| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
GUARDIAN Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:18:01 GMT
Getting fit should have a purpose. Here are some ways to enjoy your newfound fitness
Clearly we need both a healthy body and a healthy mind if we are to live happy, active and comfortable lives. These periods of training are designed to provide you with a foundation of fitness, which you can then apply to everyday life. Here are just three more ways to apply it:Be energetic
Look for every opportunity to apply your newfound fitness to life. Save money by walking or cycling to work, or by parking further out of town and walking the rest of the way. Halve the time it takes to do the housework; offer to help people who are less able; take time out to play with the kids; have more energy for your partner, family or friends.Be social
The social element of sports and exercise is one of the best things about it. And enjoying time being active with like-minded people will keep you motivated and inspired to stay fit. So think about joining a sports team or an exercise class – and take a friend along. Get out there and enjoy yourself.Be inspired
Why not apply your new fitness to something you weren't able to do before? There's inspiration to be found out there in all shapes and sizes: whether it's comedian Eddie Izzard running 43 marathons in 51 days, Fauja Singh, the 100-year-old man who completed the Toronto marathon last year, or the gutsy Jane Tomlinson, who cycled 3,800 miles across the US with cancer.
If you think you can do it, you probably can.
Fitness
Health & wellbeing
Andy Puddicombe
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
|
GUARDIAN Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:27:01 GMT
Physical fitness can be broken down into five essential elements, and each can play a role in everyday activity
At the heart of your new workout are the five elements of physical fitness – an all-round fitness that you can apply to daily activity. While some elements are widely talked about, others are often ignored, and that's one of the reasons this workout is so different. Rather than focusing on just the most common aspects of fitness, it brings together the key ingredients of flexibility, stability, strength, cardio and power, to ensure that you get a balanced, functional and effective workout – and achieve the most sustainable and satisfying results.Flexibility
Even if you can't touch your toes, you can still train your body to become more flexible. Stretching out the muscles before exercise helps ease muscle tension and joint pain, and warms the muscles so each exercise can be done safely through a full range of movement. The safest and most effective to begin with is a static stretch, performed slowly, within your own capability. Stretching is just as important at the end of a workout to avoid muscle tension later on. Exhale and ease into each stretch – you will find you can stretch further.Stability
People usually associate stability with their core, but it's just as important to strengthen the stability of the joints in the body. This allows strong, fluid movements, with fewer injuries. But your core – the area of the body connected to the abdominals, pelvis, lower back and diaphragm – is important. Training this area can improve posture, increase energy levels and reduce the risk of injury. Effective stability training is dependent on a focused and concentrated mind, which will ensure a full range of motion, good balance and correct form.Strength
Strength is not simply muscle size – it is the amount of force a muscle can generate at a specific velocity. For men, strength exercises will add size to the muscles, but for women, who have less testosterone, it will simply create a more athletic-looking body. Strength training also increases fuel-storage capacity in the muscles, improving everyday endurance. Studies have shown that it also fine-tunes the nervous system. Form is the key issue to focus on in strength training, ensuring the movement is smooth, steady and effective.Cardio
One of the many roles of the cardiovascular system is to transfer oxygen and other nutrients to our muscles. Cardio exercise usually refers to aerobic activity, such as running and swimming, but any exercise that significantly raises your heart rate and keeps it there could be described as cardio. Over time this kind of exercise increases the size of the heart muscle, meaning blood and oxygen can be pumped more efficiently. As you get fitter, your heartbeat gets stronger, and your lungs have to work less hard. Recovery is key for this element of fitness.Power
Power is the ability of a muscle to maximally contract in an instant to create explosive movement. Think of a sprinter coming out of the blocks or a gymnast leaping into the air. This natural "springiness" is both genetic and conditioned: some people are born with more so-called "slow-twitch" muscles (making them good endurance athletes); others have more "fast-twitch" fibres (better at short bursts of speed or force). But power can be developed. By focusing on timing and rhythm you may uncover a natural gift for flying high or jumping long.Ten tips to take away
1 Stretch regularly Take time to stretch first thing in the morning and last thing at night. It will improve your flexibility and make you feel more relaxed.
2 Commute the healthy way Whenever possible, try to walk, jog or cycle to work, rather than drive or take public transport. If you live too far away, consider parking further from work, or getting off the bus or train a few stops earlier.
3 Use the stairs If there is a choice between the stairs and the lift, always go for the stairs. This is such an easy way....
| | |
GUARDIAN Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:14:08 GMT
French women who have had defective cosmetic surgery were once ignored, but the 'pipettes' are making their voices heard
They call themselves the "pipettes", a group of 30 French women, who like hundreds of thousands of others caught up in global heath scare, are walking around with a potential timebomb in the shape of defective breast implants.
Until recently in France, the prevalent view, if anyone bothered to have one, was that by undergoing surgery for cosmetic reasons they were paying the price of their own vanity. But in November 2011, pipette Edwige Ligonèche, 53, died of a rare lymph cancer, three years after an implant made by the French company Poly Implant Prothèse (PIP) ruptured in her left breast, and France woke up to a health scandal.
"I swore to Edwige that if things ended badly for her, I'd make sure it didn't result in general indifference," said Alexandra Blachère, president of a group of PIP implant patients. She kept her promise. After a public outcry, the French government has launched investigations into the scandal, police inquiries are under way and the European Union is reviewing its regulations.
There is a tragic sense of deja vu to this. A year ago, health minister Xavier Bertrand issued a mea culpa over the failure of the French health authorities in another devastating scandal.
The diabetic drug Mediator, wrongly used by doctors as a slimming aid, had been prescribed for more than a decade despite fears over its safety and despite being linked to 2,000 deaths. Officials, it appeared, had ignored warnings of its dangers.
Bertrand promised reform, but doctors and patients now fear the two scandals are just the tip of an iceberg of malpractice and potentially deadly deception in the health and pharmaceutical industry.
The implant scandal has again thrown the spotlight on France's health watchdog, AFSSAPS (the Agence Française de Sécurité Sanitaire des Produits de Santé), which has a €115.5m (£95.5m) budget, employs nearly 1,000 full-time staff, almost 2,000 part time experts and has three laboratories.
The agency, formed in 1998 after a scandal over blood contaminated with HIV, was to "evaluate the benefits and the risks linked to the use of health products" making sure they were "as safe as possible". Although given no role in approving medical devices such as breast implants, it is supposed to be aware if such devices cause health concerns.
However, AFSSAPS claims it was unaware of repeated health alerts over PIP implants since 2000, when the US Food and Drug Administration inspected the company's factory.
Although the FDA sent and later published a warning letter to PIP saying its implants did not meet health standards and noted there had been 120 complaints about them, AFSSAPS insists it never knew about the letter.
There were other warnings. Christian Marinetti, president of a plastic surgery clinic in Marseille, repeatedly told AFSSAPS from February 2008 onwards about PIP implants rupturing. Finally, after reporting 14 incidents with no reply he sent a recorded delivery letter to the agency denouncing a "health scandal".
When that went unanswered, he sent another. This prompted agency inspectors to pay a surprise visit to the PIP factory in south-eastern France in February 2010, where they found unauthorised gel was being used.
Jean-Claude Ghislain, director of evaluation of medical devices at AFSSAPS, has said: "There was a falsification of documentation, which obviously made audits very difficult."
But PIP has said it was able to hide incriminating documentation and substandard material because it was given notice of audit visits.
Laurent Gaudon, lawyer for some of the PIP victims, said the agency should have heeded the warnings long before 2010. "The US specifically banned PIP silicone breast implants in 2006, surgeons in Marseille raised the alarm in 2008," he said. "Why did it take AFSSAPS so long to realise there might be something wrong?"
"Is the PIP implant........
| | | | | | |
GUARDIAN Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:49:06 GMT
One of my favourite recipes for the cold, winter months, this risotto is perfect comfort food
When it's cold, I am always asked for comfort food ideas, and risotto is one of my favourites. Pumpkin risotto is a perfect winter dish and it's so easy to make, involving minimum faff. Just drop the raw pumpkin in early enough, so it has time to cook down.
I used to prefer to add the gorgonzola while still cooking the risotto, but these days I love serving it on top so it slowly melts in. And just as good as chestnuts are pickled walnuts, if you happen to find them in your deli.
Serves 8 as a starter, 4 as a main
2tbsp olive oil
400g pumpkin flesh, diced in approx 2cm chunks
1 small onion, chopped
500g carnaroli rice
1.5l veg or chicken stock
400ml white wine
200g butter, cold and diced
100g parmesan, grated
100g gorgonzola
8 cooked chestnuts, sliced
1tsp sage, chopped
Salt & pepper
Heat the olive oil in a large pan, add the chopped onion and sweat it until it becomes translucent. Then add the rice and cook until it becomes shiny and translucent, but without any colour. Season, deglaze with the wine then, when it has completely reduced, start adding the hot stock, ladle by ladle, as needed, so that the rice stays moist, but is not swimming in liquid. From the moment the first ladle of stock goes into the pan, the risotto will take around 18-20 minutes to cook.
After you pour over the first ladle of stock, add the raw pumpkin. Then, when the risotto is two minutes away from being ready, remove from the heat and start adding the diced, cold butter, bit by bit.
Finally, finish with the grated parmesan, half the gorgonzola and the sage and season well. The end result should be a creamy, fairly runny risotto. Serve with the sliced chestnuts, and the rest of the gorgonzola on top.
• Angela Hartnett is chef patron at Murano restaurant and consults at Whitechapel Gallery and Dining Room, London. Twitter.com/angelahartnett
Main course
Food & drink
Angela Hartnett
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | |
GUARDIAN Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:45:00 GMT
There's a new artificial sweetener on the market, but the same old story of potential side effects and big business interests leaves a bad taste in the mouth
There's a new sweetener out called Truvia. They call it "the first calorie-free sweetener from the stevia leaf": it's white and granular stuff that looks – but doesn't smell or taste – like ordinary sugar. It launched in America three years ago where it makes use of a ditsy ad campaign, and the UK website shows videos of seemingly delighted Brummies enjoying it with strawberries.
Artificial sweeteners seek to trick the palate into feeling that it has enjoyed the benefits of sugar – energy, appealing taste – when nothing of the kind has happened. Many are thousands of times sweeter than ordinary table sugar, so you can eat far less of them for a comparable effect. As western waistlines continue to swell and people worry about their diet, the global sweetener market is now worth hundreds of million of dollars. Many businesses have a considerable interest in promoting sweeteners over natural sugar.
In the UK, Truvia appears with the familiar Silver Spoon logo, that outfit having the "distribution channels" to disseminate the product here. But in fact Truvia is a joint effort from agribusiness giant Cargill and Coca-Cola. References to the latter are exceptionally sparse on Truvia's UK website.
Cargill claims that Truvia is "based on ... an extract of the stevia leaf" because 1% of the sweetener is a compound it has trademarked "Rebiana", derived ultimately from the South American plant. Most of the remaining 99% is erythritol, a so-called sugar alcohol – though neither an alcohol nor a sugar – which Cargill manufactures, almost inevitably, from corn. Erythritol is another sweetener: since the body absorbs it quite poorly it can lead to intestinal problems, euphemised in a warning on the Truvia label as a "laxative effect".
Since Truvia is manufactured in the US, where 85% of corn is genetically modified, it has been widely speculated that the corn used to make erythritol is GM. Cargill states that the erythritol itself is not GM. Erythritol is found in nature in minuscule quantities, but is far cheaper to make by converting corn into food starch, fermenting this to create dextrose and processing it further for erythritol. (Cargill's method of synthesising erythritol is patented; Bruce Bradley has outlined the process more generally.)
Truvia's bucolic website claims that, to make Rebiana, "Dried stevia leaves are steeped in water similar to making tea [sic]." In fact, Coca Cola's patent describes a 42-step procedure to derive Rebiana from the stevia leaves, using such country chemicals as acetone, methanol, acetonitrile, isopropanol, tert-butanol and "mixtures thereof". Whether Truvia can truly be classed "natural" seems, at the least, semantic.
Indisputably natural is the stevia plant itself. South American peoples have used stevia leaves to sweeten food and drinks for centuries, and one derivative of the leaves, stevioside, has been a popular sweetener in Japan since the 1970s. After an anonymous petition which at least one website speculates came from the aspartame industry, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) briefly and somewhat controversially banned stevioside in the early 1990s. To this day, stevioside can only be sold in the US as a dietary supplement rather than a sweetener, even though it's now "generally recognized as safe" by the FDA and enjoys similar approval from the World Heath Organisation (pdf). There is, in fact, evidence to suggest that stevioside can offer certain benefits to people's immunity and glucose absorption, which means it may be of use in treating diabetes.
But Truvia contains Rebiana rather than stevioside. The FDA declared Rebiana "safe for use in food and beverages" in 2009, a higher rating than that awarded to stevioside even though stevioside has considerably more evidence for its safety than Rebiana. The Nutrition........
|
GUARDIAN Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:57:50 GMT
Lower incidence of salmonella in UK eggs and a drive to reduce waste leads to revised guidelines from food safety watchdog
Consumers no longer need to throw away their eggs immediately they pass their "best before" dates, the Food Standards Agency said on Wednesday.
The safety watchdog changed its advice as part of a drive to cut food waste, saying that people could eat them safely for a day or two more, provided they were hard-boiled or in dishes such as cakes where they would be fully cooked.
The change in the guidance, which a straw poll among Guardian staff suggested was not always being followed, reveals a shift in official attitudes born out of the salmonella-in-eggs crisis which famously cost Edwina Currie her job as health minister in 1988.
It was these food safety scares – BSE, listeria, and E coli were others – that persuaded Labour to promise a body to monitor food safety when it came to power in 1997.
A long campaign involving egg producers in the UK and abroad to reduce the incidence of salmonella bacteria in eggs has helped cut food poisoning by this route.
The agency said: "If salmonella is present in eggs it could multiply to high levels and cause food poisoning. But salmonella contamination levels in UK-produced eggs are low, and salmonella is killed by thorough cooking.
"This is why the advice is now that eggs can be eaten after their 'best before' date, as long as they are cooked thoroughly until both yolk and white are solid, or if they are used in dishes where they will be fully cooked, such as a cake."
The food agency statement added: "Apart from eggs, most foods can be eaten safely after the 'best before' date, as this is mostly about quality rather than safety. Past this date it doesn't mean that the food will be harmful, rather that its flavour, colour or texture might begin to deteriorate.
"However, it is still important to remember that if food has a 'use by' date, then it shouldn't be used after this date as it could put your health at risk."
The UK egg industry later welcomed the move as "great news" and urged consumers to look out for its lion mark now found on most home-produced eggs. This is only to be used on eggs laid by hens vaccinated against salmonella enteritidis, raised to higher welfare standards than required by law, and subject to feed controls.
Britons eat nearly 11.3bn eggs a year, 2.5bn of them imported, according to the British Egg Information Service.
Food safety
Food & drink
E coli
Health
James Meikle
guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
|
GUARDIAN Wed, 14 Dec 2011 16:00:00 GMT
It's still not too late to make a Christmas cake. Vicky Frost tests five kits and asks: can you actually fit a slice in on the big day?
It's an odd part of the annual festivities: the bit that gets brought out once everything else has been devoured and you're in need of more calories like the house is in need of more fairy lights. But a Christmas without Christmas cake would be unthinkable. Long after even the turkey remnants have gone and the new year diet should have started, you can still rely on there being a slab in the tin. In some families it can last until spring.
That's partly because loads of people don't like Christmas cake – screwing up their face at the cake, or the marzipan, or the cake and the marzipan. What fools! Personally, I'm fond of both in small amounts. But two slices is more than enough to last me until next year. Which is possibly why I've never been particularly moved to bake one from scratch.
My dad traditionally made our family cake, often procrastinating so much that he'd only get round to icing it on Christmas Eve while the rest of the family trouped off to midnight mass. That's not such a terrible plan when you consider the likelihood of anyone having any room for cake after a massive Christmas lunch, or a Boxing Day trifle. But it does highlight the problem with making a Christmas cake – yet more faff at the busiest time of the year.
Which no doubt explains the popularity of the Christmas cake kit. A bag with everything you need to bake the perfect Christmas cake without weighing, overnight soaking and abandoned half bags of fruit. Except, you have to buy, erm, eggs, butter, lemons, and in most cases marzipan and icing - some would question whether it was worth buying a kit at all. That probably depends on whether you are ever likely to bust open the treacle, spices and flour ever again. If not, the kit is definitely worth it. If however you could be cajoled into making your own mincemeat with the leftover fruit, it might be worth reconsidering.
I tested five kits currently on the market. Tesco's comes courtesy of Mary Berry – whose baking knowledge knows no bounds. It includes all the usual business you'd expect in the way of soaked fruits, chopped nuts, bagged spices, but also marzipan and icing. The result was disappointing in our blind taste tests – and I thought it rather a mean cake in terms of both plumpness and volume of fruit. Sorry Mary, but for once we will have to disagree.
Faring rather better was Sainsbury's Taste the Difference kit, which had fruit so sticky and juicy it was veering into pudding territory. For me the balance of sponge and fruit tipped too far in favour of the raisin element. Others thought it tasted "like a fruitcake should do: dense and moist". The Harrods cake also split opinion. On the upside, it comes with (fondant) icing and marzipan, and all the ingredients are packaged in a loose bottom cake tin. On the downside, you have to soak your own fruit, which rather defeats the object and means you need to factor in the cost of booze. The end result is a curious thing. Some of our testers liked it for the generous hunks of cherry that studded the sponge. But for me it was rather odd: an almost gingery cake with too little fruit.
Which leaves the two cakes that did best in the blind tasting, and in my home testing: Whitworth's and Delia's for Waitrose. Of the two, Delia's is the more generous, giving a good, deep 20cm cake. It's also the one that will please more people – here the sponge is light, the fruit sweet but not sticky, and the balance more in favour of cake than fruit. As an occasional fruitcake eater, it's my favourite. More hardcore fruitcake fans, however, were quick to praise the Whitworths kit, which turns out a boozy, well-balanced cake that is firm enough to slice properly, but sticky enough to count as more fruit cake than tea loaf. Both will need you to buy your own icing and marzipan, but both really deliver when it comes to........
|
GUARDIAN Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:06:43 GMT
Top female players in bid to boost profile of sportswomen after BBC's all-male Sports Personality of the Year award shortlist
A group of leading British sportswomen has called for the "abysmal" media coverage of women's sports to be addressed after the uproar over the male-only shortlist for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award.
Speaking at the launch of an event aimed at boosting the profile of women in sport, the 11-time Paralympic champion Tanni Grey-Thompson said: "We have a huge number of home Olympic and Paralympic medallists who are women. But the media coverage is abysmal, the funding is abysmal and not enough girls are getting involved."
She said that far more needed to be done, adding: "It's a really positive thing to admit that we haven't cracked the women in sports issue."
Last month, the BBC's failure to include any women on its shortlist for the award provoked criticism from a group of MPs who accused it of "ignoring women's achievements".
More than a dozen female athletes met MPs in parliament on Wednesday to promote Us Girls – a lottery-funded programme which aims to give young women from disadvantaged areas sporting opportunities and the chance to meet female sports stars.
Barbara Keeley, the Labour MP for Worsley and Eccles South, said that young women needed more role models.
"In the runup to the Olympics the number of women doing sport is falling," she said. "This is a real concern. Sport affects your fitness, health and how you feel about yourself."
Tracey Crouch, the Conservative MP for Chatham and Aylesford – and an FA-qualified coach who manages her local girls' football team – will on Thursday ask David Cameron how he plans to promote women's sports. "It's about boosting women's profiles because that's the reason the shortlist failed," she said.
Figures released last week by Sport England, which aims to get more people involved in sport, show the number of women participating in sport at least three times a week has decreased over the past year, while male participation has increased.
Jennie Price, Sport England's chief executive, said more thought needed to be given to how sport was reported in the media. "Sport is seen through a male lens and coverage is given to mainstream male sports like football," she said. "But these aren't always the ones that women are interested in."
The England and Great Britain international hockey player Beth Storry said: "It's definitely not an even playing field when it comes to publicity. Women in the US receive so much more coverage. We need to get more girls involved. Playing has changed my life and given me such confidence."
Her sentiments were echoed by Kylie Grimes, a Great Britain wheelchair rugby athlete. "There's lots of girls out there who would like to get involved but are intimidated or think its not for them," she said. "A lot rests on the profile of sports being played [and] hopefully the Olympics will improve this."
Katie-Jemima Yeats-Brown, a 16-year-old Olympic judo hopeful from Tonbridge, said the BBC controversy had served only to strengthen her resolve: "I was disappointed by the shortlist, but it just motivates me even more because now I have something to prove."
BBC Sports Personality of the Year
Women
Rebecca Ratcliffe
guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
|
GUARDIAN Wed, 14 Dec 2011 10:00:00 GMT
A fun way to serve up some Christmas veg
Gribiche is a classic French sauce similar to tartare. It traditionally accompanies fish and chicken, and can also be used as a dip for chips or scotch eggs.
Here, though, it forms the base layer of a miniature edible garden, complete with vegetables that appear to be bedded in soil. The idea of edible soil was first thought up by the Japanese chef Yoshihiro Narisawa and has since appeared in a number of restaurants, including René Redzepi's Noma in Copenhagen.
I've used it to create a piece of horticultural visual trickery that will delight your guests as they eat with their fingers and warily taste the soil, only to find it's delicious.
The choice of vegetable can vary according to the season. In place of those below you might want to try radishes, baby leeks, baby turnips or baby fennel.
(As a variation you can grill the vegetables instead of cooking them in oil or water. This will give them a nice barbecued characteristic – although you will lose the illusion that the vegetables are growing out of the soil.)
Serves 6–8
For the salad:
200g pitted black olives in brine, drained and rinsed
25g Grape-Nuts
8 baby carrots
8 brussels sprouts
8 baby asparagus
8 baby broccoli
8 baby bok-choy
For the gribiche:
1 medium egg
130g mayonnaise
35g cornichons, finely chopped
30g capers, rinsed, patted dry and finely chopped
15g white wine vinegar
30g whipping cream
Salt and black pepper
2 sprigs of tarragon, leaves picked
10g flat-leaf parsley leaves
10g chives
Pre-heat the oven to 110C. To dry the olives, spread them on a tray lined with parchment paper and dry in the oven for 4 hours. Halfway through the drying process, roughly chop the olives so they dry more quickly.
Remove the olives from the oven and allow to cool before chopping very finely. Do not be tempted to chop the olives in a food processor because it will become a paste.
While the olives are cooling, increase the temperature of the oven to 180C. Toast the Grape-Nuts on a baking tray for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to cool before crushing with a pestle and mortar to a coarse powder. Mix the toasted Grape-Nuts with the dried olives and set aside.
To start the gribiche, lower the egg into a small pan of boiling water and cook for 10 minutes. Drain and cool under cold running water. Remove the shell, then separate the white from the yolk.
Finely chop the egg white and press the yolk through a sieve. Stir both into the mayonnaise with the cornichons, capers and vinegar. Lightly whisk the cream to soft peaks and fold into the mixture. Season with salt and freshly ground pepper, cover with clingfilm and refrigerate until needed.
When ready to serve, cook the vegetables in oil or water, depending on the vegetable, or serve them raw. Just before serving, chop the herbs and fold them into the gribiche.
To construct the salad, put a layer of gribiche in the bottom of individual bowls or one large serving dish. Sprinkle the olive and Grape-Nut mixture in a layer on top and "plant" the vegetables in neat rows in the soil.
• This recipe is taken from Heston Blumenthal at Home by Heston Blumenthal (Bloomsbury, £30, with photography by Angela Moore and Art Direction from Graphic Thought Facility). Order a copy for £20 from the Guardian bookshop
Salad
Food & drink
Heston Blumenthal
guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
|
GUARDIAN Wed, 14 Dec 2011 05:00:00 GMT
With its museums, castle and nearby coast, there are plenty of reasons to visit Lancaster. But where to eat in this historic county capital? Tony Naylor picks the city's 10 best budget restaurants
• Interactive map: Britain's best budget restaurantsWhite Cross
A somewhat ugly pub, in a fine canalside location, the White Cross is known for its homemade all-day food and its 14 real ales. Portions are extraordinarily generous. For £5, I got a slice of dense, rough-cut, seriously piggy pork pie the size of my outstretched hand and as deep as my index finger, alongside a pile of decent, fluffy skin-on chips. Less could be more, in this case, as the pie certainly didn't need its herb-stuffing topping and the accompanying pot of zingy orange-and-raisin chutney. But if you're on a budget and need to fill up, the White Cross should be your number one destination.
The wider menu takes in deli boards, sandwiches and sausages in various states (with mash, casseroled etc) and a fantastic-sounding steak and ale pie that uses beer from the Tirril brewery, in Appleby in Westmorland. Steaks apart, all the dishes are under £10. You'll find Tirril's Old Faithful on the bar, alongside regional beers from the likes of Bowland and Lytham breweries. If White Cross ripped out its red-brick bar and its dated patterned carpets – in fact, had a general refurb – it would be a very good pub indeed.
• Snacks and sandwiches from £4, mains from £5. Quarry Road, 01524 33999, thewhitecross.co.ukThe Music Room
A spin-off from award-winning local coffee roaster J Atkinson & Co, the Music Room is where owner Ian Steel and his son Maidment put their beans into action across a menu of next-level espresso, pour-over filter and cafetière drinks (coffees from £1.50). The knowledgeable and enthusiastic staff will happily talk you through blends, tastes and extraction methods, without blinding you with science, and the finished drinks could hold their own with anything produced in London's "third wave" coffee bars.
If you feel the need to flannel convincingly about your brew, the walls are helpfully lined with tutorial posters which walk the novice through the gamut of coffee aromas, from, erm, roast beef to garden peas. The Music Room also sells a small selection of brilliant cakes by talented local Debbie Kaye, including root vegetable and fig cake or pear and plum Bakewell. The Music Room itself is an attention-grabber: the interior has been cleanly decluttered by the Steels, but retains its three-storey Victorian elaborate facade. It makes for an almost Berlin-ish contrast with the neighbouring graffiti and urban decay.
• Cakes from £2.40. Sun Street, 01524 65470, themusicroomcafe.comThe Sun
This handsome city centre inn (all exposed stone, wooden beams and polished rusticity), serves good food all day. In particular, its sharing deli boards of local cheeses, charcuterie and items from the excellent Port of Lancaster Smokehouse are a boon for the picky budget traveller (£8-£16). Its evening menu includes a few other dishes, such as fish and chips or the Sun's own sausage and mash, which come in under £10, but, if you're watching the pennies, the daytime menus offer greater choice. The Sun's bar is a cosy bolthole at breakfast (until 10.30am weekdays). The dimmed lighting, relaxed friendly staff and the background hum of consensual jazz standards will ease you gently into the day.
Prices might seem a shade high – for instance, £8 for eggs Benedict – but portions are huge, quality good and everyone gets toast and Wilkinson's jams thrown in. Finish the Sun's small hillock of smoked salmon, sunny scrambled eggs and fresh Scottish pancakes (£6), and it will set you up for hours of sightseeing and history. Incidentally, the Sun is owned by the dynamic Lancaster Brewery, so the beer choice is both wide (10 real-ale hand-pumps) and interesting.
• Breakfast and lunch dishes from £3.50, evening mains from £8.50. 63-65 Church Street, 01524 66006,........
| | | | | | | | | |
GUARDIAN Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:05:29 GMT
Alex Clark on present buying, turkey cooking and getting out of Twister
OK, listen carefully, because there's a lot to get through and we're going to have to be quick. We're talking the whole gamut here: pre-Christmas party run-up, accommodation and catering arrangements, gift provision and reception, television schedules – and how to call time on the festivities. The ideal would be to spend Christmas pretty much alone, with a Vesta Curry and a Poirot box set. But it's not going to happen, so here is how to make the best of it. Be warned: it requires much planning and an iron nerve.
❆ Your present: either provide make, model number, colour, size and web address or resign yourself to your fate.
❆ Other people's presents: one shop, one hour, one present per person.
❆ Seasonal partywear: it's all about making an entrance. At least that's what fashion types say. On that basis a fur coat and no knickers should do it.
❆ Counterintuitively, extend warm invitations to any waifs and strays in your orbit. They're unlikely to come, but their presence will put off social climbers who care about the napkins.
❆ You will be tempted to clean the house. Don't. That's all.
❆ Mix cold tea in a bucket, chuck it over the wall of your spare room and garland with crushed crisps. Upload photographs to a social media site. Nobody wants to spend Christmas in a damp room.
❆ The food: chill. Well, heat, obviously, but don't sweat it. Enough of the thermal metaphors. Make sure the turkey's cooked enough not to poison anyone and have a huge vat of gravy to hand. Nobody cares what anything tastes like. It's the big secret we daren't tell Heston.
❆ Cede control of the television. You will look like a saint and there is absolutely nothing decent on, ever. Play Call of Duty in the shed instead.
❆ You may be tempted to have two large alcoholic drinks as each of the 12 Days of Christmas dawns. Aside from the obvious anaesthetic benefit, you bank on this getting you out of having to drive anyone anywhere. STEP AWAY FROM THE BOTTLE. Your car is your friend. There is nothing like a 10-mile round trip to find some emergency custard to get you out of a game of Twister, and there's always the possibility of spotting some festive dogging.
❆ Once it's all over, parcel up the leftovers that are on the turn and hand everyone their coat. For tomorrow we book our sessions at Relate and open our credit-card bills.
Christmas
Alex Clark
guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
|
GUARDIAN Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:05:30 GMT
With a short menu, small portions and unreliable food, lunch at 10 Cases turns out to be a one-date wonder
10 Cases, 16 Endell Street, London WC2 (020 7836 6801). Meal for two, including wine and service, £90
The 10 Cases is the restaurant equivalent of one of those people you know you should fancy, but can't – not quite. At the end of the date you say: "The problem's not you, it's me," because you don't want to hurt their feelings when, of course, the problem is them: they have a really irritating laugh, or protruding nasal hair, or they don't know the name of the prime minister. And yet they are fabulous in every other way. The 10 Cases really is fabulous in every other way. It describes itself as a "bistro à vin" – its name standing testament to its policy of listing only 10 whites and 10 reds (plus a couple of champagnes and a rosé) and buying only 10 cases of each wine. When it's gone, it's gone. They move on and buy something else.
Every bottle is available by the glass, the 50cl carafe and the bottle, and the prices are very reasonable. From the whites we tried a lovely, restrained Riesling from Germany's Nahe valley and a crisp Chablis. From the reds a classic bit of dense, big-fisted Bordeaux for £8.60 a glass from the house (though not the vineyards) of Haut Brion, and a Manium Mencia from northwest Spain. If you have ever wanted to experiment with wines, to range far and wide during a meal, 10 Cases is the place to do it.
The eccentrically handwritten wine list suits the look of the place. In all respects it feels like a neighbourhood restaurant. It's all white walls and wooden furniture, a bar and blackboards listing that day's dishes. The nibbles – a bowl of radishes for £3, anchovies at the same price, roasted garlic, grilled octopus, sweet oily slices of saucisson or a thimble of brown potted crab which had about it the smooth, retro aspect of Shippam's paste (for the nostalgics) – are unchanging. And there's a handful of dishes that are on every day: a duck-egg and bacon salad, a whole lemon sole, a beef fillet and so on.
The rest of the menu changes every day and lists just three choices at each course. That's the problem. Offering so little choice is great; Lord save us from menus that make you feel like you've read War and Peace before you've started eating. But with so little choice, everything has to be bang on. Not everything was. And to retread the old Jewish joke: the portions! So small!
Admittedly they don't charge much for this corner of town – £4 to £5 for a starter, low teens for mains – which is probably why they don't give you very much. Best of the savoury dishes was a dolls' house-sized bowl of pea and ham soup with chewy shreds of ham in it. For all its depth of flavour, though, the soup lacked texture. It was just a little too well mannered. By comparison another starter of braised lentils with merguez sausage was decidedly ill-mannered. Just half a sausage loitered near a pile of lentils, which covered an unadvertised lump of ham hock.
But the mains were the real problem. A veal breast cassoulet sounded interesting, and it was, but not in a good way: a vast, square hunk of undercooked meat, looking like something carved by Barbara Hepworth, sat in a meagre puddle of white beans. A braised rabbit leg was a little better, but the saucing was dull and the patty of veg-covered mash a whole puck of so-what. (I asked about their approach to vegetarians. "Oh, we'd find something for them, even if it was just a mushroom omelette." Oh dear.) Dessert rescued things with a chestnut crème caramel and a finely executed almond and pear tart.
So that's barely half the dishes we tried doing the business. And of course on another day, when they were cooking things they understood better, the meal could have been terrific, but in the expensive business of lunch, namely mine, consistency is all. 10 Cases is a brilliant idea for a restaurant; it just needs better food.
Email Jay at........
|
GUARDIAN Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:08:02 GMT
The singer discusses his formative food experiences
The first food I remember is Farley's Rusks with warm milk on cold mornings. I still love rusks. That's why my sister has kids – so I can go round and nick theirs.
At boarding school we were rationed to three boiled sweets on Wednesday, three on Saturday, and a chocolate bar on Sunday. So anything extra represented freedom, especially crisps. I'd smuggle in mine inside a hollowed-out dictionary.
I have a lolly stick phobia. I can't even hold one – I have to wrap a napkin around. It's making me go funny now, just thinking about the texture if you bite one. Horrendous.
When I was 19 I waitered at an organic restaurant in Exeter, and one night four deaf gay guys came in and I spoke very slowly and precisely, so they could read my lips. They became more lewd as they got more drunk and finally said, "We want to take you home with us." I thought, "You pervs, no way" and mouthed "Fuck off". But they gave me a tip.
You learn everything you need in life as a waiter – delegation, communication, selling, handling difficult people, pushing premium products, humility, charm, and getting others to fancy you.
The most disappointing food experience I've ever had was when the bus driver stopped for lunch during a horrendous, standing-room-only, 12-hour bus ride to Mombasa and I was told a cafe served fish and chips. But it was raw potatoes with a charred fish head on top.
Recently I meditated and fasted for five days in Ibiza, living on just vegetable water. Although I probably lost too much weight, I coped very easily. But when I got home I had a coffee and a piece of chocolate cake and went completely nuts.
We had a family party in 2002 to celebrate my parents' wedding anniversary, my sister's birthday, and me winning Pop Idol. There were 120 people on three trestle tables eating bangers and mash and at the end we had a massive food fight with ice cream and jelly. Delightful.
I saw a psychiatrist who told me about how food could help my depression, then at a lodge in Mozambique I discovered the power of blueberries, blackberries, pomegranate seeds, avocado, veggies and fish oils. Wanting to take care of yourself is the key.
I've started thinking I'd really like to go on a beginner's cookery course for a week, to learn the basics of pastries, pies, breads and sauces. It's time for it – I've moved home, I've got a big kitchen and I'm ready. I want to take Dad on it with me – I'm not sure he's very keen, but it'd be a good thing for us to do together as men.
The album Echoes is out now on RCA
Will Young
Food & drink
John Hind
guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
|
GUARDIAN Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:08:04 GMT
Convenience is undermining our culinary experience,
There was a Woolworths a few blocks away from the New York apartment I grew up in and often, on a Saturday afternoon, my grandmother would take me there for lunch. You'd walk past the aisles of penny candy and stationery supplies until you could smell the coffee brewing. We would sit at the counter. The waitress taking our order would pull a pencil out from behind her ear and scribble it down on a pad. "What can I get you?" she'd ask. My order never varied. Grilled cheese and a chocolate milkshake. That was when I was lactose tolerant.
In the 1970s, no one was worried about food being fresh. Even me. I don't recall if there was an actual kitchen, but I doubt it. The pies that sat in the pie cases had enough lard to preserve them for decades. Lard was the Botox for pies.
The cooks would make the sandwiches on the spot and everything else went on the griddle or in the deep fryer. The counter was set up as a giant loop so that simultaneously we could watch them flip the burgers while people shopped for hairnets and socks.
When I got older, Woolworths had gone into decline and, instead, we'd go for meals at Saks Fifth Avenue or Bloomingdales. My grandmother loved eating in department stores. It was probably the convenience of being able to do two things she loved in one place. Shop and eat.
For me, eating in a restaurant next to the lingerie department felt claustrophobic. I don't enjoy eating somewhere where there aren't windows. Plus, I was never a devoted shopper and find it stressful. I get in, get what I need, and get out. How much shopping are you doing where you have to pause to refuel?
I know one stop for everything has become popular, though, and it's a concept that shows no signs of abating. In America, Wal-Mart has removed the chore of ever having to go outside. You can visit the doctor, have dinner, buy patio furniture and pretzels. At the Mall of America in Minnesota, you can get married, divorced and have your baby christened, proving that an entire lifetime can unfold under one roof.
Now that chemists have become like department stores, it was only a matter of time before they started to sell food. I don't want to purchase a sandwich in the same place people are getting haemorrhoid cream.
Which brings me to the packaged sandwich. At home, you make a sandwich and then you eat it. No one makes one and puts it away for a couple of days.
Even worse is packaged sushi. Chances are there isn't a sushi chef in the bowels of Boots slicing up fresh tuna. Which means it's been prepped in a factory somewhere in south Wales. This sushi has migrated further than an Atlantic salmon.
Convenience is undermining our culinary experience. People are now buying their produce at service stations. I know shopping for locally sourced food is desirable but are there really tomato vines at the garage?
Forty years ago, unless you were living on a hippie commune, no one cared if the food wasn't organic. But now, our palate is more educated. There is something incongruous about seeing pineapple on the shelf of a newsagent. Of course, my grandmother would have loved it.
ariel.leve@observer.co.uk
Food & drink
Ariel Leve
guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
|
GUARDIAN Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:08:10 GMT
Christmas recipes on your phone from some of our finest chefs. But are they user-friendly?
What is it? The food app equivalent of Manchester City: a no-expense spared bid for the top, based around securing the finest talent available. The impressive selection of chefs involved includes Marcus Wareing, Simon Rogan, Bruno Loubet and Nathan Outlaw. This is the Christmas spin-off. £1.99, for iPhone and iPad.
Key ingredient? Each chef contributes a full Christmas menu, including canapés and petits fours. Very classy. They're good, too.
Yes, but can I manage it at home? All the dishes are graded for difficulty but "medium" may count as pretty tricky for some. Unless you regularly knock out a dessert of caramel mille-feuille, mango and gold leaf press and crystalised chilli.
Will it improve my cooking? The videos of the more cheffy techniques, such as butchering rabbit, are great. Ace those and you can handle Monica Galetti and her infamous MasterChef Pro skills test, no problem.
Food & drink
Apps
Christmas
Chefs
Gareth Grundy
guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
| | | |
GUARDIAN Fri, 09 Dec 2011 06:45:01 GMT
We are profiling charities for readers who have time or money they would like to donate, or are seeking help in those areas. Today we look at CCHF All About Kids, which offers disadvantaged children respite breaks
Nine-year-old Shannon's father has a long-standing mental health problem which means he can't work or leave their two-bed flat by himself. Her mother is the main carer, but suffers from stress and joint problems, so the family must manage on Shannon's father's disability living allowance. Even if the family could leave the flat, there is no way they could afford a holiday.
As a result Shannon is withdrawn, anxious, fearful of trying out new things and found it difficult to make friends – at least until her teacher referred her to CCHF All About Kids. The charity, based in the heart of the Sussex Downs and 20 minutes from the south coast, paid for Shannon to enjoy an activity week at their centre in Hassocks.
"Shannon has benefited hugely from this camp – she has gone from being shy, lacking in energy and confidence, to making friends easily, joining in with and enjoying every activity," says a volunteer who spent the week with Shannon. "It was a pleasure to watch her grow in confidence."
CCHF All About Kids, which is 100% funded by voluntary donations, was founded in the late 1800s as the Children's Country Holidays Fund, and helped more than 2 million disadvantaged children in its 125-year history by providing a range of residential activity and respite breaks.
In the 1930s, author AA Milne helped raise £6,000 for the charity (more than £250,000 in today's money), while CCHF was asked by the charity WRVS to assist with the evacuation of London's children during the Blitz.
Today, CCHF says there are more than 600,000 children living with poverty, abuse, isolation and depravation at any one time in London – recent reductions to the child tax credit and the working tax credit for lone parents won't help. It means many inner-city familes are struggling to afford the basics, let alone a holiday for their children. Andrew Cartwright, chairman of CCHF All About Kids, says school holidays can add to the financial burden on parents as they have to find the money for childcare and larger food bills.
"Despite all the apparent prosperity in our society, the need for our services to help young children is no less today than when we were established in 1884," Cartwright says. "The difficulties and lack of opportunities for so many children in the busy parts of our cities is still a huge problem that has not gone away."
During an activity break with CCHF, chlidren can enjoy a range of activities including swimming in natural outdoor pools, kite-flying, and "Weaseling", which involves climbing under and over rocks. But it costs £301 for one child to have an action packed six-day residential break, while £150 is needed to recruit and train each new volunteer to look after the children (for every four children who attend the charity needs at least one volunteer).
"Our teams are committed to bringing enjoyment and encouragement to a growing number of children, and to seeing how it can have a long-term positive impact on their lives," Cartwright says. "It makes a tremendous difference."
The 700+ children who enjoyed a welcome break from home life during 2011 would no doubt agree. But CCHF says it needs volunteers as well as donations to help reach the £700,000 it costs each year to run its services, and welcomes readers getting in touch to offer help.
Charitable giving
Consumer affairs
Charities
Children
Voluntary sector
Christmas
Mark King
guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
GUARDIAN Sat, 03 Dec 2011 07:59:01 GMT
It's pink gunk so cheap it doesn't even have an anatomical name, but processed pork is beyond delicious
In the latest of Jamie Oliver's American odysseys, he demonstrates how the cheapest of processed meat products are made, with the use of some random old bits of beast and a washing machine.
What you do (and you probably could do it at home, though you'd have to not mind knackering your washing machine) is just sling in the bits you couldn't sell, put it on a spin cycle, and after a while, you have some pink gunk. It is so cheap, it doesn't even have an anatomical name, let alone a menu name. Food standards agencies all over the world allow it to be piped into sausages and similar, to make up that mysterious element that is neither meat nor not-meat.
I know all this. I know it back to front. I know that you shouldn't eat cuts you can't identify, and I'm not going to be so brazen as to make some anti-elitist point that there's no moral difference between sirloin and spinal.......
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
GUARDIAN Wed, 30 Nov 2011 13:33:35 GMT
Being candid about your disgustingness is not for every food brand, yet it has worked wonders for Marmite
Mmm, yeast extract. It's like the reality TV of the food world: basically disgusting but unusually good at commanding column inches.
Of course, by yeast extract I really mean Marmite, which, over the last few years, has managed to spark an international incident, play host to Jesus, and give Madonna nightmares. Not bad for a reasonably priced savoury spread. The latest example of Marmite's hold over the media came on Monday, when a lorry collided with a caravan and spilled 20 tonnes of the stuff on to the M1. It's hard to think of a more English mishap and the papers lapped it up. What was basically a minor road traffic accident in Yorkshire has, so far, generated almost 300 headlines, trended on Twitter and subjected us all to a lot of extremely bad puns.
So what is it with the English and Marmite? What dark forces are behind this rather odd obsession?
Well, as with so.....
| | | | | | | | | | | |
GUARDIAN Tue, 29 Nov 2011 08:37:04 GMT
Traces of virus, known as winter vomiting bug, found in more than three-quarters of the shellfish tested from UK growing beds
More than three-quarters of British-grown oysters contain norovirus, research has found.
The study, conducted on behalf of the Food Standards Agency (FSA), discovered that 76% of oysters tested from UK oyster growing beds had traces of the infectious bug.
Low levels of the virus, which causes symptoms such as vomiting and diarrhoea, were found in 52% of the positive samples, according to the data.
The FSA said it was difficult to assess the potential health impact of the findings, as researchers were unable to differentiate between infectious and non-infectious norovirus material in the shellfish.
However, it said the results of the study would be used as part of a review by the European food safety authority, which is to advise the European commission on what a legal safe level for norovirus in oysters should be.
Currently, a safe limit for the........
| | | | | | |
WORLDHEALTHNEWS.HARVARD Mon, 28 Nov 2011 11:00:00 EST
Alice Park reports on the latest study regarding bisphenol-A exposure from BPA-lined soup cans. "We may not know all the ways in which the chemical bisphenol-A (BPA) affects our health, but...we're exposed to it frequently -- BPA is in many plastic products and lines nearly all food and beverage cans. Exposure to BPA, an endocrine-disrupting compound that mimics the body's hormones, has been linked to heart disease, diabetes and obesity, and to potential problems during development in fetuses and young children. In Canada and Europe, the chemical has been banned outright from baby bottles, and while many manufacturers have removed BPA from baby products in the U.S., it hasn't been regulated yet by the government. Researchers...at the Harvard School of Public Health, sought to figure out just how much BPA you get from eating food from cans...To measure levels of BPA, the researchers asked all the participants to give urine samples after each soup-eating period...in the fresh-soup.......
| | | | | | | | | | |
GUARDIAN Thu, 24 Nov 2011 16:30:01 GMT
America's founding involved expropriation – of Native American corn. Thank you, Occupy, for naming the modern expropriators
I'm actually not a big holiday person. Here in New York City, my Christmas ritual is a first-run movie and Chinese food. I spend Passover with friends in the back room of Katz's Deli on the Lower East Side.
For Thanksgiving, though, I do roast a turkey. When it comes to the holiday's meaning and origins, I think about the sign on Cape Cod's Corn Hill, the one that marks the spot where the Pilgrims found – and stole – a cache of Indian seed corn for planting, come spring. The sign swears that the Pilgrims later repaid the Indians. And how.
Here's one of the things I'm most thankful for this year. That, in a little over two months, the Occupy movement has done what our elected officials have so rigorously avoided doing since the financial industry's shenanigans brought the world economy to its knees in 2008: spoken up for the 99%. Asked why we got sold out,..
| | | | | | | | | | | |
GUARDIAN Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:00:00 GMT
Forget the turkey and the 'chocolate pilgrim centrepieces' this Thanksgiving. Here is my handy guide to surviving that special holiday
As you read this, Americans around the world will be rolling up their sleeves, gearing up to push some readymade stuffing into a dried-out bird while a male relative stands to one side, arms at his waist, poised to make the traditional joke as inscribed in the constitution by the Founding Fathers: "Heh heh – most girls make me buy them dinner before I get to do that!" Heh heh.
Yes, it's Thanksgiving time in America, that special holiday marking the Anglo-Saxon invasion of someone else's country, which Americans celebrate by eating sweet potatoes and marshmallows. Mixed together, naturellement.
Pretty much every holiday has, if not downright creepy origins, then ones certainly far away from their Hallmark manifestations today. Most obviously, there's the disconnect between a night that was once intended to mark the last chance for the dead to......
| | | |
GUARDIAN Tue, 22 Nov 2011 09:50:00 GMT
Bhalla papdi chaat is only one delicious dish in the glittering multiverse of foods to be found in Dehli
Serves 4
For the dumplings:
200g / 7 oz urad dal (white lentils)
2.5cm / 1-inch piece ginger, peeled and finely grated
2 green chillies, chopped
30g / 1¼ oz sultanas, chopped
1 teaspoon black pepper
pinch baking powder
1 teaspoon salt, or to taste
vegetable oil, for deep-frying
For the papdi:
180g / 6 oz plain flour
pinch salt
1 teaspoon carom seeds
2 tablespoons vegetable oil, plus extra for deep-frying
For the yoghurt:
400g / 14 oz thick natural yoghurt
40g / 1½ oz granulated sugar
40g / 1½ oz runny honey
½ teaspoon salt, or to taste
100g / 3½ oz cooked chickpeas
1 teaspoon chilli powder
1 teaspoon amchoor (dried mango powder)
½ teaspoon ground cumin
few sprigs coriander, chopped
1 teaspoon salt, or to taste
Tamarind chutney
Mint and coriander chutney
2 tablespoons pomegrante seeds
First make the dumplings. Rinse the lentils under cold water running water, then drain.....
| |
GUARDIAN Mon, 21 Nov 2011 20:30:04 GMT
The prime minister's choice of dish is a nice compromise between British shepherd's pie and Greek moussaka
It has been reported that David Cameron is currently hosting a series of "lasagne suppers" for Tory MPs, aimed at repairing relations after the EU referendum vote rebellion. Mending fences is all very well, but why lasagne?
As a political meal it may seem a trifle, well, Italian, especially if you're feeding eurosceptic Tories, but it's a nice compromise between shepherd's pie and moussaka. The former, of course, is for ever tainted by association with Jeffrey Archer's Christmas party, and the latter is too Greek for words. Some maintain that lasagne is actually Greek in origin; others say that it's based on a 14th-century English recipe for a dish called "loseyne".
Lasagne is a great comfort food, in that everybody likes it, but nobody likes it too much. When you invite people round to dinner, you know they're not coming just for the lasagne. It also demonstrates a........
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
|
|
Nigel Slater's beetroot recipes
Winter fun for non-skiers, London's most unique hotel room and Chinese new year
Nigel Slater's classic mango lassi
Restaurant review: Mishkin's
Protica's New Healthy Snack Food
Recipes for Health: Noodle and Apple Kugel — Recipes for Health
Culinary capers
Growth Hormone Increases Bone Formation in Obese Women
How I remember: The lifelogger
Fitness Marketing Program Teaches Personal Trainers How To Outsource...
Members of The Inaugural Birmingham-Jefferson Food Policy Council Meet...
Lawsuit Says Walgreen, Par Pharma Overcharged
Market Watch: Goatherd's life a rugged climb
Waste Whey? Some Say No Way.
Readers' travel tips: life-changing trips
Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil by Tom Mueller – review
Better than your usual table
Does deodorant ingredient affect breast cancer risk?
Ask an exercise expert all your fitness questions Monday 1 p.m. EST
Tainted juice episode calls FDA capabilities into question
FDA Halts Imports of Orange Juice: Is It Safe to Drink?
Fitness Marketing Expert Shares Time-Saving Tips For The Busy New Year
Protica Products for Bodybuilders and Dieters
Indy Gastro Physicians Give Patients Greater Access to Medical...
Living Fuel Says It’s Time To Feel Better, Look Better, and Perform...
Glass beer tankards make return
Critic's Choice: Where to eat the heat
Did Food Safety Auditors Cause The Fatal Outbreak From Tainted Cantaloupes?
Wear 'Em, Chuck 'Em, Float 'Em: 10 Things To Do With Twinkies
How to cook healthy comfort foods
Coca-Cola alerted the FDA to fungicide levels in orange juice
10 of the world's best yoga retreats 2012
Sleeping beauties: Caring for the winter wildlife garden
Perfect hot chocolate
