Better Then Restaurants | Easy Delicious Recipes

Joe Baker’s Damn Good Salsa (and Huevos Rancheros Redux)

April 5, 2010 – 10:34 pm | by admin

Finding this salsa recipe was a bit like finding religion, but better! I got both the euphoria and the feeling that I’d been wandering aimlessly for too many years before the discovery–but without feeling judged or having to listen to hymns that sound, perhaps unintentionally, like plodding, joyless dirges. Now that I’ve trivialized something that billions hold dear and invited angry comments (there I go again, assuming actual readership exceeding five persons), allow me to apologize and talk about the salsa. I have made my own salsa since I was a wastrel of a teenager in Albuquerque, New Mexico who couldn’t cook a lick. Even as my kitchen skills have improved over the years, my salsas have only occasionally risen above shrug-producing. A few weeks ago, however, while visiting one of my sisters in the tiny town of Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania, I was introduced to a real true connoisseure of good food, a scholar of history, and a mean blues harp player: Joe Baker. (You can check out his entertaining blog here , where he posits on a wide variety of …

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Tags: Best Cooking Tips, Better Then Restaurants, boiling-springs, Entertaining, huevos-rancheros, kitchen, mexico, pennsylvania, result, salsa

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Interview

April 1, 2010 – 12:38 pm | by admin

(Shameless self-promotion alert. Hey, I don’t get on TV very often so I’m making the most of it) Ahead of tonight’s semi-final, here’s a little interview with me talking about food, cooking and John and Gregg. If you would care to relive what has become known as the ‘WI Debacle’ then it’s available on iPlayer. If you’d prefer to sit tight and wait for the next instalment it’s on BBC1 tonight (1st April) at 8:30pm. Oh, and have a decadent decadently long weekend x Note: It seems that the video is too large for my little blog and is spilling over onto the sidebar. I don’t know how to fix this. If you’d prefer to watch it without bits of text covering it, you can see it here instead Read this article: Interview

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Tags: alex masterchef, Better Then Restaurants, debacle, easy recipes, Fantastic Recipes, instalment, long-weekend, making-the-most, promotion, text-covering, very-often, video

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Beef & Stout Pie

March 15, 2010 – 9:17 am | by admin

The transformation of ‘stew’ to ‘pie’ by the simple addition of a pastry case or lid is a great one. Although little more than starchy filler, hiding slow cooked meat within the confines of a flour and fat housing does wondrous things to the contents. Wondrous, magical things. A cheap staple food with a lengthy and sometimes less than illustrious history, the pie has undergone a renaissance of late. Artisanal and gourmet offerings now jostle for space alongside mass produced efforts with less than stellar provenance. The pie is becoming a shining beacon of all that is great about British food. Hearty, wholesome and delicious. Food we should rightly be proud of. The most satisfying of pies, though, are the ones that you nurture yourself. A tender, slow cooked meaty filling and a suet exterior that manages to be both crunchy and yielding at once. A barely audible crack as the pastry gives to the pressure of cutlery and a waft of richly scented steam as the contents spill out onto the plate. ‘Double carbing’ is a point of contention. In most cases desire trumps sensibility and a mound …

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Tags: beef, Better Then Restaurants, british, chicken-or-beef, meat, pastry, people, result, stout, transformation

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Steamed Quick Duck Confit

February 25, 2010 – 12:12 pm | by admin

Confit is one of France’s finest gifts to humanity. Tough pieces of meat cooked long and slow in a thick jacuzzi of fat until it is meltingly tender and supremely tasty? Hand it over. Immediately. Traditionally a method of preservation, the meat would sit quite happily in its fatty suspension for months on end – the surrounding lard preventing bacteria from scuttling in and spoiling the delicious meat within. Not the most practical thing to do at home, especially in small quantities, confit duck is something I eat only rarely which is why I was intrigued by an alternative method discussed over port and candied fish . Not only does it require a fraction of the amount of fat but reportedly yields results on a par with the traditional method. Some even go so far as to say superior. Everything that is good about confit in a neat domestic kitchen friendly method. A challenge too tempting to pass over. Quick Duck Confit Buy a whole duck. Seriously. Don’t bother faffing about with legs and breasts. Just buy the entire bird and get busy with a sharp knife. It’s much cheaper and you can then render your own fat from the leftover bits and bobs. [Steamed bum-plings, anyone? Dim Bum?]…

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Tags: anise, Better Then Restaurants, delicious, does-it-require, jacuzzi, leftover, salty, traditional, Yummy Food

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Big Mac makeover

February 17, 2010 – 4:38 pm | by admin

It seems that the folks at McDonalds are beginning to realise that one burger doesn’t fit all as they continue in their efforts for fast food dominance in Europe. People didn’t quite take to the speedy, wham, bam, thank you ma’am Yankee style of dishing up burgers and so Mickey D’s has been forced to adopt a more European approach as it’s increasingly becoming a gathering place for young and old, offering food that’s suited to the region’s varied cultural tastes, from porridge in England, to baguettes in France, to soup in Portugal. In a continent where people take more time over their food, and often with friends, the company is trying different strategies and interior design options. Certain French restaurants have also started with a table service, something which could be rolled out further in the next few years. Big Macs will inevitably cost more if they’re served by uniformed waiters, but so far the signs suggest that in some places at least, people don’t really mind. So what about us here in South Africa? When do we get the Afro styled McDonalds? And what about some local dishes like the McGatsby…

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Tags: approach, Best Cooking Tips, Better Then Restaurants, burgers, europe, europe-people, european, Fantastic Recipes, fast, food, france, french, south-africa

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Pass the umami please

February 9, 2010 – 2:07 pm | by admin

Hand up, if like me, you love simple dishes that are real “flavour bombs” like pea-and-ham soup, cheese on toast, and pork belly cooked with yeast extract. Of course the fact that they’re simple is not the attraction, it’s because they are loaded with umami or the fithth taste. Now the Japanese who discovered it over 100 years ago, food chemists and avant garde chefs have been fascinated with the power of umami rich foods for many years but now it’s moving into the public arena. The esoteric flavour – described as the trigger for the sensation of deliciousness when detected by the brain alongside the primary tastes of sweet, salty, sour and bitter – is about to jump from the kitchens of Michelin-starred restaurants and university labs to the high street, with the arrival of umami in a tube. Two British supermarket chains are to start stocking a paste of ingredients developed by a London restaurateur and food writer, Laura Santtini, who developed a purée – which includes pulped anchovy and porcini mushrooms – while she was running her family’s Italian restaurant in Belgravia.. The Taste No 5 paste, which will be stocked in branches of Waitrose nationwide …

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Tags: Better Then Restaurants, british, family, italian, japan, japanese, laura-santtini, london, pass-the-umami, umami, Yummy Food

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A horse of a different colour

February 8, 2010 – 4:15 pm | by admin

It’s strange that many of us, when confronted by a tough piece of meat or unpalatable processed salami type of product, are inclined to dismiss it as “Tasting of bloody horsemeat”, strange because I’m sure many of us haven’t ever tasted horsemeat. I know I haven’t and to be perfectly truthful I have no desire to. As far as I am concerned horses should be galloping round race tracks or cantering along sunset beaches, not sizzling on the griddle waiting to be anointed with garlic butter. Of course up to now I’ve always been happy to blame the French for trying popularise the consumption of one of man’s favourite quadrapeds, I’ve found it expedient to blame the French for a lot of things and rather bizarrely no-one seems to rush to their defence on any matter but it seems I may have been mistaken because Italy is the largest consumer of horsemeat in Europe with more than 48,000 metric tonnes eaten every year and it is a common dish among youngsters because of its high iron content. Now I can only presume that they stick it in the salamis because I’ve never heard of…

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Tags: agriculture, Better Then Restaurants, bizarrely, consumption, europe, food, french, health-ministry, italian, raising-as-much, strange-because

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Bulli fooked

January 27, 2010 – 4:38 pm | by admin

It seems that the most exclusive restaurant in the world is about to become even more exclusive. At present it is only open for around six months out of every 12, and only for one sitting at dinner. We’re talking El Bulli here of course. Two million people have applied for the 8,000 spaces available for each season over the past few years. Being realistic, therefore, the likelihood of you actually being able to eat there has been close to zero, you would in fact have substantially better odds of picking up food poisoning at Blumen Hestonstein’s place! So how can the Spanish Toreador make it even more exclusive? Simple, close it down and no-one can eat there. Ferran Adrià has announced he will be taking a sabbatical in 2012-2013 and that El Bulli will not be opening for either season. He says he’s getting tired and needs a break. Maybe he’s just fed up with all the bloody hype – I know I am! One thing is for sure, when he does reopen it will be a totally different restaurant and his style of experimentation may have gone

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Tags: Best Cooking Tips, Better Then Restaurants, cooking, food-poisoning, getting-tired, make-it-even, over-the-past, the-likelihood

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Nordic cobblers

January 6, 2010 – 3:17 pm | by admin

It seems that that one of the next PC things to bring some anguish and pain to our lives will be this bloody carbon footprint concept invading the food world. Already the Swedes (it had to be the Swedes or the Danes, it’s the cold and the midnight sun that addles their brains) are tampering with food labels that reflect carbon footprints and a Swedish fast food chain is trying to discourage people from eating too much meat by publishing the carbon footprint of each item on its menu. The Max Burger restaurant in central Stockholm, entices you in by masquerading as a burger joint but as soon as they have you in their snare they really try to sell you falafel burger or half beef/half soya burgers. Max Burger claims to be the first restaurant chain in the world to publish CO2 emissions on its menu. From the methane produced by the cows, to the machinery used on the farm, through to the emissions produced by the abattoir and the lorries which move the meat around – the weight of CO2 represents the carbon footprint of that meal. So it’s a case of “We’ve got meat burgers…

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Tags: article, backyard-orange, Better Then Restaurants, bloody-business, carbon, danes, easy recipes, emissions, falafel-burger, Fantastic Recipes, food, machinery, move-the-meat, swedes, swedish

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A glance in the mirror

December 30, 2009 – 2:37 pm | by admin

Sometimes it’s not such a good idea to glance in the mirror, you might end up seeing something that you really don’t want to see. Oh I’m not referring to bulging waistlines or craggy good looks which are slightly weatherbeaten, I learnt to ignore all that nonsense years ago. No, I’m thinking on a more philosophical level here rather than physical. You see, like everyone else I’ve been reading about some new lifestyle trends which are emerging and which we can look forward to in the New Year. Skimming through these types of futuristic articles is a bit like reading the horoscope columns, you tend to agree with everything that fits in with your view of things and dismiss as utter rubbish anything which you may find unsettling. I nodded sagely at the paragraph on sensory branding, explaining that the more we try to cut out pop up, in your face, advertising, the more the experts are seeking out ways to appeal to all the senses such as highly designed luxurious hand items like smartphones and ladies compacts which seem to open and close effortlessly, smoothly and silently. Then I got to the bit about Extreme Connoisseurs and it started to read just like my horoscope …

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Tags: Best Cooking Tips, Better Then Restaurants, churn-artisanal, highly-designed, horoscope, kitchen, lifestyle-trend, mirror, paragraph, smoked-chillis, the-mirror