Mark Bittman: What's wrong with what we eat. How to make perfect salt and pepper squid. I still remember the thrill of my very first Chinese meal, in a restaurant in exotic St Albans back in the late eighties. There were banana fritters and hilarious chopstick lessons, pancakes you could eat with your hands and carrots carved to look like flowers; in short, it was an eight-year-old's dream meal ticket. My tastes have changed slightly since then – I'm likely to be the one pushing for the pock-marked Mother Chen's bean curd, or the chilli tripe (while secretly hoping someone else will insist on the crispy duck), but one thing I'm unable to resist, if it's on the menu, is salt and pepper squid.
And it usually is, because whatever part of China they're from, restaurateurs are canny operators, and Cantonese spicy, salty fried food is always a winner. The problem is, Chinese meals are all about sharing, and even people who claim to be scared of tentacles usually end up polishing off more of the portion than I'm strictly comfortable with. The cephalopod itself The batter The garnish. My Guides To Gelato in Rome | Parla Food. View Guide to Gelato in Rome in a larger map I have updated this post for 2013…It’s that time of year again: gelato season. Granted, rainy and cold winter weather never did stop me from eating gelato regularly, but there is nothing quite like strolling through Rome eating a gelato on a sunny spring day.
We may have to wait until it is downright sweltering before granita is available (though I spied some at Corona in Largo Arenula the other day), but that just means more time to savor gelato in all its varied forms. After nine years of binging on researching Rome’s gelato offerings, I have come up with my ultimate list of gelaterie. You won’t find Giolitti or San Crispino on this litany (indeed, they haven’t been the best at anything but being famous in a long while).
Explore related categories: Gelato · Rome & Lazio · Sweets & Dessert. British woman speaks of her anguish after vandals poured £60,000 of white wine down the drain. Katie Jones, 47, has been making wine in France for four yearsLost 4,000 bottles of white wine - a year's vintage in attackClaims she was victim of 'wine vandalism' - targeted for being British By Hugo Duncan Published: 00:16 GMT, 6 May 2013 | Updated: 08:29 GMT, 6 May 2013 A British woman who moved to France to follow her dream of becoming a winemaker has spoken of her anguish after vandals poured £60,000 of her product down the drain. Katie Jones, who left Leicestershire two decades ago, lost the equivalent of 4,000 bottles of white wine – an entire year’s vintage. The 47-year-old said it was her ‘worst nightmare’ to discover she had lost a year’s work when she returned home after a business trip. Target: Katie Jones has lost the equivalent of 4,000 bottles of white wine in a 'vandalism attack' on her vineyard in Languedoc She told the Mail: ‘It was a real shock, it was absolutely awful.
‘It is absolutely devastating. She said: ‘Yes it is quite unbelievable! The great global food gap: Families around the world photographed with weekly shopping as they reveal cost ranges from £3.20 to £320. Snapshots of families' weekly shop from countries around the world shows the food gulf between nations By Daily Mail Reporter Published: 18:32 BST, 5 May 2013 | Updated: 11:18 BST, 9 May 2013 A study of what 30 families living around the world eat in one week shows the huge gulf between the diets of different nations.
Crisps, biscuits and chocolate treats dominate the shopping basket of the Baintons from Britain who spend an average of £155 every week to feed their family of four. Other items on their shopping list include ready meals such as baked beans as well as convenience goods like ketchup, teabags and mayonnaise. These pictures of their weekly food shop shows the sharp contrast between the eating habits of those in the UK and others around the globe. Britain: The Bainton family of Cllingbourne Ducis spend £155 on their weekly food shop. Chad, North Africa: The Aboubakar family from Darfur, Sudan, spend £37 a week on food to feed six people.
The cake that looks like a Mondrian painting. It has always been possible, in certain frames of mind, to look at a battenberg cake and think it a work of art. But this tribute in cake form to the artist Piet Mondrian takes that sort of artistic appreciation to a whole new level. From the outside it looks like a squared-off chocolate log. Cut it, and you have sliced yourself an edible canvas, its finely balanced squares of coloured sponge carefully demarcated with icing. The Mondrian cake and others, such as the tall red tower decorated with Lichtenstein dots, are taken from a new cookbook, Modern Art Desserts, by Caitlin Freeman, who is pastry chef at Blue Bottle Coffee at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She never copies works outright, just pays tribute to them, sometimes tangentially. Her other creations include an Icebox Cake homage to Rineke Dijkstra, or a heart-shaped parfait modelled on Luc Tuymans' St Valentine (1994).
It could be tricky ever to look at a battenberg in the same way. Tinned food recipes | Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall | Food and drink. It's easy to be sniffy about food in tins. We hide them in the cupboard like so many brightly labelled larder louts. Not for them the on-the-kitchen-counter decorative status of jars of fancy pulses, pasta shapes and bottles of posh oils. But sometimes tinned food will save our supper, particularly when we find ourselves slap-bang in the middle of the wretched hungry gap, when the roots, tubers and brassicas of winter are dwindling and it seems aeons until spring's leafy, juicy, sprightly bounty will make an appearance.
Things in tins have been around for more than 200 years, and we have Napoleon to thank for them. He realised that almost as many of his soldiers died from scurvy and malnutrition as at the hands of the enemy. Napoleon (he did say, "An army marches on its stomach," remember?) Offered a 12,000-franc prize for anyone who could come up with a method of preserving food to feed his men. Of course, I always have lots of tinned tomatoes in my cupboards. Ribollita Black bean soup.
Low-sugar recipes: a dozen delicious treats. Our addiction to sugar, aided and abetted by the food industry, is the main driving factor in the obesity epidemic, according to leading US doctor, Robert Lustig, whose book Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth About Sugar has just been released in the UK. "We need to de-sweeten our lives. We need to make sugar a treat, not a diet staple," he says. His tips to minimise sugar intake include eating fruit, rather than drinking the juice, which has had the fibre squeezed out of it, and baking cakes and other sweet treats yourself with a third less sugar than the recipe says.
Here are a few healthy treats to get you started. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's banana recipes Delicious ways with bananas and plantain, roasting, frying, and an easy ice-cream recipe – the natural sweetness of the banana means you can adjust the sugar down to taste. Dan Lepard's low-fat, low-sugar chocolate cake Chocolate and pear cake with a rich, deep flavour and delicate, moist texture, but very little fat or refined sugar. The Greatest List of Everything Bacon at One More Gadget. Here at One More Gadget we like lists. Lots of them. You might say one day we’ll eventually have a list of our lists. Here’s a list of the most glorious list of bacon things imaginable in the Greatest List of Everything Bacon. 1.
Bacon Gumballs Bacon gumballs, there’s nothing tastier than the actual feeling of chewing bacon. Bacon Gumballs with several hours of bacon chewing can be found here 2. There’s a certain magical healing power to bacon. Each metal tin contains two sizes of vinyl, adhesive bandages. All the time. I should probably be buying these at Costco. Although this is similar to the bacon band-aids we reviewed before, these have the added bonus of eggs. Note: This product contains natural rubber latex which may cause allergic reactions. The most important band-aid of the day – Bacon & Egg Breakfast Bandages here 3. Honestly, there’s nothing hotter than a girl with bacon unless it’s a girl IN bacon. Check out more photos of Jia and her bacony costumes here 4. The answers bacon. How to cook perfect gumbo. But despite contriving to both go on holiday and move house, I finally ran out of excuses – though my fears about nailing the essence of gumbo, the stew that runs through the veins of any self-respecting Cajun, still ran high.
Sure, I've eaten some good gumbo in my time, in Louisiana and elsewhere, but making the stuff myself, well that was a whole different kettle of crabs. According to Howard Mitcham, author of Creole Gumbo and All That Jazz (and, wonderfully, a noted "bohemian, raconteur and 'renaissance man'") gumbo is "an improvisational thing, like early jazz. You just take off with whatever tune is handy and then you travel ... A Creole cook can take a handful of chicken wings or a turkey carcass or a piece of sausage or a few shrimp or crabs and whip up a gumbo. " As the Mitcham quote suggests, there are about as many gumbos as there are mammas in Louisiana: the internet is full of regional variations, always lovingly described as the original, the authentic, the best.
Meat Liquid. Food and drink firms undermining public health policy, say scientists | Society. Food, drink, and alcohol companies are using similar strategies to the tobacco industry to undermine public health policies and should be regulated, say public health experts. Negotiating with multinational companies on salt, fat and sugar levels or including calorie and alcohol amounts on labels in the way the UK government has done through its "responsibility deal" will not work, say the authors of a study published by the Lancet. "Self-regulation is like having burglars install your locks," said Professor Ron Moodie of the University of Melbourne, Australia.
"You feel you're safe, but you're not. " The paper is one of a series published by the medical journal on the large and growing threat of what are known as non-communicable diseases (NCDs) across the globe - namely cancer, heart disease and stroke, diabetes and respiratory diseases. In 2010, 34.5 million people around the world died from these diseases, which were 65% of all deaths that year. Horsemeat scandal exposes the cheap food imperative | John Harris. What do we know of the arcane processes and multinational supply chains that lie behind the modern food industry?
Or rather, how much do we want to know? Some food lines – bread, high-end confectionery, wine – obscure the realities of mass production behind a hazy myth of traditional techniques, careful quality control, men in chef's hats and the like. But in the case of the meat industry, everything is unspoken. For most people, there will probably be some half-formed idea of the trade's realities that occasionally comes to mind: giant slaughterhouses, the questionable body parts that go into mince, the tangle of horrors forever embodied in that dread term "Turkey Twizzlers". But it is largely all held at bay – part, perhaps, of that gentle denial whereby, once you're beyond mere birds and fish, the English language tends to use different words for animals, and their edible flesh.
Well, now we know. Let us briefly pause to marvel at what all this means. How to cook perfect pancakes. With hot cross buns already staling on shelves, and mince pies surely mere months away, plum pudding and pancakes are the only two foods I can think of that unite the nation for but one day a year. While more delicate sorts claim to find Christmas pud too “heavy”, I’ve yet to meet anyone, regardless of religious affiliation, who eschews a Shrove Tuesday treat. Why we don’t dare to bust them out at Easter too, or on fine September mornings, is a mystery to me. Pancakes are a remarkably versatile foodstuff: French crêpes, Indian dosas, even Ethiopian injera, all fall under the same delightful banner.
As Ken Albala, author of a gloriously comprehensive “global history” of the things explains, “any starchy batter … cooked in a small amount of fat on a flat surface” counts. Elizabethan pancakes Puritan pancakes Butter batter? Telegraph food writer Xanthe Clay uses melted butter in her batter to compensate for any loss of flavour occasioned by cooking them in vegetable oil. Stand or deliver? 1. Tesco says some of its value spaghetti bolognese contains 60% horsemeat | UK news. Link to video: Horsemeat scandal: ‘immediate testing will be done’ in schools, hospitals and prisons, says environment secretary Tesco has admitted its value range of spaghetti bolognese contains more than 60% horsemeat as fresh DNA tests began to reveal new products affected by the scandal. Staff had already removed the Everyday Value range from stores because they had been supplied by the same company, Comigel, who made the Findus lasagne that contained 100% horsemeat.
Further revelations are expected throughout the week, as the Food Standards Agency has ordered UK suppliers and retailers to undertake DNA tests on their meat and supply results by Friday. The announcement came amid a growing war of words between the supermarkets , processors and producers over who is to blame for the scandal, with Comigel claiming the trail led back to Romania - something which was vigorously denied by the Romanian government. • Additional reporting by Simon Neville and Roberta Radu. This 'world's most expensive food' trend – I can't stomach it.
The world's most expensive food trend includes Le Coq d’Argent's £1,000 coq au vin. Photograph: Sauce Communications There is nothing – other than a criminally hard-poached egg cowering pathetically under a blanket of hollandaise – that pushes my "rage" button more than shameless, cynical PR stunts dressed up as something warm and charitable. We have been subjected to the world's most expensive bacon sandwich, a £125,000 Christmas lunch and, this week, a £1,000 coq au vin. We've had pizza with gold leaf and truffles, burgers with gold leaf and truffles and quite probably gold leaf and truffles with gold leaf and truffles.
If you happen to serve food in your establishment, simply cover said food in gold leaf and truffles, say it costs a grand and watch the publicity flood in. It's pathetic and cringeworthy, and shame on you for doing it. I'm sure it will taste delicious.
Creamy chicken with apples, pears and root vegetables recipe, plus fried mozzarella and bread skewers | Yotam Ottolenghi. Both recipes in this week's new-look column were inspired by a recent trip to California, which has a climate similar to that of the Med and is blessed with wonderfully fertile soil. Olives, figs, plums, grapes, citrus fruit and every green imaginable thrive here, and for most of the year as well. On this visit, I was taken to Berkeley Bowl, a food emporium that doubles as a monument to the vegetable. The sheer quantity and variety of fruit and veg sold here, most of it local, is staggering. I counted nine types of cucumbers. Yes, you read that correctly: I did say cucumbers, not tomatoes or apples. Mind you, there were dozens of varieties of those to choose from, too. This incredible produce is the platform on which Californian cuisine has built its reputation since the 1970s, when the state's culinary pioneers, with the legendary Alice Waters of Chez Panisse at the helm, recognised the godsend growing right under their noses.
Creamy chicken with apples, pears and root vegetables. Okbooks: the word on the street. Mackerel overfishing: greed is the problem | Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Egg Waffles.