Category Archives: Food

Goodbye wheat! Readers on 10 great gluten-free recipes – from katsu curry to cherry cake

Posted on by

Steering clear of wheat, rye and barley doesn’t mean avoiding delicious dishes. Here are some of the tastiest offerings, including soda bread, peanut butter cookies and banana oat pancakes

My favourite gluten-free recipe is poodla (small pancakes), which I make using gram (chickpea) flour, water, cumin seeds, garam masala, turmeric and salt, with added chillies (chopped), grated onion and grated courgettes (it also works with mashed peas, spinach, grated cauliflower etc). Simply make a batter to any consistency, add your vegetables, then shallow fry on both sides. It’s delicious with a raita and a salad; we eat them for breakfast, lunch and sometimes as a main meal. Rekha Shah, retired, Bournemouth

Continue reading...

Beat the heat! 40 ace ice lollies to make now – from honey parfait to piña colada

Posted on by

Do you like your popsicles milky, fruity or boozy? Whatever your preference, here is a complete guide to making quick, delicious freezer treats

Along with bling and outrage, the ice lolly is probably the thing fashion designers and toddlers most have in common. It is instant dessert and an edible sticking plaster. Mostly, whether you go to town with the freeze-ins, the ombrés and the post-freezer coatings, it is heatwave relief on a stick.

Almost any liquid, bar neat, heavy alcohol, freezes well – from double cream and coconut milk to freshly pulped watermelon (for which there’s a stellar hack: slice off the top of the fruit, plunge in a hand blender and juice the inside, then strain). Make sure whichever option you plump for is overly flavourful – mild juice will make for a meh lick.

Continue reading...

Mo Gilligan: ‘I did bake biscuits in lockdown, but it’s too much faff’

Posted on by

The comedian and Masked Singer panellist on his fascination with chicken, mum’s Caribbean specials and the secret to great mac and cheese

At home, my mum did the cooking. It was me, my two sisters and my mum. She mainly cooked Caribbean dishes: mutton and rice, curry chicken and rice, sometimes curry goat, rice and peas, but that would be for a wedding or something. You wouldn’t have curry goat all the time. It’s mad when I think about it, because when you’ve got kids and you’ve just come back from work, I can see how easy it is to put some chips in the oven. But my mum was always cooking from scratch. To this day, she still does it.

We couldn’t afford the supermarket. My mum would get a lot from the markets, predominantly East Street or Brixton Market. We’d eat a lot of fish: snapper, sometimes red bream. It’s only since I’ve gotten a bit older that I’ve had other fish, like sea bass for example. Yeah, we weren’t eating sea bass.

Continue reading...

Burnout eating: how chronic pandemic stress can disrupt and destroy our diet

Posted on by

Over the past year, many of us have suffered from physical and emotional exhaustion. It is no surprise that people have turned to food for comfort

Naomi Boles hit a wall last October. “I wasn’t sleeping at all and I felt like I couldn’t keep going,” she recalls. “I was so stressed, and even when I was in bed my brain was constantly racing as I was worrying so much about my health, about my income, about my children. When I went to the doctor, it was like I’d reached a point where I couldn’t carry on any more.”

Nine months on, she is still recovering from that burnout. “I am finally getting to the point where I can be a bit easier on myself and not constantly be in this fight-or-flight mode,” she says.

Continue reading...

Pro-onion faction triumphs in Spain’s great omelette debate

Posted on by

Nation settles one of its most vexed questions as survey finds large majority of Spaniards prefer tortilla de patatas with onion

In a rare moment of national unity unseen since a certain British chef recklessly floated the idea of adding chorizo to paella, Spain has come together at last to settle one of its most ancient, vexed and divisive questions.

No longer will tempers flare at bar counters nor arguments rive friends, families and neighbours gathered together at table. Chefs, critics and home-cooks can put aside their opinions – and their spatulas – safe in the knowledge that yes, an overwhelming majority of Spaniards really do prefer their tortilla de patatas with onion.

Continue reading...

Absolute bangers! 10 brilliant sausage recipes – from risotto to perfect pizza

Posted on by

Sausages are a fabulous ingredient in their own right, and should never just be served up with a pile of veg. Here’s how to use them with panache

It is easy to be lazy with a sausage. They are already seasoned, so all you have to do is cook them, put them on a plate next to some other stuff and eat them. But to simply plonk a banger next to a pile of veg is to do it a grave disservice – far better to use the sausage as an ingredient in its own right. Here are 10 recipes that do exactly that.

Continue reading...

Salud! Spain’s female winemakers use their intuition to rise to the top

Posted on by

The industry has a growing number of women earning plaudits at its renowned bodegas. But are they really better than men?

“I think of my wines as barefoot children that need love and care,” says winemaker Marta Casas, holding her glass up to the light. Below her, the vineyards of Penedès roll away almost to the sea, but she could be virtually anywhere in Spain.

Just as they fought their way into the male domain of haute cuisine, a growing number of Spanish women are seeking a career in winemaking, with three times as many taking courses in oenology compared with 10 years ago. This was given an added boost in 2018 when Almudena Alberca was made Spain’s first female master of wine, one of only 149 in the world.

Continue reading...

Unlocking the ‘gut microbiome’ – and its massive significance to our health

Posted on by
Scientists are only just discovering the enormous impact of our gut health – and how it could hold the key to everything from tackling obesity to overcoming anxiety and boosting immunity

If you want to learn more about what’s going on in your gut, the first step is to turn your poo blue. How long it takes for a muffin dyed with blue food colouring to pass through your system is a measure of your gut health: the median is 28.7 hours; longer transit times suggest your gut isn’t as healthy as it could be. We are only now beginning to understand the importance of the gut microbiome: could this be the start of a golden age for gut-health science?

“The gut microbiome is the most important scientific discovery for human healthcare in recent decades,” says James Kinross, a microbiome scientist and surgeon at Imperial College London. “We discovered it – or rediscovered it – in the age of genetic sequencing less than 15 years ago. The only organ which is bigger is the liver.” And, for all that the internet may be full of probiotic or wellness companies making big health claims about gut health, “We don’t really know how it works,” he says. At the risk of sounding like the late Donald Rumsfeld, there’s what we know, what we think we know, and an awful lot that we don’t yet have a clue about.

Continue reading...

Hold the toast! 10 delicious avocado recipes – from latkes to luscious lime cheesecake

Posted on by

There is so much more to do with an avocado than just mash it up, whether you decide to make a grilled peach salad, Mexican chicken soup or fabulous ice-cream

Avocado has three main uses: the first is avocado toast; the second is guacamole; the third is being held aloft as a totem for why millennials will never be able to afford their own homes. This is all rather unfair. The sheer number of air miles that it takes to reach your plate is often so vast that an avocado should be a treat. Thoughtlessly slapping one on a piece of toast simply won’t cut it. Here are some more distinctive uses for this ingredient.

Continue reading...

Iraq was Donald Rumsfeld’s war. It will forever be his legacy | Andrew Cockburn

Posted on by

The late defence secretary’s micromanagement style – arrogant, bullying and ignorant – helped ensure the disastrous outcome

Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense under George W Bush, who died on 30 June at the age of 88, enjoyed one all-important attribute, which was to appear larger than he actually was. He enhanced his comparatively diminutive 5ft 8in stature with the aid of thickly padded shoes with built-up heels, which caused him to waddle when he walked. His staff called them the “duck shoes”. But he inflated his presence in other ways, too, promoting the image of a clear-thinking, decisive commander while determinedly deflecting responsibility when initiatives he had championed careened into disaster.

When American Airlines flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, he hurried out of his office and headed for the site of the impact, spending a minute or so helping to carry a stretcher bearing one of the casualties. Meanwhile, the country was under attack, but no one knew where the chief executive of the US armed forces was to be found. As a senior White House official later complained to me: “He abandoned his post.” The excursion elevated him to heroic status, as a decisive, take-charge leader, an image that persisted in part thanks to his heavily staffed publicity apparatus. It played no small part in distracting attention from his impatient neglect of warnings prior to 9/11 that a terrorist attack was likely.

Continue reading...

A drop in the ocean: rewilding the seas

Posted on by

From giant clams to zebra shark, marine biologists want to replace lost and vanishing species at sea but face unique obstacles – not least rampant overfishing

Kneeling on the seabed a few metres underwater, I pick up a clam and begin gently cleaning its furrowed, porcelain smile with a toothbrush. It’s a giant clam but a young one and still just a handful. Here in Fiji, giant clams or vasua as they are known, were so heavily overfished for their meat and shells that by the 1980s they were thought to be extinct locally. Australian clams were imported to start a captive breeding programme, and subsequent generations of their offspring have been released on coral reefs across Fiji. They’re still vulnerable to fishing and poaching, but if carefully guarded the giant clams do well and have become symbols of healthy corals reefs inside well-managed marine protected areas.

A key to their early survival is rearing them in cages to keep them safe from predators until they’re large enough to survive by themselves. However, the cages also exclude herbivorous fish, so the clams can easily get overgrown by seaweed, which is where the regular toothbrushing comes in.

Continue reading...

Meera Sodha’s vegan recipe for sweet potato mochi with black sesame sauce | The new vegan

Posted on by

Rice flour and sweet potato make chewy-crunchy cakes to coat with a salty-sour sesame dip

When I think of food that “sparks joy”, to borrow the phrase of a well-known house organiser, I don’t think of multicoloured cakes or the smoke and dance of Mexican restaurant sizzlers. It’s the fun, playful chewiness of the Japanese glutinous flour rice cakes called mochi that I want. Often they’re sweet, filled with adzuki beans or peanuts, but they can also be savoury, as in today’s recipe. Here, they are fried like pancakes to give them a toasty, crisp exterior before being coated in a deeply flavourful and dark sesame sauce.

Continue reading...

Croatia and Italy renew feud over prošek and prosecco wines

Posted on by

Italy tries for second time to block Croatia’s efforts to win special EU recognition for its dessert wine

Croatian winemakers have leapt to the defence of their centuries-old dessert wine, prošek, amid a renewed prosecco identity war sparked by Italy.

Italy said it would defend prosecco at all costs after Croatia applied to the European Commission for special recognition of prošek.

Continue reading...

‘Six chickens somehow turned into 60!’ Meet the families trying to live the Good Life in the pandemic

Posted on by

Many people yearn to grow their own food and live a simpler life – but, when coronavirus hit, some decided it was now or never. Have their dreams of burgeoning veg patches and frolicking livestock come true?

On their one-acre plot of Hertfordshire countryside, Sarah Apps and Liam Armstrong live with three chickens, 59 tomato plants and – until this morning – three pigs. “It’s been an emotional day,” says Apps. They plan to get more pigs later in the summer, and next week more chickens are arriving; then ducks and a goat, a couple of turkeys for Christmas and, maybe next year, bees. Living on their own land, and becoming more self-sufficient, had been a bit of a dream for the couple, but it took the Covid pandemic to make it happen. “You just didn’t know what was going to happen,” says Apps. “Young people were dying, older people were dying … I think you really need to live for the days that you’ve got.”

When they spotted a run-down bungalow that came with an acre of land, they went for it. They had been living in Romford, East London. “We could hear the roar of the M25 and I could barely be bothered to mow the small patch of lawn we had,” says Apps. They moved in November and spent the winter creating raised vegetable beds, putting in fencing and making animal enclosures. It has been gruelling physical work – they have done it mostly by hand – moving around 30 tonnes of soil. “It was our fitness thing through lockdown,” says Apps. But now they have growing just about every type of vegetable you’d find in a well-stocked supermarket, eggs every day, and in a few days the pigs will return for the freezer. She breaks off to check on a chicken who is in their kitchen. “She’s just had a bath. She’s not very well.”

Continue reading...

Eat this to save the world! The most sustainable foods – from seaweed to venison

Posted on by

What should we be scoffing if we want to help fight the climate crisis from our kitchens? The question has never been more important or confusing – here is a guide to help you get started

Was ever a word so misused as “sustainable”? “Healthy” comes close, and indeed the two are often bandied around together, in trite “good for you, good for the planet” taglines that often appear on foods which are anything but. The question of what we should eat to help combat climate change and environmental degradation has never been more important – nor so confusing. In July, the government will publish its National Food Strategy, based on a year-long independent review, which should shed some light on the matter. In the meantime, there are some foods which, with caveats, you can scoff with a clear conscience.

“Good eating starts at home, and one of the most important things we can do for the future of the planet is to minimise food miles – so our staples should be foods that can grow perfectly well in this country,” advises Patrick Holden, chief executive of the Sustainable Food Trust. Another basic principle is to do your best to understand the story behind what you’re eating – be it plant or animal: “If you know who produced your food, they are accountable to you, and more likely to care.”

Continue reading...

Damaging ‘fly-shooting’ fishing in Channel sparks concerns

Posted on by

Small-scale fishers say mostly EU fleet is devastating catches with method that nets entire shoals of fish

The UK has been accused of allowing a fleet of mainly EU “fly-shooting” fishing boats “unfettered access” to the Channel, without a proper assessment of the impact on fish populations, the seabed or the livelihoods of small-scale fishers.

Organisations representing small-scale fishers on both sides of the Channel have warned that the fleet is having a “devastating” effect on their catches. They are calling for a review of the vessels’ UK licences until an impact assessment has been carried out.

Continue reading...

You’ve been warmed: 10 slow-bake recipes to keep you home

Posted on by

As the cold weather takes hold, leverage the heat of your oven to stay cosy while cooking up a feast


With more of us spending time indoors during winter and while working from home, your oven can double up on duties: making dinner and warming your kitchen in the process. You don’t need a slow cooker when your oven can do all the work for you, from tender confit vegetables to a rich and luxurious custard.

Continue reading...

Recipe for inflation: how Brexit and Covid made tinned tomatoes a lot dearer

Posted on by

Combine the pandemic with rising raw material costs, stir in a labour shortage, a twist of Brexit, add a pinch of poor weather and voila …

Tinned tomatoes are a taken-for-granted store cupboard staple, relied upon by Britons to whip up home cooked favourites such as spaghetti bolognese. But the price could soon make you take notice, amid warnings of higher shopping bills, set against a backdrop of soaring global food prices.

From the packaging to the transportation and the energy used in manufacturing, nearly all aspects of the production of this popular ingredient now cost more. The crushed tomatoes alone are 30% dearer than a year ago, at €0.48 per kilo. The same pressures are driving the prices of many foods higher, meaning Britons will probably face bigger bills for groceries or meals out this autumn.

Continue reading...