When people ask me what my favourite thing about food is, I have an instant answer. Cheese, I say. (No not really). What I love most about food, and increasingly notice the more I indulge and explore my passion for this most fundamental of human drives, is that it's a brilliant social tool. Food can bring even the most unlikely people together. I first became aware of this when I spent two years in the Oxford University Royal Naval Unit during my undergraduate degree. Among the many arduous tasks this involved - sailing warships, trying to cook in a metre-wide sea-tossed kitchen while holding a sick bag to your mouth, shoe polishing, cleaning the ship's toilets, the unpleasant itch of mass-produced uniform, swabbing frozen decks without gloves in the middle of January - was the requirement to attend a fair few fancy dinners with various important naval personnel (OK, so not that arduous, really...until I tell you that I had to both wear and therefore learn how to tie a bow tie). Oh good, I thought. Small talk. My favourite.
Read moreFestive apple jelly
The word ‘jelly’ fills me with a little bit of horror. Firstly, it conjures up images of lurid children’s birthday party food, weirdly fluorescent transparent goo in odd shapes that wobbles under the pressure of a spoon or a fat youthful finger. I’ve never liked jelly or even tried it, as I recall; I think I’m afraid of the strange way it would feel in my mouth, not solid but not quite liquid either, trampolining oddly against the teeth. I have an irrational aversion to the stuff.
Read moreApple, cinnamon and sultana hazelnut crumble cake
Baking, in our culture, is so often inextricably connected with love. Family memories and relations are shaped around food; some of our fondest recollections of our mothers and grandmothers are perfumed by the heady scent of a baking pie or cake. Missing the closeness of home and the familiarity of domesticity is frequently couched in terms of our longing for a particular dish, and even parental ineptitude in the kitchen is usually recalled with wry affection. Childhood friendships are formed and dissolved over the sharing of cake and other baked goods: I still remember once refusing to speak to my best friend for a week because she stole my lunchtime flapjack and ate it. We bake cakes, bread, brownies to cheer up our loved ones or as a token of our affection; the humble combination of flour, butter and sugar has become fetishized in our culture to such an extent that we apparently believe there are few gifts more redolent of love than a homemade baked good.
Read moreBacon-wrapped pheasant with gin and quince gravy
Of all the preparation that goes into cooking a meal, there are some tasks that I enjoy more than others. Preparing food is often seen as a chore, particularly when compared with the relative pleasure of eating it, but I think any keen cook will agree with me that actually, when you really enjoy the process of working with food, you learn to relish some of the simplest kitchen tasks. Separating an egg, for example - there's something quite satisfying about rocking the golden globule of yolk from shell to shell, allowing the viscous white to trickle through your fingers into the bowl beneath. Rubbing butter into flour for a crumble, sending up delicious waves of buttery scent that hint at the promise of golden crumb forty minutes later. Melting chocolate over a pan of simmering water, watching as those dark, matt cubes collapse into a thick, glossy silken mass. Blitzing spice pastes in a little blender, watching a tangled mass of disparate ingredients harmonise into a powerfully aromatic paste of fragrant flavour.
Read moreFavourite food moments of 2013
The end of the year is a time for reflection. Nostalgia. Thoughtful musings about life, progress, achievements, goals, regrets. Vague notions of self-improvement and self-denial. Bittersweet pangs and spirited hopes. Tears. Smiles. Thinking through your emotions, considering your true self.
But, luckily, this is a food blog. This is the sort of place where I post a photo of some meat or a cake and say 'omg yum, best thing ever to go in my mouth', occasionally interspersed with hilarious anecdotes about my teenage self or mildly homicidal rants about slow people. This is not a place for the kind of sentimental rubbish we might normally associate with the year drawing to a close. PHEW, right?
Instead, I thought I would commemorate the end of 2013 with a brief recollection of my favourite food-related moments, and some nice pictures. Can't say fairer than that, I hope.
Read moreCaramelised bananas with toasted coconut
While I usually deplore the ‘food as fuel’ mentality, the mindless consumption of edible goods simply as an aid to increased productivity regardless of their nature, I have to say that I do sometimes treat the poor banana with such an attitude. Wolfed down between coming home from work and heading to the gym, practically inhaled as a pre-swim morning snack or gulped greedily every time I feel that familiar blood sugar slump, I rarely pay much attention to this humble fruit, carelessly exploiting it for its filling, sugar-rich, workout-boosting nature and ease of eating.
Read moreMalaysian-style chicken curry with pineapple
There are two things I absolutely must do whenever I go travelling to a new place. Number one is to take cooking lessons from the locals. All the better if this takes place in gorgeous open-air surroundings by a Vietnamese river amidst gardens of fresh lemongrass and Thai basil and a swimming pool for when the exertion of cooking all gets too much, as I was once lucky enough to experience in Hoi An, but any form of cooking lesson is hugely exciting for me, even if it’s just a street food seller taking the time to demonstrate to me how they make their delicious wares. If they let me eat said wares along the way, even better.
Read moreLove thy neighbour: apple turnovers
When I was about fourteen, I went to a cookery evening class at one of the local secondary schools. I can’t remember if my mother decided to enroll me for this or if it was voluntary, but as I enjoyed it quite a lot I suspect the latter. You’re probably waiting to hear that this was an inspirational turning point in my life, that it inspired my subsequent love of food and all things culinary, that those happy evenings still stay with me, recalled in a nostalgic haze, credited with the establishment of my life’s passion.
Read morePumpkin crêpes with caramelised apples and pecans
Everything turns orange in the world of food media around this time of year. You can’t look at a recipe without finding that pumpkin has been sneaked in there somewhere. Sweet or savoury, breakfast or dinner, between the months of September and December it’s almost guaranteed to contain the golden vegetable, especially if it’s come from anywhere near America (in which case it will almost definitely also include cinnamon).
Read moreRhubarb, strawberry and Cornish gin cobbler
There’s an obvious answer to the question ‘Why don’t people cook with gin much?’
The answer is, of course, thus: because why on earth would you want to cook with gin when instead you could do all of the following things with it, preferably in the following order:
1. Admire beautiful simplicity of bottle of gin.
2. Feel small thrill of excitement at the promise contained within said bottle’s glassy depths
3. Wonder if it is the right time of day to drink gin
Read moreMango, coconut and ginger cereal bars
I’ve had a box of cereal bars in my cupboard for over six months. It was a box of six when I bought it; six months on, five remain. The other day I looked at the sell-by date and had to throw them out, as they’d expired two months ago. Why had I purchased a box of cereal bars and only eaten one? The answer lies not, as you may think, in simple forgetfulness, or a discovered dislike for the variety I had purchased.
Read moreApple and quince crumble with damson ice cream
Damsons are a high maintenance love affair. You can’t just coast with damsons, putting in minimal effort for a lot of reward, like you can with a strawberry, perhaps, or a pear – all you need with these easy goers is, at most, a knife. They’re not a fruit to be popped carelessly into the mouth while reading the morning newspaper, or something to munch as a snack on the go. They’re not something you can half-heartedly throw into a cake batter for a sweet and sticky result, or toss into the smoothie maker for an afternoon pick-me-up.
Read moreGoose breast with honeyed figs; potato and celeriac cake
I have a secret. You can't tell anyone, because I've spent the last four weeks moping around in huge jumpers moaning about how cold and rubbish England is compared to Asia, rolling my eyes every time I see grey skies (so my eyes have basically taken up permanent residence in the back of my head, then) and huffing every time anyone seems pleased to live in this ridiculous country. I'd hate to be inconsistent. But...and I can barely bring myself to admit it...tonight I actually found myself enjoying the English autumn.
Read moreCrab apples roasted in sweet chai tea
There are some fruits that just provoke a standard, knee-jerk response in the kitchen. Glut of apples? Make apple pie. Lots of bananas? Banana bread. Been too enthusiastic with the pick-your-own strawberries? Jam, of course. Oranges mean marmalade, and blueberries pancakes. Rhubarb equals crumble. When my supervisor told me she had a surplus of crab apples, and needed recipe suggestions, her only stipulation was “Don’t say jelly.”
Read moreBali banana pancakes
The moments you remember most fondly from travelling are often not quite those you’d expect to recall or to take such a place in your heart. I have many wonderful memories from my recent trip to south east Asia: spotting an orang utan in the wild in the heart of the Borneo jungle; immersing myself in the sights, sounds and scents of one of Penang’s biggest hawker markets; snorkelling in turquoise waters off the coast of Sabah; walking through lush rice terraces in Java surrounded by papaya trees. And yet one of the moments I remember best, and that fills me most with a tranquil sense of happiness, is one that is comparatively trivial.
Read moreTagliatelle with tuna meatballs and fresh cherry tomato sauce
Among several recipe instructions that are guaranteed to make my blood boil is the phrase ‘brown the meatballs on all sides’.
Now, I know a qualification in mathematics is not an essential requirement for the amateur or professional chef, or indeed the humble recipe writer. But it doesn’t take Archimedes to figure out that meatballs are, in fact, spherical. This means that firstly, they do not actually have sides, and, secondly, the act of browning them entirely over their total surface area is logistically impossible.
Read morePlum and hazelnut crumble tart
In my mind, there are two types of plums. The first are those that appear year-round in supermarkets, often in plastic punnets with a label saying 'Ripen at home'. They are imported, usually from South Africa. They are often nearly perfectly spherical, firm and glossy-skinned, and come in three different colour varieties: bright greenish-yellow, slightly translucent; dark black-purple, with a matt white bloom misting the surface; or vivid uniform magenta. These are perfectly fine - they are very reliable, delivering without fail a pleasantly tart crunch when slightly underripe and something slightly more sweet when ready. They also cook well, holding their shape under the pressure of heat.
Read moreSpiced apple and date jam (or, 'apple pie in a jar')
I’ve had an apple tree in my garden for as long as I can remember. When I lived with my parents in Cambridge, our neighbour’s apple tree overhung our garden and reliably dropped large quantities of cooking apples onto the lawn every autumn. My house in York, by happy coincidence, also has an apple tree in the garden, but this time it is entirely mine and entirely my lawn that bears the brunt of the October windfall.
Read moreAvocado, ricotta and sorrel toasts
When you think about ‘something on toast’, that lifesaver meal that I’m sure we have all succumbed to at one point or another in our lives, it has to be said that, generally, they aren’t the most nutritious somethings that find their way onto our pieces of charred bread. Marmite, for example. Jam. Cheese. Bacon. Butter. Not very many vitamins there.
Read morePho ga (Vietnamese chicken noodle soup)
There's a recipe in Yotam Ottolenghi's book Plenty, I forget the name of the dish. It's a spicy Asian creation of some sort, the breakfast of choice in a certain far Eastern country. In the blurb at the top of the recipe, Ottolenghi says something along the lines of "Breakfast is the one meal that doesn't cross cultural boundaries." This had never occurred to me before, but upon reading it I realised how true this is. No matter what is offered to me for the breaking of my fast in a country other than my native England, I always find it slightly difficult to begin the day with anything other than my usual, rather English, breakfasts: porridge, granola or homemade bread with jam.
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