The nan is just crispy enough to enjoy but still soft enough to get a firm grip on the lamb kebab inside. The spices were well-balanced but personally I could have done with some more chilli kick. If I’d been drunk, I’d have liked a lot more chilli. Let’s face it sublety is wasted on a man full of cooking lager.
Traditional Christmas bakes from around the world
From the North to the South poles, people do like a nice bit of cake at Christmastime. Packed with the prestige indicated by copious fruit-and-nut usage, these are an often boozy, always bountiful, and occasionally barmy bunch.
European Christmas market breaks with thetrainline.com
Let’s face it, the majority of London’s ‘Christmas Markets’ are grim excuses for the real spirit of festive commerce felt throughout Europe’s more traditional town squares. £50 for a night spent shivering in a mock chalet scoffing lukewarm bratwursts and glugging glogg? No thank you. We’ll get a cheap deal off thetrainline.com and pop off to one of these destinations instead.
A selection of rather nice festive menus
Who hasn’t had that awful feeling of sitting down, stomach pleasantly a-rumble, only to have those stirrings of gastric yearning turn to icy needles of dread upon having a cheap paper crown plonked on your bonce and reading the awful incantation’prawn cocktail; turkey with all the trimmings; Christmas pudding; mince pies and coffee’ on a holly-trimmed menu?
Learning to taste cheese World Cheese Awards 2012
Do you reach thoughtlessly for a packet of hard Italian cheese – or make your decision based on colour, age and flavour? Joanna Biddolph urges you to look carefully when you buy – including for evidence of success at the World Cheese Awards.
Festive Book Review: Scandinavian Christmas by Trine Hahnemann
Ooh I do like a fuggy kitchen on a cold day, with all those lovely cooking smells wafting about like the Christmas Fairy. Especially these Scandi bakes with their liberal use of cardamom. And my own majestic love for those cakes and cookies knows no bounds. So those smells are about the only things that are going to resemble the Fairy this Christmas.
Nathan Outlaw’s Chicory Marmalade Tart, Deep-Fried Crackler Cheese, Pickled Walnut and Pears
Nathan Outlaw’s partial to a nice cheesy tart this Christmas.
‘Christmas with Cyrus’ at Mr. Todiwala’s Kitchen
The indomitable Cyrus Todiwala would make a rather good Father Christmas, being jolly, jocular and- sorry, sahib- slightly rounded. But that bit of extra padding is just testament, were it needed, to his wicked culinary skills. To my knowledge, Cyrus isn’t planning on appearing in fancy dress, but he does have a fulsome festive offering for his fans.
Festive FEAST at the Islington Sorting Office
It was only a matter of time before street food met posh nosh. And FEAST was one of the first to flaunt the culinary collision, hosting a bijou collective of traders and restaurateurs at their inaugural festival at Guy’s Hospital last summer. 5,000 food-lovin’ Londoners can’t all be wrong, and the Christmas FEAST line-up is looking pretty appetising…
Paxton & Whitfield’s festive cheeseboard picks
Please God let this be the year the death knell sounds for those tawdry selection boxes holding a grotesque assemblage of shrink-wrapped specimens nefariously studded with’fruit du jour’ or muddled with metallic herbage. This year we kindly offer you Paxton & Whitfield’s expert selection, and the opportunity to redeem your own cheeseboard. Seize it with both hands.