Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

Copenhagen Food is a cookbook by Trine Hahnemann. This book looks beautiful and demonstrates a lot of plain but tasty Nordic cuisine. But that said, I have only made a couple of recipes from it, even though I went through and indexed all of the ones I wanted to try.

Prawns will and homemade mayo is the only recipe I regularly use, which is like twice a year. The only modification to the mayo I have made is to add a little bit of lemon.

Since then, it has languished on my sideboard waiting for a review, which I have not written because I did not really know what to say. So, this is me saying very little.

In fairness, it is titled Copenhagen Food: Stories, traditions and recipes, so the sparsity of recipes is clear from the title.

Rick Stein: The Road to Mexico is a cookbook by Rick Stein that draws on recipes from the Southern United States (California area) and Mexico.

There are a lot of good recipes in here. That said, I never found the motivation to make a lot of the seafood dishes, instead opting for the easy taco options that I could make by marinating a meat of my choice and wrapping it up in tortillas.

I also made some salsa and guacamole, so we tended to do several days of tacos in a row so that I could make one big batch and enjoy it while it was still fresh.

During the Tour de Yorkshire last week, including the day as a whole, I burnt 5,133 kcals. That is a lot of kcals. Helpfully, my friends James put together a meal plan to work out how much McDonald’s I could eat to recover the energy.

Breakfast items

• Double sausage and egg McMuffin
• Hash brown
• Pancakes and syrup

Main menu items

• Double cheeseburger
• Quarter pounder
• Big Mac
• 2 x medium fries

Desserts

• Chocolate doughnut
• Aero McFlurry
• Chocolate muffin

Drinks

• Small Fanta orange
• Large chocolate milkshake
• Flat white
• Latte

Will get all of that queued up for my next big sportive!

Toby Carvery has outdone themselves. Their new range of desserts includes a freakshake that features a Yorkshire pudding with chocolate brownie in it.

We’ve outdone ourselves this year. Usually, when we make our annual pilgrimage to buy the Christmas ham, they top out at about 6kg. But, this year, we found them all of the way up to 9kg.

We weren’t sure 9kg would fit in the oven. Or in the fridge. So, we went for a conservative 8.67kg ham. Which still beats our record by over two kilograms. Venla seemed pretty pleased with it.

I’ve been working through a few of Aine Carlin’s cookbooks that Sarann kindly lent me. They’re not doing it for me, to be honest. They’re not filled with recipes, and many of them just didn’t take my interest or were based around ingredients I couldn’t use. But there were a few nice dishes.

Aduki bean casserole from The New Vegan

Shepherd’s pie with sweet potato mash topping.

Cannellini bean stew.

The Slow Cook Book is a cookbook by Heather Whinney. It contains hundreds of recipes and all of them come with instructions for how to do it in a slow cooker, or using a more traditional method. This feature is great when you forget to put your slow cooker on and need to cook your dinner in a lot less time.

Some of the recipes are a little involved: there is 15-20 minutes of prep and pre-cooking in a pan before you put it into the cooker. However, once you get used to this and plan for it, it’s not too much hassle and comes in a predictable format.

The recipes are tasty. However, as is a problem with most slow cooker recipes, they tend to be very liquidy. And there is a lot of them. We’ve been doing one a week for probably over a year and still haven’t got the end.

While I was over in Finland, I raided their supermarkets for the sports products they had. Some of it was Finnish, some of it was American. Here is what I found.

Gatorade

I’ve never tried Gatorade before but it thumbs up. I like this stuff. It doesn’t feel as heavy as Lucozade.

Powerade

Another widely sold drink that I’ve never tried. It was good, but I prefer the flavours of Gatorade.

Maxim protein bar

This was very tasty. Almost as tasty as the Carb Killa bars.

Arla protein yoghurt

Chocolate and orange flavour. it definitely has a distinctive taste compared with other yoghurts, but in terms of mixing up my recovery food, I could see myself throwing in some of these.

Tupla protein bar

This not only looks like a Mars bar (but has no relation) but also tastes like a chewy version of a Mars bar. All of which is good.

Cricket protein bar

These are named Leader Zircca bars. Leader is the brand, and zircca is the Finnish word for cricket. Not the game, but the insect. It’s made of crickets: 15 of them go into each bar. They were okay and didn’t taste like you were eating insects, but I haven’t left craving more.

We’ve really enjoyed Ken Hom’s cookbook. We’ve been working our way through the 60-odd recipes we thought looked tasty over the past three or fours months and can now conclusively say that it is a winner.

All of the recipes have been easy to follow. A lot of them start the same way: by chopping up some meat and marinating it in a mixture of sesame oil, rice wine, soy sauce and corn flour. Then typically stir-fried with a variety of other ingredients.

If you’re looking for authentic Chinese food, this isn’t the book for you. The recipes are Westernised, which makes them both easy to cook and very tasty.

Sweet and sour pork.

Chicken and sweetcorn soup. It should have been chicken and spinach soup, but I cooked all of the spinach the day before and had to rely on stereotypes to fill in the blank.

Chicken with sesame seeds.

Braised fish.

This week, Tesco announced that it was removing “best before” dates from around 70 products including apples, potatoes, tomatoes, lemons and onions.

In 2012, I wrote about how banning “best before” dates could contribute to reducing food waste. Has Tesco taken this step because of the relentless pressure of six years of being sharing my blog post? No. But I’m pleased about their decision nonetheless.