C
ontrary to the December diet I described in my last post, there are plenty of vegetables that are in season in December, as well as, you know, biscuits, cakes, and meat wrapped in more meat.
Admittedly, fruit is thin on the ground – at this point we’re mostly importing or living on booze-soaked dried fruit. No complaints here! Continue reading
A
s a kid, I was a super picky eater. Not in the way that’s shown by TV shows which decry the state of the nation’s nutrition – I don’t remember being particularly enamoured with chicken nuggets and I didn’t eat chips till the age of 17 – but in a “give me cheese or give me nothing” way.
At 24 years old, I’m still finding things that I’ve never eaten, things that are totally normal and cause people to look at me like I’ve come from another planet.
I had baked beans for the first time a couple of months ago.
I had no idea what I’d been missing out on all this time. Easy, tasty food that can be tarted up without much hassle and is a great hiding place for secret veg! That’s my favourite.
So, this quick sausage and bean casserole is now my go-to, just a matter of whacking things into a pan in a few rounds then curling up with a warming Spanish-tinged delight. And as Beyonce no doubt meant to say, if you like it then you shoulda put an egg on it. Silky yolk running into comforting, spicy casserole? Yes please. Continue reading
I
‘ve been putting this post off in hopes that I’d have a recipe to put up, but the broken oven in our flat has thwarted me. I managed to make a birthday cake in a kitchen fairly foreign to me – a towering chocolate affair, with whisky buttercream and caramel ganache – but the recipe needs tweaks before it can appear here. Instead, a yawning content chasm has opened.
The fan and element have both blown, and by the time the new parts are fitted, it will have been three weeks since the bad news was delivered via WhatsApp. Three weeks of mentally planning meals and then remembering they’re an impossibility. Three weeks of being desperate to bake something to use up the 40 eggs I bought last weekend. A slight surplus, but worth it – they taste different in a way that’s hard to pinpoint. Richer, perhaps? Either way, they’re part of the dearth of creative cooking, lately. It’s all eggs on this, eggs on that. (Really, it’s a pretty good problem to have.)
Continue reading
W
hen I was at sixth form, I also worked three jobs (ish), and dreamed about all the free time I’d have as a grown up. Monday to Friday was sixth form – although around half of that time was sitting in the common room, or taking trips to Tesco in free periods – and Friday afternoon was cleaning for a family friend. Weekends in retail. Half-terms split between retail and a part-time feature writing job at a local magazine. Monday to Friday, nine to five, sounded glorious.
How adorable, right?
Now, it’s all busybusybusy, hours flying by before we can even stop to think how we’re spending them (the tube. The tube is where we’re spending them). And it’s for this reason that I’ve become a cheat in the kitchen, relying on recipes that can be made in a big batch and easily tweaked and recycled across multiple nights. For months, this was big bubbling pans of chili, made often enough that it became a flat joke. The holy grail of lazy home cooking? Big batches that can be frozen, and reheated fairly quickly. Continue reading
Litres of orange juice and tea. Mugs of soup and bowls of crumble. Olbas oil-drenched hankies. These are the things we’re really clutching this month, as the “back to school” cold sweeps the country, whether you’re actually at school or not.
So, September’s round up is a bit different to the usual, focusing more on what we can eat to help give our immune systems a helping hand in fighting against the sniffles. Continue reading
T
hese early months are odd ones for seasonal food – with winter giving way to spring, market stalls full of February’s hardy greens start to transform, with the additions of wild garlic and purple sprouting brocolli. The stars of February and March are undeniably those versatile green vegetables: trendy kale; wrinkled savoy cabbages, each dimple picking up sauce; and the always-brilliant leek. Even cauliflower, which has seen a revival as more people seek alternatives to heavy carbohydrates, is a noteworthy seasonal feature. Here’s a round up of some of the most inspirational recipes to help you get using those early-spring treats. Continue reading
T
his weekend, a message popped up on my phone screen that set off a domino run of panic in my mind.
“I was thinking this morning…”, said one of my closest friends, the one I got to know in the school library when we were both chubby little book nerds, “Can we have a Christmassy London weekend?”
A moment’s consideration and a flip through my mental diary later, I realised I only have one weekend free between now and 2015. How did that happen? How can I fit everything in? When did I become a person who says, Sorry, I’m all booked up till next year? Continue reading
So, it’s not really a matter of “in season” but it’s the season for pumpkin, right? This year, the hoopla around pumpkin seems to have come to a peak – my local supermarket was overrun with them from the first of October and, well, the telltale sign is the bizarre backlash in the media. I’ve seen for-and-against. I’ve seen pumpkin spice hate. This, on the cultural significance of it all, was a really interesting read. But more importantly, the food! One of my favourite pumpkin finds was pumpkin spice chocolate muffins with maple cream cheese frosting (Flourishing Foodie).
Aaaand onwards, to the rest of what’s in in October. Continue reading
Y
ears ago, there was a bakery back home that has since become the stuff of legends for those of us lucky enough to grow up with it in the village. The building is a pizza place now, but during my childhood it was a sugar-laden Aladdin’s cave of cakes and pastry and huge triangle slices of the best caramel shortbread I’ve ever had. I mourn for what used to be whenever I walk past now and the street smells of grease rather than sugar and butter.
Perched beside the pavement, roughly at the halfway point on the walk to school, the village bakery smelt so good it was basically impossible to stroll past without at the very least slowing down to take in the aromas of fresh bread, cheese straws, and a plethora of biscuits. A tiny room, there was only just enough space for a small round table and two chairs, tucked underneath a pin board that covered all aspects of village life: craft fairs, church services dance classes. It was old-fashioned, without the pretense you get these days in bakeries that declare themselves “artisanal”; all crisp paper bags and motherly staff.
The loaves of bread I used to buy most mornings on the way to high school for about a year – I was chubby for a reason – were still warm at 8am, and perfect on their own. The marshmallow cones were a regular childhood treat, and those caramel shortbreads were out of this world. But for true decadence, it was all about the date slice.
Don’t get me wrong, the dates slices weren’t a sophisticated affair. A hefty slab, they were essentially two hunks of shortbread sandwiched together with a thick, sticky date puree, and sprinkled with sugar. Healthy? No. Delicious? Yes.
Years on, it’s up to us to recreate the treats from our childhoods. Here, the humble date slice is tarted up a bit, making the most of the end of Bramley apple season and taking on a flapjack-y twist with the addition of oats. Continue reading