Apple bread, baking for cold weather

November 26, 2011 Food & drink
Apple bread, from Roast Figs, Sugar Snow: Food to Warm the Soul by Diana Henry

It’s nearly December, so all the apples are in and off the trees now.  That leaves an annual problem…dealing with gluts. Luckily, I don’t have any gluts to deal with, but I do have friends who need to deal with theirs, leading to a slight over-abundance of Bramley apples.  Apple pie? Too predictable.  Baked apples? [...]

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Roast Figs, Sugar Snow: Food to Warm the Soul, by Diana Henry

November 23, 2011 Books
Roast Figs, Sugar Snow: Food to Warm the Soul, by Diana Henry

Hunger makes beans taste like almonds – Italian folk saying It was cold today. That feeling of winter has been creeping in for a few weeks now, the leaves piling up and swirling around the bottom of trees and against walls, things turning brown, dying, hibernating. It felt like winter, and I’ve started to cook [...]

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eightpointnine.com’s personalised coffee

November 19, 2011 Food & drink
eight point nine's personalised coffee

One of the key things about coffee is freshness. It’s the reason that any coffee shop worth its salt grinds their own beans, with the very best grinding small quantities very regularly. At home, it’s difficult to get a decent grind out of most domestic grinders….blade grinders just obliterate the beans, and they do that [...]

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How to make boudin noir

November 16, 2011 Food & drink
How to make French Boudin Noir, or black pudding

You either love blood puddings and sausages, or you hate them. I’ve yet to find anybody who’s simply ambivalent. Sitting on the fence just doesn’t seem to apply here. There are many different versions of blood sausage – the traditional British black pudding contains oats to thicken it, the Spanish Morcella has rice, and this French [...]

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Keevil & Keevil, meat through the post

November 13, 2011 Food & drink
Keevil & Keevil online butchers, Smithfield Market, London

Years ago, walk down any British town’s high street, and you’d find a clutch of entirely predictable shops. A baker, a greengrocer, maybe a fishmonger if you were lucky, and a butcher. The explosive growth of the supermarket and our hunger for the convenience of shopping for everything under one roof with a big car [...]

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Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal, by Jennifer McLagan

November 9, 2011 Books
Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal, by Jennifer McLagan

Go into any supermarket, and most butchers, and there’ll be shelves full of neatly butchered meat, prize cuts of rump, sirloin, tenderloin…the premium parts of the animal. What’s missing is the rest of the beast, all the other parts that don’t make up the standardised, easy to handle, easy to cook cuts that people so [...]

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Create, Leeds

November 4, 2011 Eating out
Create, Leeds

Rob said that he’d find us a restaurant. Normally, that’s a good thing, but this time he suggested this new place in Leeds that’s run by his old boss from his time at Harvey Nicks.  He described it as a bit relaxed, with plastic tables and chairs. Plastic tables and chairs weren’t what many of [...]

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Slow-cooked beef in stout or porter

October 29, 2011 Food & drink
Shin beef in beer

Right, confession time. This was meant to be a Generic Lazy Blog Post. Oh come on, you know the sort, especially if you write a blog yourself.  Sometimes us bloggers hit a brick wall and just don’t know what to write about.  We just scratch and scrabble around for something vaguely interesting to cook or [...]

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Maple syrup, walnut and pear cake

October 17, 2011 Food & drink
Maple, walnut and pear cake by David Lebovitz

This last week or so have been quite tough, and the coming ones aren’t shaping up particularly well, either. What to do? Well, baking a cake often helps. So, that’s what I did today, cashing in half a day’s holiday tucked away for a rainy day and heading off home in the wind and through [...]

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