food, reviews and of course coffee
Today the Guardian published a very nice cake recipe as part of a week long baking frenzy,
All this week, as part of Guardian food month, we will be running exclusive baking recipes from some of Britain’s favourite food names. To begin, a treat – top cake-makers Konditor & Cook’s bestselling Curly Whirly chocolate sponge with vanilla-bean frosting
Today it’s Konditor & Cook’s Curly Whirly cake.
Every year across the UK hundreds (if not thousands) of people suffer a miserable Christmas as they go down with food poisoning, with a lot of these down to badly cooked roasted turkeys.
With less than a month to go the Food Standards Agency has published a Safer Christmas Eating guide which should help you avoid making yourself and others ill through badly cooked food.
Whether you’re cooking for one or thirty-one, our Christmas poultry advice – plus our cooking and defrosting calculators – can help protect you and your family and friends from food poisoning.
Well worth reading, more so if you have never cooked a really big turkey before.
So which coffee do you drink on a regular basis?
Personally I stopped drinking instant coffee a few years ago, and now only drink “proper” coffee. I either use my espresso machine or the cafetiere.
I use Percol’s Fairtrade Organic Percol which is quite a strong coffee.
Dark and full with upfront flavours of bitter chocolate and hazelnut with a smooth and rounded finish.
I enjoy this first thing in the morning and often have a second cup mid-morning if I am at home.
So which coffee do you drink and enjoy?
The Guardian have published an informative and substantial guide to baking, everything from cakes to bread.
Whether you are a novice pastry roller or an expert icer, our scrumptious new guide will take your enjoyment of baking to a whole new level.
Check out the Guardian’s Guide to Baking.
The Guardian reports today that consumers are been asked to stop buying excessively salty ready meals.
Shoppers are today urged to boycott an unhealthy “hit list” of supermarket ready meals amid claims that they undermine the progress made by most manufacturers in reducing the average salt content of convenience foods.
It can be quite amazing, well more like scary, how much salt can be found in some ready meals. Often as much (if not more) than the recommended daily amount of salt, and then some people add more salt!
For me personally I try and avoid salt for health reasons, but now much prefer the natural flavours of food, herbs and spices and I don’t need the taste of salt. I certainly don’t consider salt to be a natural flavour enhancer.
A different way of cooking potatoes.
Take a spoon, place the potato on it, and then with a sharp knife make some slices ensuring you don’t cut all the way through the potato.
Place the potatoes in the roasting tray and baste the potatoes with a blend of olive oil and melted butter.
Roast for an hour and then grate some parmesan on top (if you so wish) and roast for a further ten minutes.
Really tasty.
Take some skinless boneless organic chicken thighs, some supermarkets sell them like this, others you will need to skin and bone them. I prefer the thigh meat as it has a lot more flavour than the breast meat (and is cheaper).
Slice into strips.
Coat in flour.
Coat in beaten egg (free range and organic).
I did two different kinds of strips, one with seasoned flour and one with breadcrumbs.
To season my flour and breadcrumbs I usually use a mix of cajun spices.
Shallow fry for a minute or so, until brown.
Drain and put onto kitchen towel on a plate to drain any excess oil. Keep warm.
I served mine with spicy rice.
Quick and easy.
Yesterday I cooked a very nice Sunday lunch for the family.
We have stuffed chicken thighs wrapped in pancetta. I served this with hassleback potatoes, steamed carrots, green beans and brocolli. We also had roasted parsnips, sweet potato and carrots, we also had Yorkshire puddings.
It went down very well and very tasty it was too.
BBC Food has published what looks like a very tasty recipe from Saturday Kitchen, pan-fried calf’s liver with port and sage.
Probably like most people I am not a great fan of liver, probably down to the liver and bacon dish that I was served at school.
However I would quite like to try this, so I might.
This is a very tasty way of cooking pork loin steaks, however you can use other cuts of pork as well, I have done this recipe with thick slices of pork tenderloin.
Take your pork loin steaks. They need to be quite thin, about quarter of an inch (5mm). If you have thicker steaks, if you put them in the freezer to firm up you will find them much easier to cut into thinner steaks.
You now need to make some breadcrumbs, add some herbs and ground pepper to the breadcrumbs.
In a frying pan add some plain oil, something like sunflower, I used rapeseed oil, and heat up until it takes about thirty seconds to brown a cube of bread.
Take the steaks, coat in plain flour and then dip in beaten egg before covering in breadcrumbs.
Depending on the size of your pan, cook just one or two steaks at a time, otherwise too much in the pan will cool the oil down too much or the steaks will stick together.
Cook for a minute two on each side.
Once cooked, keep in a warm oven until ready to serve.
One of the benefits of cooking pork is that the pork stays really tender, whereas dry frying the steaks can sometimes toughen them up.
I have served this with rice and tomato sauce.