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…

Friday food links – 27 Feb 2015

Feb27

Biggest food successes of the week were the roast beef last Sunday, done to rosy in the middle, sliced thin and piled onto bread with the onions roasted underneath it, some slaw and a thin smear of mustard. And the braised red cabbage with caraway, mustard seeds and red wine. The granola bars, however, didn’t hold together at all, so got crumbled up, baked for another half hour and put in the jar for granola over cereal.

Recipes:

An attempt at these granola bars – but see problems above (I think I was a bit too liberal with the rice krispies)
Cabbage and carrot slaw with this citrusy dressing (with the beef sandwiches)
Braised red cabbage – from an old Wednesday Chef post (served with sausages)

Without a recipe:

Fish finger tacos, cabbage slaw, avocado
Breadcrumbed fish and chips
Roast topside of beef in sandwiches with roast onions
Egg fried rice with vegetables
Pizza with artichoke hearts and cheddar

Reading:

The extract from Joanna Blythman’s latest book on what’s really in your food makes for somewhat worrying reading. Food manufacturers gradually replacing declared additives and e-numbers with naturally-derived replacements that don’t have to appear on the label.
Rome’s schools are serving a pan-European menu – and the Italians are predictably in uproar.
This is an amazing list of helpful Scandinavian words that don’t exist in English. I particularly love ‘Tandsmør’ – a Danish word meaning ‘tooth butter’ – there’s so much butter on your bread that you leave toothmarks.
I’ve just got the 5 O’Clock Apron cookbook, which looks great. Particularly keen to try the chicken shawarma recipe, which features in this list of 10 top kids recipes.

Friday food links – 20 Feb 2015

Feb20

After a week of being cooked for, this week was a combination of new projects, and eating from the freezer. The week was anchored by a big braise of pork with tomatoes, and of beans on Sunday, which gave us pork and bean burritos, tomato sauce for pasta, and mashed beans for baby dinners. I ordered such a large piece of pork, that the other half is in the oven this evening for porchetta. Oh, and I made Semlor (see picture above), Scandinavian cardamom buns filled with vanilla whipped cream and marzipan, for Shrove Tuesday. I am completely converted – and they are even better with a thin layer of raspberry jam.

Recipes:

Smitten Kitchen braised beef with tomatoes and garlic, except with pork instead of beef
Braised beans with bacon and wine, but without the wine to make it baby-friendly
Mustardy farro with roasted veg from Diana Henry’s A Change of Appetite (although adapted liberally to use leftover barley risotto instead of farro)
Mock porchetta from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook – this book is so soothing, so comforting in the kitchen. Judy Rogers walks you through exactly what to do, and while there are usually a lot of steps, she let’s you know why they are all needed.
Sake steak and rice from Nigella’s Feast
Semlor from Scandilicious

Without a recipe:

Pasta with tomato sauce and meatballs from the freezer
Burritos with braised beans, shredded pork, tomato salsa, and weirdly, stir-fried veg, which actually worked ok.
My mum’s pheasant casserole from the freezer

Reading:

A very smart piece from The Guardian about ‘miracle’ foods. There’s no such thing as an ‘anti-cancer’ diet, ‘rich in antioxidants’ isn’t a health claim, and just because a food contains something, like vitamins or omega-3, it doesn’t mean your body is able to absorb it. Once again: Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Baby carrots (at least in the U.S.) are whittled down big ones. But this isn’t as wasteful as it sounds. It’s a way to use the misshapen carrots that would otherwise be rejected by supermarkets.
Lucky Peach has a fascinating history of the molten chocolate cake. I suspect this pattern of innovation – from elite chefs through good restaurants to chains and then supermarkets – is replicated for all sorts of new foods.
I really loved this post from Shauna, aka gluten free girl, about the soothing ritual of the same meal plan every week.
Need a chocolate fix? You might need bittersweet brownies with cranberries, chocolate cardamom mousse or chewy dairy-free brownies.

Friday food links – 13 February 2015

Feb13

A short one this week, because I almost forgot to put this post together, and because I haven’t bookmarked that much this week. I’ve also been treated to someone else’s cooking all week, with my Mum catering while she was staying with us.

Reading this week:

Rocket & Squash does a good round-up of the weekend food supplements on Mondays. Very useful.
Smitten Kitchen – oven-braised beef with tomatoes and garlic sounds right up my street: three ingredients, almost no preparation, long-braised goodness. But I wonder why you can’t routinely buy beef chuck as a joint in the UK?
Daniel Boulud comes across as a pretty hyperactive character in this Bon Appetit piece.
A child psychologist takes fussy-eating children to Yo Sushi without their parents to see what they will eat (answer: most things).
Both of these Nigel Slater valentines cakes sound delicious.

Friday food links – 6 Feb 2015

Feb6

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.

Friday food links – 30 Jan 2015

Jan30

There has been a lot of simple without-a-recipe cooking this week, coinciding with a more concerted attempt to make proper meals for the little madam, as opposed to just assembling random bits on the fly. A roast chicken at the start of the week provided leftovers for two more meals, and the bones went into the freezer to make stock another day. It’s looking like it will be cold here this weekend, so I’m glad I’ve got some thick slices of beef shin in the fridge to braise slowly and shred into unctuous ragu.

Recipes:

Pork with quince and pomegranate from Persiana
Orange marmalade cake from the NY Times

Without a recipe:

Slow-roast chicken, roast potatoes in the same pan, broccoli and cauliflower cheese
Pasta with tomato sauce and chicken
Fried rice with chicken and vegetables
Sausages, potatoes and sweet potato, red onions roasted together
Fish parcels with sea bream, leeks and potatoes

Reading this week:

The Economist publishes an annual guide to the relative value of currencies, based on the price of a Big Mac around the world. They have coined the term ‘burgernomics’ for this exercise, and they’ve really gone to town with the food-based adjectives and puns in this year’s article.
Food52 acknowledges something that should be more common – the ‘perfect’ version of a given dish is very subjective. So they give you a guide to creating your favourite brownie, whether your idea of perfect is fudgey, cakey or chewy.
The Serious Eats Food Lab comes up regularly in these links, for their forensic approach to getting a dish right, and their interest in the nuts-and-bolts of food science. This article on recreating the perfect McDonald’s-style fries is a great example.
It’s a common observation (and one that Eddie Izzard has views on) that pears are ripe for a frustratingly short window. When they’re good, they’re excellent – when bad, they can be tasteless, gritty, floury. The Awl takes apart the pear and how to make the best of it. It’s based on US varieties – I’ve never seen a Seckel pear here – but there is some overlap.
How-to videos are one of the great assets of the internet, and great for teaching cooking techniques. Here is a simple video on the best way to de-seed and chop a pepper. For more on these sort of simple techniques, the NY Times has a series on basic techniques, and Poires au Chocolat has a good set on baking foundations.
And some baking inspiration for the weekend (in addition to the marmalade cake above):
- The Perfect Salted Caramel sauce – Felicity Cloake
- Rhubarb and custard split buns – Ruby Tandoh at The Guardian
- How to make Ciambellone (a plain lemon-scented Italian cake) – The Wednesday Chef

Friday food links – 23 Jan 2015

Jan23

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:

Vegetable chili, more or less from the Baby Led Weaning cookbook
Smitten Kitchen pizza dough
NY Times fish tacos, made with fish fingers 🙂
Honey & Co. – Pomegranate molasses chicken

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):

BBC News documents some of the changes to the consumer price index shopping basket, used to track food inflation.
The Piglet tournament of cookbooks pits some of the previous year’s best cookbooks against each other to find a winner. Each head-to-head has its own judge, who cooks from both books. Always entertaining, this year’s list includes Diana Henry’s ‘A Change of Appetite’ and ‘Smashing Plates’ by Maria Elia.
Bee Wilson’s column in the Telegraph continues to be worth reading. This week: on spiralizers and specialist kitchen gadgets more generally.
A New Yorker piece discusses the rise of ‘fast casual’ eating – chains like Chipotle and Shake Shack. In the UK, I’d probably put Byron and Wagamama in this category too.
I like the look of this brunch dish from pinch of yum – a bit like shakshuka bolstered with spicy fried potatoes.
I wasn’t a huge fan of Ruby Tandoh during the Great British Bake-off series she featured in, but her food writing is smart and her recipes in her Guardian baking column more interesting than most. This piece brings together several of her favourite recipes from the column.
McSweeney’s is a destination for intelligent comedy writing, and I very much hope there are more in this series: The Great Cookbook breakdown, Part 1

Friday food links – 16 Jan 2014

Jan16

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:

Pain de Campagne from Brilliant Bread by James Morton
A version of squash, black bean and feta tacos from The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook
Braised chicken with pears and rosemary from All About Braising by Molly Stevens – truly delicious, that one.
Carrot, sweet potato and ginger soup, in the Thermomix, a Riverford recipe

This week’s reading:

A lovely, sane, contrast to the usual ‘2015 food trends’ pieces, Diana Henry runs down what she thinks we will see more of this year. Wise words.
An old LA Times piece, carefully researched, on why there’s no need to soak your beans before cooking them. Of course, as Catherine Phipps (author of The Pressure Cooker Cookbook) pointed out on twitter, this is something pressure cooker cooks have known for years.
I can’t remember where I first learned that you should peel and cook broccoli stems, not throw them away. This NY Times recipe for sliced and fried broccoli stems sounds delicious.
One I have just caught up with – Bee Wilson reviews Anna Jones’ book ‘A Modern Way to Eat‘, and describes her approach to vegetarian eating as an eight-step process. Something that’s useful to bear in mind when you’re used to composing meat-and-two-veg meals.

Using Mainly Spoons

Reading between the lines of recipes

Tag Archives: food links

Friday food links – 20 Mar 2015

Friday food links – 13 Feb 2015

Friday food links – 6 Mar 2015

Friday food links – 27 Feb 2015

Friday food links – 20 Feb 2015

Friday food links – 13 February 2015

Friday food links – 6 Feb 2015

Friday food links – 30 Jan 2015

Friday food links – 23 Jan 2015

Friday food links – 16 Jan 2014

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