April 2013
1 post
Men Love Pies, Girls Like Hummus by Simon Rimmer:...
Rimmer and his mates #ladsontour
I was at a working lunch recently with a woman from another company, and the conversation, as ever, turned to boys. Specifically our boyfriends.
“I like all his friends, except one,” she said, swigging her Viognier. “I just don’t like the way he talks about women. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a feminist or anything….”
At this point my eyes bled into my slow...
February 2013
1 post
The Great Northern Cookbook by Sean Wilson: The...
It’s only bloody Martin Platt off Corrie!
I thought I knew how this would go. I chose The Artist Formerly Known As Martin Platt’s cookbook because I expected it to be lolz. Known for having played a man who was married to Gail, Coronation Street’s Gerbil of Doom, he’s only gone and reinvented himself as a foodie.
And so I imagined that we’d open with this nice little anecdote about...
January 2013
2 posts
7 tags
Cooking For Real Life by Joanna Weinberg: The...
Joanna Weinberg. The woman whose recipes work.
“He’s going to come a bit later, he didn’t want to be the first one to get there,” my friend explained of her husband on a recent night out. “I suppose I can understand, he doesn’t want to hang out with my friends all night. If it was with his friends, I’d probably show up at last orders.”
“And I’d probably have a massive strop and not show up...
6 tags
Leon Cookbook Book 4 – Family and Friends – The...
They make their own wacky fun over at Leon
The restaurant chain Leon has a very idealised view of what friends and family are like. According to their latest cookbook – which is called Friends and Family, and is all about friends and family, and what you might cook for your friends and family if your life was a bit more curated and your family didn’t only eat things that have been boiled or...
July 2012
1 post
11 tags
Kitchen and Co by French and Grace: The Review
The eponymous French and Grace, just casually mixing up some flavours in some cute garden somewhere.You literally couldn’t get more current.
There has never been a better time to be a binge eater in Britain. On practically every street corner is a boutique baker selling designer doughnuts, or organic artisan hawking their high class hamburgers. “I’m just queuing for the latest must-have...
June 2012
1 post
8 tags
Mr Wilkinson's Favourite Vegetables by Matt...
Actual Awwwwww
“I’m never fucking doing Cook the Books again,” I shouted at my boyfriend, before storming into the bedroom. “I’ve had e-fucking-nough,” I added, yanking off my tie and throwing it on the floor for effect. It was the night before I was due to be cooking from Mr Wilkinson’s Favourite Vegetables, a paean to plants and produce from asparagus to zucchini. I’d chosen the book because...
May 2012
2 posts
9 tags
Gok Cooks Chinese: The Review
That’s a whole lotta Gok
Gok Wan is somewhat of an easy target. With all his hair flicking and shrieking of “you can do it, babes,” and grabbing of middle aged women’s breasts and forcing of housewives to get their thread veins lasered off, throwing casual insults his way is easier than taking your bra off and walking down a makeshift runway in a shopping centre outside Hull. For starters,...
9 tags
Martha Stewart's Pies and Tarts: The Review
I spent longer making the bloody pudding than either of these two spent in jail
I know a lot about life in prison. Not only have I had a cocktail in the Courthouse Kempinski Hotel – which used to actually be a jail, folks, so how’s that for journalistic research? – but I also watched all eight series of the surely-almost-wholly-factual prison-set drama Bad Girls. I know that prison guards are...
April 2012
2 posts
8 tags
Home Cooking Made Easy by Lorraine Pascale: The...
Pot. So 90s.
I love the 1990s revival so much more than I loved the actual 1990s. Back then I sat in my room listening to Tori Amos albums over and over, marking passages in Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson about the beauty of true love, and getting frustrated about the episode of My So Called Life where Angela had a meltdown because she had one spot on her otherwise perfect visage. One...
7 tags
Livwise by Olivia Newton-John: The Review
Disclaimer: After writing this up I suddenly spotted the bit about how all the proceeds from this book go to the Olivia Newton-John Cancer and Wellness Centre in Melbourne, so you should probably ignore any mean things I say and buy it anyway. The curry recipe alone will more than make your charitable good deed worthwhile.
Look at me, I’m Gwynnie P…
Every Sunday afternoon, from the...
March 2012
3 posts
7 tags
Notes From My Kitchen Table by Gwyneth Paltrow:...
I’m not sure if it’s the resemblance that is frightening about this pic, or something else I can’t put my finger on
There’s a story doing the rounds of the London media about how, at Philip Green’s party on some exotic island recently, Gwyneth Paltrow was quietly jogging down the beach when she happened to run past Kate Moss, eating crisps and smoking fags on a sun lounger....
6 tags
The Little Paris Kitchen by Rachel Khoo: The...
“Nothing here is styled”
By now, you’ll have had the perfect life of Rachel Khoo rammed down your throat by the BBC. Fancying herself as Croydon’s greatest export since Kate Moss, she uses her TV show and new book to swan around her home of Paris on her bicycle, buying baguettes, drinking coffee, probably having winsome affairs with existential poets she happens to meet on the...
7 tags
Seasonal Spanish Food by Jose Pizarro: The Review
Artful artichokes resting on some tiles. Who cares why?
Sarah Beeny may be wrong about a lot of things – you don’t always need to be preggo on TV, you don’t always need to offer the death stare whenever anyone disagrees with you and you don’t always have to back people into submission (something she once did to me terrifyingly down the phone. She tried to convince me it was ok for her house to...
February 2012
5 posts
7 tags
What's For Dinner? by Fay Ripley: The Review
Her easy recipes are the reason Mumsnet don’t go to Iceland, apparently
For members of Mumsnet there are no grey areas. Life is divided into two distinct groups - things they love and things they abhor. In the first set are Bugaboos, cafes which allow breastfeeding breeders to wop their waps out, and haranguing women who go back to work after giving birth. Things they hate include,...
6 tags
Gordon Ramsay's Great Escape: The Review
Oh, Gordon. I wish you’d bat for my team
Oh Gordon, you big, sexy, sweaty hunk, you. You hulking Easter Island rockface, you domineering, sweaty man-beast, with legs as thick as a walnut tree, face as grooved as a walnut itself. You’re everything I could possibly want in my fantasy figure – you’d shout me into submission, call me a snivelling twat, throw a lumpy white roux all over me and...
8 tags
The Intolerant Gourmet by Pippa Kendrick: The...
Regina George: 120 calories and 48 calories from fat. What percent is that? Gretchen: Uh, 48 into 120? Regina: I’m only eating foods with less than 30 percent calories from fat. Cady: It’s 40 percent. Well 48 over 120 equals X over 100 and then you cross multiply and get the value of X. Regina: Whatever, I’m getting cheese fries.
Regina’s attitude to food could, quite...
6 tags
Mini Review: Chase Marmalade Vodka
Getting home after date night, having shared a bottle of wine and losing that boozy buzz on the tube, I had an insatiable urge for a nightcap.
#danielradcliffeproblems
“Why don’t we open the Marmalade Vodka?” my boyfriend asked, as I slumped on his sofa, scrolling through all the Twitter I’d missed during dinner. That reminded me - @ChaseVodka had tweeted me earlier in the week to suggest...
6 tags
The Fabulous Baker Brothers: The Review
Which one is the hot one, again?
I read an interview with Delia in the 1990s where she moaned that whenever she went round to someone’s house for dinner they always cooked something fancy, trying to impress her, and all she really wanted was fish and chips or something.
#firstworldproblems
But when I invited my friend the renowned-food-and-drinks-writer Douglas over for dinner, I knew how...
January 2012
3 posts
8 tags
Full of Flavour by Maria Elia – The Review
Maria’s chicken. How hard can a spatchcocking be?
“You need to spatchcock the chicken. Calm down, it’s not as scary as it sounds!” begins the recipe, complete with its own friendly exclamation mark, for Slow-Roasted Paprika Chicken with Butternut Squash, Smashed Butter Beans and Tomatoes. Obviously I panicked. The vague instructions spoke about cutting off the wing tips with scissors and...
Coming Soon: Full of Flavour Maria Elia
Full of Flavour is one of those books that, hungover, you leaf through bemoaning the fact that nobody is on hand to make any - just one - of the recipes, all of which look amazing, and truly what you feel like right now, and why are they all such an effort and how come there isn’t any Lucozade left, and oh, God, perhaps you’re not quite ready for food yet after all…
Well, this...
