Vegetarian skewers - some thoughts
"I'm not sure a tomato belongs on a kebab anyway. They refuse to turn when the kebab is rotated on the grill, burst and collapse into a red mush. Pointless." Nigel Slater Now having a vegetarian granddaughter and some vegetarian friends, every now and then I have to think of some kind of skewer dish for them if the food I am cooking everybody else is for a BBQ or is the family's favourite kebabs. So when Yotam Ottolenghi's topic for his last week's newsletter was vegetarian
4 days ago
Overbalanced - ads and websites
Time for a website and this is the next one on my list. I looked at it a while ago and wondered why I had it on the list, and actually decided it wasn't worth a look. However, since then I have wondered a bit at why I rejected it as unworthy of a look, but then thought, well it's relatively popular - it often comes up in the first few results in searches that I make. So I need to think more about it. And one thing that is a thing to talk about is the massive number of ads
Jul 18
The price of lamb
This is actually a lucky dip post, and I shall have stuff to say about the chosen book and the chosen recipe - which you have now guessed features lamb - specifically lamb cutlets such as these. Now this photo, found on Google Images, with the caption 'Thanks for the bargain Coles' - it was ironic - is actually old, because the lamb cutlets in this photograph were selling at $45.00 per kg. Now they are selling at $51.00. Ordinary housewives, surely cannot afford that. I h
Jul 14
Italian/Indian or Indian/Italian?
"Arguably, two of the most loved foods of all time, combined." Devinder/East West Pizza" If you think about it, Italian and Indian cuisines are more similar than expected: rich comfort foods with generous use of tomato, garlic, and onion." clicksngiggles/reddit The photograph is of pizzas on offer from the East West Pizza cafe in East London that Devinder with his wife Manpreet run. In 2021 in a competition run by the BBC for the best pizza takeaway in Britain it was voted
Jul 3
Those gifts and impulse buys
"You shouldn't have anything in your pantry that you wouldn't want to cook with." Alison Roman I have two lovely daughters-in-law and two lovely sons, who, because of my love of food and cooking, often give me foodie gifts and hampers. This year for my birthday I was given this glorious Italian 'hamper' - which also included a Graham Swift novel in Italian that the local library had serendipitously been throwing out, and a bottle of Italian pinot grigio - but my husband go
Jun 30
Tech problems
"For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three." Alice Kahn The expression on the guy's face is a bit like I feel. So I'm going to vent a bit. You are probably not interested in the problem and my attempts to solve it, but I feel the need to rage at the machine. You may have noticed you are not getting any emails telling you I have written yet another brilliant piece of triviality. I only realised after a few days, whe
Jun 26
A missed opportunity
A couple of days ago, this brochure arrived in our letterbox. Of course I was not excited, but I did think that it might have some information inside that would be useful for a blog. And it did but not in the way I thought it might. I should explain that Woolworths has been undergoing the same renovation process that Coles undertook some time ago, and that I'm sure is happening everywhere, with variable tweaks made according to the physical size of the store and the demogra
Jun 25
Lucky dip - Kubbeh hamusta
"A recipe that adapts to its environment, but never forgets where it came from." Elli Benaiah/Beyond Babylon There are so many tricky and just picky issues about this particular recipe. It comes from Sami Tamimi and Yotam Ottolenghi's book Jerusalem - a word that evokes a whole range of emotions these days - mostly not good. Although Sami Tamimi - a Palestinian and Yotam Ottolenghi - a Jew of mixed heritage, are no longer official business partners in the Ottolenghi empire,
Jun 19
Spanish-style - well any '-style'
If you have read yesterday's post, you will know that this is one of two dishes that I am currently considering for our lunch on Saturday. It's from the delicious. book More Please, by Valli Little, and for some reason I assumed that it was a Spanish dish. And so today, I was going to 'research' this Spanish dish and do one of my kind of analyses of a traditional dish. However, when I checked my Spanish cookbooks - Claudia Roden and Robert Carrier being the authors - and al
Jun 4
Tinned tomatoes & pasta from the supermarket
This is really a bit of a cheat post in that I'm just reporting on some reviews I found of those basics of just about every kitchen - tinned tomatoes and pasta. How did I even come to be looking at them? Well I think I had recently bought a packet of Cucina Matese pasta from Coles and since I had heard from somewhere that this was actually a Coles brand, rather, than an Italian brand I decided to look into it and somehow - first came across this Australian supermarket tinne
May 30
Friday pastry fun
"There is never enough crust." Nigel Slater Somehow or other it is now almost a tradition that Friday is for pastry - usually a quiche. It is also true that by Friday I am using up leftovers, or even leftovers of leftovers. Like today. Pastry and leftovers offer an infinity of possibilities, and a fun challenge. Behold today's challenge. What absolutely has to be used is the tiny bit of leftover vegetable toad-in-the-hole in the front. Actually the vegetables only cons
May 22
Getting going
"The morning steals upon the night, Melting the darkness." William Shakespeare The quote and the painting were featured on my art desk calendar this morning, which sort of coincided with the thoughts I had been previously been having about the routines we go through in the morning, so I thought I would begin with it. The painting is by Charles-François Daubigny and it's called Morning by the Lake painted in 1858. I am dimly aware of the artist's name, but do not know this p
May 21
Travel
"Travel is the story you tell yourself about yourself." David Prior Once a year the Australian Financial Review puts out a seriously glossy Fin! Travel magazine - inserted into their AFR Weekend edition. This weekend is that weekend. Normally I flick through it in about five minutes - even less sometimes - and discard because it's full of ads for expensive watches, cruises and hotels with articles about holiday experiences which are - well - just decadent and out of my reac
May 17
Korean? noodle pancakes
"misused words generate misleading thoughts." Herbert Spencer The April Woolworths Fresh Ideas Magazine popped up yesterday, and so I took one and flicked through it. I confess I've gone off the Woolworths magazine in recent times - it's recipes seem less interesting and less well presented than the Coles equivalent. Not that Coles is a goldmine of recipes I should add. But it is indeed always interesting to browse both magazines for all sorts of reasons other than lookin
Apr 25
David Chang's fresh kimchi(s)
"Kimchi … you know you can just buy it, don’t you?" Zoe Williams/The Guardian And yes I do know that you can buy kimchi - indeed I bought some a little while ago to add to something I was making. It was in the recipe. I can't remember what the recipe was, and nor, to be honest can I remember tasting the kimchi. I do remember eating some in one of the dishes served to us at Ho-chi Mama in the city a long time ago - and that was delicious. It's one of those ingredients lik
Apr 22
Does it matter how good the food is?
"Hell, it's only food. Just enjoy it." Jill Dupleix This is my family - well most of them - on holiday four years ago, I have no idea what we were eating - probably some kind of barbecued meat and I'm sure it was at least good if not absolutely delicious. But really it wasn't what we are eating that was important, no matter how much thought and skill went into it. It was the pleasure of eating it together, chatting about this and that. Although, of course, that can some
Apr 14
Cabbage and the vagaries of memory
“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were." Marcel Proust This was going to be a relatively straightforward post inspired by the idea that 2026 is the year of the cabbage - which I I have been mulling over for a while - which would then be an occasion to talk about my favourite recipe for cabbage and finally being nudged into action about these things by Ottolenghi's latest newsletter which talked about all things cabbage. However,
Apr 12
Favouritism, preference, bias ...
"people usually see what they're already looking for, that's all.” Veronica Roth I have spent a large chunk of today and a bit of yesterday trying to decide what to cook for a lunch with our friends on Friday. (Actually on Tuesday and Wednesday - it's now Thursday. To me this is a pleasure, but it's also increasingly difficult. I mean where to begin? As you know I have masses of cookbooks, there are the supermarket magazines once a month and there is, of course, always the
Apr 2
Pretentious or sublime? - musings
“I'm tired of 'pretentious' just being used as an excuse to dismiss anything that fucking expects you to have a brain.” T.J. Kirk Please excuse the language in the above quote, but it was the one quote that I found that kind of expressed the same feeling I get occasionally - most recently and most specifically after seeing Paolo Sorrentino's latest film, La Grazia . last Thursday. I saw the film with my friend Clare in the city. There were a mere half dozen people in one o
Mar 29
Does disappointment trump joy?
"I see no point in putting pen to paper to preserve anything negative, sad or painful." Nigel Slater Well so says Nigel. To be fair he did go on to say that there was more than enough misery around, and probably in his life too. I doubt there is anyone happy all the time. He was simply saying he did not want to write about the bad things. The things that go wrong. However, I want to consider this in writing after my Sunday birthday party which was overall a joyous experi
Mar 24