Imagine you could only choose one drink to have for the rest of time, we'll make it easier and allow one from each of a hot drink, a cold drink and an alcoholic drink.
What would you choose ?
I'd pick: espresso, sparkling water and red wine.
Any one else?
Coca-cola are selling tap water under the brand Dasani. There has been much gossip and speculation over the selling of essentially filtered tap water. Many of the office water coolers have filtered water in them, often under the label spring water, certainly it is not mineral water.
However, as Lucy said, we'll all end up buying and drinking the stuff, as Coke own the fridges, in the local newsagents. They will certainly put a stop to anyone else's water being cold, come that long hot summer. Personally I like San Pelligrino or Badoit.
Not in a Barcablog type manner, but Lucy bought me an interesting book entitled "Onions Without Tears: Cooking with Onions, Leeks, Garlic and Chives" by Lindsay Bareham, hardback or paperback, both from amazon.co.uk, her soup book is also very good.
The book covers cookery using the whole onion family and has everything you can imagine from salsas to sauces to soups to recipes using onions, such as the many stews of French cooking. Expect some extracts over the coming weeks, as I try a few things out.
BTW the book is pretty much out of print, so the links above are to enable you to get one second hand if you want a copy.
Nigel Slater says in the Observer Food Monthly today, "The British are not passionate cooks. We are a nation of recipe followers.".
I think he is largely right, given the fare for sale in the shops. So many ready meals and non-cooking meals, that often take as long to make as food from plain ingredients. Personally I try to take inspiration from recipes and not slavishly follow. I prefer authors who guide and hint rather than state step by step. Cookery is not a set of instructions, it is an indication of what to do given the ingredients, your tools and what you want to eat. People I like a lot are Elizabeth David, Nigel Slater, Simon Hopkinson and Richard Whittington, not you will note Delia...
Nigel Slater's autobiography is being syndicated in the Observer, the section linked above is a bit sad and somewhat bizarre, his book Toast is out in mid-september.
This my favourite season for cookery, lots of fruit and vegetable in season and the darker evenings give you an excuse to eat more. Summer is too much like assembly with the odd weather dependent barbeque for variety. Autumn gives you the excuse to spend the afternoon in the kitchen quietly chopping and letting things bubble and reduce. So bring on the daubes and the stews, the tarts and the pies, warm satisfying cookery to spend some time over and enjoy.
A splash of wine, a home made pizza and some tomatoes we grew will have to do until I get back from the Alps...
Dark chocolate is better for you than milk chocolate and so much nicer too. The health benefits are mainly down to anti-oxidants in dark chocolate, which the milk proteins in milk chocolate bind to and thus you lose the benefits, as they cannot be absorbed.
So eat dark chocolate, coffee and red wine - yum.
Off the back of a somewhat heated work conversation on the origin of pizza, Lucy went and found the possibly definitive history of pizza. Contained within this document is the origin of margherita plus the source of Napoli and New York's pizza fame.
Spent yesterday cooking and eating mainly, we made icecream and tiramasu, an omlette and had a barbeque. Warm summer days are quite inspiring for cooking I think. Having been in Italy recently I have realised just how much of the food that we eat in the UK is inspired by Italy, Spain and France. We would not have olive oil or countless vegetables without the influence of the Mediterranean and North Africa. The UK is a great place to draw all of these influences together, without them our food might be quite dull. Classic british dishes do not really inspire me - roasts, fish and chips, vinegar instead of oil and our own snack food toast. Not quite pizza or bruschetta... I'm not damning our food, but realising that I do not really eat British food very much.
Summer is now finally making itself known and we've had our first barbeque, for me the natural drinking partner for the summer are cocktails. The best guides I've found are the sauce guides, which are a straight forward guide to making good cocktails, like you might get in a decent cocktail bar, like lab bar in Soho, London.
The sauce guides cover how to make these and great things like the bramble, champagne cocktails and jamican mules, which are much better than russian ones , essentially swap vodka for dark rum. The sauce guides cover what to use and how to mix it, plus a short review and a bit of history, plus a photo of what it should look like. Their recipes work and make tasty drinks, the emphasis on fresh ingredients and being precise with measuring so you get the balance of sweetness right. They also recommend different spirits to get and what toys to buy. The website needs a decent searchable interface though, as there are over 1000 drinks in the book, which is 7 quid and updated quarterly.
To make many decent cocktails, like the sublime bramble, you need an ice crusher, Braun make a decent one which is part of a food processor, order it from amazon. The reason for an ice crusher is so that the alcohol is kept cold in a glass, which is tightly packed with ice. If the ice is crushed then less of it melts as there are no gaps, you can see this as the outside of the glass gets covered in condensation.
My perfect martini, take cold gin, usually gordons export and noilly prat vermouth. To make one martini take two shots of gin and about a quarter of a shot of vermouth, sometimes a little less and shake with 3-4 fresh ice cubes for about 5-10 seconds, and then pour into a chilled martini glass, chill the glass with ice and water, then dry with a glass cloth. To make a gibson add a black olive, to make my current favourite add a splash of brine from some olives and you get a dirty martini.
