

Poutine - trendy junk food
"when seen for the first time, poutine looks like a culinary catastrophe." Rebecca Nicholson/The Guardian Indeed it does, but then...
May 29, 2024


A sort of French heritage
"What had stuck was the taste for a kind of food quite ideally unlike anything I had known before. Ever since, I have been trying to...
May 19, 2024


"Finland is the green vigour of a forest"
"Much Finnish cooking suggests the outdoors, the pleasures of the campfire." Dale Brown - Time/Life The Cooking of Scandinavia Finland...
May 13, 2024


Vegetables then and now
"Vegetarianism wasn’t just perceived as a dietary choice but a lifestyle one. If you were veggie you were a hippie." Fiona Beckett/BBC...
May 9, 2024


First recipe impact - is it why we buy?
"without naming names, I find that many miss out on the opportunity to sell the casual reader by making your first recipe absolutely...
May 7, 2024


The delights and annoyances of a Persian lunch
“One of the joys of restaurants is that they’re a brilliant place for disclosure. If you’re going, ‘Sorry, what? You did what? To whom?’...
Apr 29, 2024


Desi or dépaysé - inventing comfort food
"Being the child of an immigrant has its own issues because your identity is so torn." Afreena Islam "Desi: a person of birth or descent...
Apr 25, 2024


A lucky dip, a website, lamb and avgolemono
"Avgolemono is just so important to Greeks. But maybe it’s even more important to Greeks who’ve left Greece." Simon Glofit So it began...
Apr 11, 2024


Fermented herring to taco Fridays - Sweden
"The backbone of Nordic cuisine comes from dealing with challenges" Rachel Khoo Back to my foodie tour around the world with the third...
Apr 7, 2024


An earnest blogger
"So this is it. I have to cook every dish in the book as written by Jane – even if it contains something I don’t like, e.g. whiskey and...
Mar 22, 2024


Norway - stewed mutton and cabbage or Grandiosa frozen pizza?
"There remains a clear gap between the blossoming fine dining scene and the everyday food eaten by most Norwegians and visitors to the...
Mar 3, 2024


Almost 50 years post Cuisine Minceur
"This was far and away the most influential cookery book of the latter half of the last century. It affected almost everything we eat...
Feb 17, 2024


Allspice
"Everything is in there: it gives you a hint of cinnamon, nutmeg, that pepper-y, clove-y taste, all of these different flavours out of...
Feb 12, 2024


Dragons, money, luck ...
"the more dumplings you eat, the richer you’ll get." Jennifer Wong/The Guardian Chinese New Year began yesterday, but the big Melbourne...
Feb 11, 2024


Tawook - it's just chicken
"The whole is not merely the sum of the components. It comes back to the same thing - the spirit of cooking." George Haddad This was a...
Jan 28, 2024


Changing the form, but retaining the spirit
“When I opened up my first restaurant it was never to cook Greek food the way most people had seen it.” Peter Conistis The dish at left...
Jan 17, 2024


How basic can you get? Bread sauce
"Bread sauce: pure, holy, special, gentle, and kind." Ruby Lott-Lavigna/Vice (The version above is Easy bread sauce from James Martin,...
Jan 16, 2024


Questions arising - a cookbook present
"Emma Freud: Because you aren’t surrounded by an Indian community in the UK, has your cooking become more anglicised? Chetna Makan:...
Jan 10, 2024


Then, now, national dishes - Denmark
"Lacking the wild natural surroundings of their northern neighbours in which to climb and hike, the Danes have made eating their...
Jan 7, 2024


A chef's life - down, up, and down again
"He became an apprentice chef to answer a simple question: did food exist that was better than that which he’d eaten?" Stephen Downes...
Jan 4, 2024

