There was never any real question that The Kitchen Diaries would be another brilliant book from Nigel Slater.
And, true to form, it's a collection of scrumptious recipes, somehow written in such a way as to make your mouth genuinely water. However, it is also a thoughtful meditation on how we eat and when: following a year in the Slater kitchen, the book raises questions about seasonality and provenance, but also addresses simpler matters -- such as what exactly is the best thing for supper on a damp Tuesday and what you might be able to create from a leftover risotto.
For food with the wow factor, Shane Osborn's latest offering, Starters, is a very good bet. The dishes in his restaurant are beautifully presented, and so if you want (or need) to impress the mother-in-law this Christmas, then serving up his truffle and white bean soup or duck breast, prune and walnut salad will go some way to doing so. All the recipes are for starters, and come with helpful advice on how to enlarge them into main courses, and include detailed instructions on how to serve them, so you too can put tasty, attractive food on your table.
Italy's most popular cookbook, The Silver Spoon -- actually, more or less the only cookbook in Italy -- is a compilation of recipes more than 50 years old. It is now in its eighth edition, and is often given to Italian brides.
This is more an encyclopedia of Italian food than a cookbook. There's nothing but densely packed recipes (more than 2,000 of them), so if you need to cook brains, there are more than 10 methods to choose from. You'll probably be more interested in the delicious range of pizzas, though, or main courses such as mackerel with sage butter or roast aubergines with ricotta.
I genuinely thought I knew how to poach an egg until I had a look at Eggs by Michel Roux. Did you know, for instance, that you can cook them in up to two days in advance and keep them in cold water in the fridge, reheating them in boiling water when you need them? Michel Roux may be a Michelin-starred chef, but in this book he goes back to basics with simple, straightforward, highly edible recipes. I can now say, with some pride, that I can make proper hollandaise sauce and rather good omelettes. Yum.
Soup is simple, highly nutritious and potentially very tasty. However, Soup Kitchen by Annabel Buckingham and Thomasina Miers is not just a book designed to help you invent something from the vegetables in the fridge on grey January days; it is a collection of excellent recipes donated by leading chefs, introduced by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Try spicy sweet potato soup, or even chocolate soup, and rest safe in the knowledge that 70 percent of the cover price goes to charities for the homeless such as Centrepoint and the Salvation Army.
If you have any plans to diet in the new year, then stay well away from La Dolce Vita by Ursula Ferrigno. If, however, you dismiss all such faddishness and are well-prepared to dip your hand back in the biscuit tin after the festivities, then this is the book for you. Ferrigno has collated her favorite sweet recipes from Italy to great effect -- so if you need an extravagant cake for a party, or you simply want to know quite how you might go about bottling fruit, then look no further. A good book to give as a present -- the recipient will simply have to invite you round for tea and cakes.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and