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.
As mega K-pop group BTS returns to the stage after a hiatus of more than three years, one major market is conspicuously missing from its 12-month world tour: China. The omission of one of the group’s biggest fan bases comes as no surprise. In fact, just the opposite would have been huge news. China has blocked most South Korean entertainment since 2016 under an unofficial ban that also restricts movies and the country’s popular TV dramas. For some Chinese, that means flying to Seoul to see their favorite groups perform — as many were expected to do for three shows opening
A recent report from the Environmental Management Administration of the Ministry of Environment highlights a perennial problem: illegal dumping of construction waste. In Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) and Hsinchu’s Longtan District (龍潭) criminals leased 10,000 square meters of farmland, saying they were going to engage in horticulture. They then accepted between 40,000 and 50,000 cubic meters of construction waste from sites in northern Taiwan, charging less than the going rate for disposal, and dumped the waste concrete, tile, metal and glass onto the leased land. Taoyuan District prosecutors charged 33 individuals from seven companies with numerous violations of the law. This
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
Apr. 13 to Apr. 19 From 17th-century royalty and Presbyterian missionaries to White Terror victims, cultural figures and industrialists, Nanshan Public Cemetery (南山公墓) sprawls across 95 hectares, guarding four centuries of Taiwan’s history. Current estimates show more than 60,000 graves, the earliest dating to 1642. Besides individual tombs, there are also hundreds of family plots, one of which is said to contain around 1,000 remains. As the cemetery occupies valuable land in the heart of Tainan, the government in 2018 began asking families to relocate the graves to make way for development. That
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