Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

I haven’t made bread for years. But I recently started experimenting with making my own butter, so for the hospital Christmas lunch I hade a few loaves of focaccia with some lemon and sea salt butter. Went down very well. One of the most important things I’v elarnt from Elina is that you can absolutely bake your way into people’s hearts.

More Than Yorkshire Puddings: Food, Stories and Over 100 Recipes from God’s Own Country is a cookbook by Elaine Lemm.

Lots of nice stuff in here. Again, I didn’t make too many of the recipes, but probably more than Coast, and I did make a few of them several times. If you’re unfamiliar with Yorkshire food, this is a good guide.

Coast is a cookbook by Rachel Allen and subtitled recipes inspird by Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Coast”. Its organised in narrative form as she takes us on a journey from Cork all the way to Donegal.

It’s a fun read. I didn’t make many of the recipes because they tend to be quite involved in terms of sourcing ingredients as well as the cooking itself. But it has some lovely photography and stories in, too, so it is a nice book to have.

Bliss on Toast is a cookbook by Prue Leith.

The idea of a toast cookbook might raise eyebrows but the book is excellent. I tried almost every recipe. It makes such good lunches. They’re often quick to make and still delicious. If you are bored of your usual lunches, this is a great way to mix things up for little effort and big results. This is instantly one of my favourite cookbooks.

Donegal Table: Delicious Everyday Cooking is a cookbook by Brian McDermott. I cannot recommend it enough. It’s down to earth and the food is delicious. I tend to measure cookbooks but how often I reuse them. River Cottage is at the top, Mary Berry is close behind and others rank somewhere below that. Donegal Table isn’t quite River Cottage, but it’s not far off, either. I’ll be using some of these recipes again and again.

My photos don’t do it justice. But here they are anyway.

Surf and turf sliders.

Eggy bread with bacon.

Mammy’s Irish stew.

Sausage and pasta bake.

Honey roasted vegetables.

Lemon and black pepper chicken.

I’ve been working my way through The Food of Sichuan by Fuchsia Dunlop. Elina bought it for me for Christmas. But probably the previous one and it has sat around waiting to be used for a while. Well worth the wait: there is some delicious recipes in it!

Gong bao chicken

Duck with cashews

Dry-tossed beef

The Roasting Tin is a cookbook by Rukmini Iyer. It promises “simple one-dish dinners” and it delivers. I like it. Stick a bunch of ingredients in a roasting tin, stick it in the oven and in an hour or two you will have nice food. Not much messing around and nice results.

There is optimum roasting time. The short roasts were a bit dull, and I didn’t get great results from the really long roasts which I think come out better if you slow cook them. But the range of an hour or so seems to be the sweet spot for this book. I recommend the five-spice pork chops and smokey sausage supper, both of which make excellent and easy to prepare meals.

The Wicked Healthy Cookbook is a cookbook by Chad Sarno, Derek Sarno and David Joachim. It’s nice in that it talks a little bit about the theory of making vegan food. But everything felt quite involved and hard to make, or easy to make but with hard-to-find ingredients. None of the recipes has made it into our regular rotation.

Dirty Vegan is a cookbook by Matt Pritchard of Dirty Sanchez fame. I tried a bunch of the recipes but I couldn’t really get into it. None of them has made it onto our regular rotation.

I’ve been testing out salted potatoes for running. They make a nice savoury snack when you are sick of gels.

To cook, I boiled them for 10 minutes, coated them in coarse sea salt, roasted them in the oven at 200 degrees for 30 minutes, coated them in a bit more salt and declared them ready. They were pretty good, but I think their appeal will be much greater towards the end of a long run. They’re not bad cold, but not quite as good as warm.

I tested both Jersey royals and British gems. The skin is a bit looser on the Jersey royals and Elina felt they went a little rubbery, whereas the British gems held up a bit better.