Managing to manage your moolah and your munching? Congratulations. If you’ve been a successful scrimper you might even be ready to graduate to the advanced level of’gaining ridiculous returns for your meagre outgoings’. In the final phase you’ll get to eat out AND have treats.
Book review: Sherbet and Spice- Mary Isin
If you go and dig around the Christmas leftovers cupboard- what do you mean you don’t got one?- you might find one of those whimsical, hexagonal boxes of Turkish delight. And you might think a few glunky cubes would be the perfect accompaniment to this sweet tome. Wrong.
Divine Vegan Desserts – Lisa Fabry
Vegetarians eh? Blooming nuisances that they are, always checking you haven’t used non veggie stock in their soup or slipped some gelatine in their jelly. If there’s one thing worse than a veggie round for dinner though, it has to be a vegan. They won’t eat anything that isn’t 100% made of plants.
Nostalgia and contemporary excess from Fox’s
If you held back over Christmas and the new year, dipping into generously chocolate-dipped Fox’s biscuits won’t seem over-indulgent, particularly as they are now on offer. Half-price must mean half the calories, Joanna Biddolph asserts.
The Tavern Cheltenham
The Tavern is miraculously free of cartoon chefs. Instead, it has a bevy of friendly, burly and rather dashing gentlemen, who whizz around the open plan kitchen with a general air of passion and competence like sexy, chefly bumblebees.
Restaurant review- As Greek As It Gets
‘Eating doesn’t get Greek-er than this!’, as John Torode and Gregg Wallace might proclaim. But does the restaurant live up to its self-inflicted hyperbole? Having spent a childhood’s-worth of holidays clattering around on donkeys, picking fresh almonds and flitting round olive groves, I’m a soppy old nostalgic already poised for persuasion.
How To Scoff Well & Spend Less
When the Fino fug finally clears and I rise to blue skies, I’m all excited-like. January 1st! A new beginning! A fresh start! The chance to plan 365 days of explorative feasts! Or not. The response to my Most Excellent Guide to necessary noshing is not the irritating-but-tolerable’out-of-office’. Worse. A panicky text informing me a particularly gourmet guy has a £10 weekly food budget’till payday.
Marque -Mark Best
This is ultimately a book you will in fact probably never cook from but you will enjoy enormously. It will make you want to search out restaurants that take the care, the creativity and the time that Marque does to deliver a dining experience beyond the norm. You’ll eat with renewed appreciation of what it takes to be a chef at this level and you’ll savour every morsel because you’ll have a very good idea of just how very hard it was to create.
Flatiron Steak, Soho, London
I like to wrestle with a steak, shirts off like William Shatner in Star Trek, the hard-won bits are where the flavour is and that’s why onglet is so good. Flatiron’s steak is butter smooth, you could cut it with an airline spork, but they do a pretty good job of getting some texture and caramelisation on the outside, so saving it from being anodyne.
Nuovo Mondo: Modern Italian Food. Stefano De Pieri and Jim McDougall
Nuovo Mondo is a collaboration between Stefano de Pieri, Italian originally of course, and Jim McDougall who was born an Aussie. Together they set out to create dishes that break moulds. Stefano admits he is a conservative chef, marinaded in tradition. Jim, once his apprentice, is brimming with new ideas and together they set out to surprise each other, to create new dishes together and argue amicably in pursuit of the exciting.