Hard to believe it’s the end of October – today was warm and sunny: it could have been June. Still, there are leaves on the ground, and soups and stews are starting to become a more regular feature of the menu.

• John Lanchester thinks food has got a bit over-hyped in a piece for the excellent New Yorker food issue. I tend to agree.
• Michael Specter wrote a long and thoughtful piece for the same issue about gluten, the coeliacs and the intolerances, the science and the politics.
• I made the plain white sandwich loaf from Justin Gellatly’s book last week. It was incredibly good with a soft crumb that I had stopped thinking was possible from a plain yeast-flour-water loaf. I also want to try the pumpkin seed loaf from the same book. So I am trying to get back into the groove of bread making, and these two recipes caught my eye:
  • 4 hour baguettes from Food 52
  • Whole-wheat sunflower seed rye bread (which is one of David Lebovitz’s excellent posts about blogging at the same time)
• I loved this sequence of interviews with different cooks and writers about how to write a recipe correctly. I liked Judith Jones’ preference for more description, more information, rather than just the briefest version possible. I particularly dislike the (mainly American) tendency to hide preparation steps in the list of ingredients (1 onion, chopped, 2 tbsp butter, melted).
• Molly from Orangette has some good observations on what home cooking means. Is it only ‘proper’ cooking if it involves a recipe or 5 different ingredients? Does that put people off ‘just’ making an omelette for dinner, or making something from leftovers?