahead puff pastry.

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:

Without a recipe:

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

Reading this week:

Friday food links – 6 Mar 2015

Snowdrops

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:

Friday food links – 23 Jan 2015

I hope she's hungry! #lifewithbaby

Winter is really here now. I think it took its time arriving, but there’s no real doubt now. Even in our sheltered corner, there’s thick frost on the ground each morning. I’m thankful there’s no snow though – we’re not equipped for it!

Recipes from this week:

Cooking without a recipe:

  • Chicken curry (Spice Tailor sauce) and dal
  • Pasta and sauce

And this week’s reading (which includes tidying up some old articles too):

Friday food links – 16 Jan 2014

First go with my @BakeryBits proving baskets, using @bakingjames Pain de Campagne recipe.
A bit of a bleak week – rain battering on the skylights at night, cold winds whistling around the pushchair in the day. Highlights included a first run with my proving baskets from Bakery Bits (above), and some nice veg-centred cooking, including soup, roast vegetable salad, and tacos.

Recipes:

This week’s reading: