Lamb

Recipes: Lamb recipes to get the juices flowing.

Spicy lamb, cranberry, and date bites

Welsh lamb Cutlets en croûte

Mojito-style racks of lamb

Welsh lamb and mango curry with coriander and sweet potato dumplings

British Christmas recipes

Article & Recipes: Deep and crisp and even

Three sweet Christmas recipe from Nigel Slater: brandy snaps with cinnamon cream; mulled perry with pears and spices; brown sugar spice biscuits.

Perry is now sold as 'pear cider'. A wonderfully refreshing drink, even when warmed with sugar and spice. The smell as it fizzes on the stove is pure Christmas.

Gravlax & the Feast of Seven Fishes

Recipe: Lemon-Dill Gravlax

To make this Scandinavian specialty, you rub raw salmon with salt, dill, and other flavorings and cure it in the fridge. The process takes three days, at which point you’ll have smooth, silky cured salmon, which makes an impressive appetizer served with baguette toasts or black bread and a swirl of crème fraîche.

Article & Recipes: Feast of Seven Fishes

For these Italian chefs the Feast of Seven Fishes is the highlight of their culinary calendar, and they're happy to be sharing recipes, workspace, and later, lunch. The feast is a Christmas Eve tradition that has spread from southern Italy to Italian homes throughout the United States. Though theories abound on its origins, the feast probably derives from the centuries-old Catholic tradition of eating only fish on Fridays and certain holy days.

Turkey & Tiny Kitchens

Article/Recipe/Blog Post: Cooking turkey

And, from the same writer: So your kitchen is tiny, so what?

Pumpkin

Article / Recipes: Thanksgiving: 20 things to do with a pumpkin.

The traditional side dishes that accompany the roasted bird may vary according to region but usually include sweet potatoes baked with either marshmallows or maple syrup; stuffing, known as “dressing”, and made with herbs, cornbread, wild rice, chillies, chestnuts or sausage depending on the state; New England cranberry relish as a tart foil to all the sweetness on the plate, and, for pudding, the acquired taste that is pumpkin pie.

Both pumpkin and butternut squash are versatile types of winter squash that can be sautéed, mashed or used in soups and curries.

Perfect Yorkshire Pudding

Article/Recipe: Chemists divine formula for perfect Yorkshire pud.

Scroll down: the recipe sits at the end.

Dr Emsley’s consultations with colleagues across the country led the Royal Society of Chemistry to conclude that the best specimens were no less than 4in high. He declined to disclose the precise methodology of the investigation.

“I have seen many grim results from people who have tried to get their Yorkshires to rise,” he said. “They frequently made gross errors.

“Cooking is chemistry in the kitchen and one has to have the correct formula, equipment and procedures. To translate the ingredients into chemical terms, these are carbohydrate + H2O + protein + NaCl + lipids.”

Couscous with mustard dressing

Recipe: Golden couscous with lemony mustard dressing.

Curry

Blog Post: What makes a good curry great?

The ingredients must be obviously fresh and identifiable. The meat must be coated in sauce, not drowned in it. The meat must have been cooked with the sauce - not that catering rubbish that is pre-cooked, heated and chucked in later.

The meat must not be tough, but not cooked to the point of being stewy/poached/falling apart either - not melt-in-the-mouth, but slightly resisting the bite.

50 Best Cookbooks

Article: The 50 Best Cookbooks ...


... according to the Independent.

Offal

Article & Recipe: Britain gets an offal taste of austerity.

Scroll to the end of the article for three recipes.

In The River Cottage Family Cookbook, Fearnley-Whittingstall points out that muscle, or flesh, makes up only 60 per cent of a carcass: why waste the rest?

"Many people are squeamish about eating offal – some seem to assume that they won't like it before they have even tried it," he grumbled. "This is partly because it seems so different from the meat they are used to. And partly perhaps because, unlike ordinary red meat, when you look at a piece of offal it is hard to forget where it comes from.

"But the offal cuts are often some of the most interesting and delicious parts of an animal; sweeter, more tender and usually more interestingly flavoured than the muscle meat. Try it; you might like it."

Offal can be the ultimate fast food, he said – a slice of liver can be fried quicker than bread toasted. A teaspoon of mustard, a few shakes of Worcestershire sauce, a pinch of cayenne, and some crème fraîche made some dressing.

Salmon with udon broth

Recipe: Pan-fried salmon with chilli coriander udon broth.

Next time you're wondering what to do with salmon, there's this.

Egg and potato burritos

Recipe: Egg and potato burritos.

The American Cookbook Project

Website: America by Food.

The American Cookbook Project is a forum for sharing food stories. People from across the country are invited to share their favorite recipes and memories associated with this dish. This is not simply an online cookbook but a collection of memories and recollections of great meals from the past.

Pork Chops

Recipe: Pork Chops with thyme

The 11 Best Foods You Aren't Eating

Blog Post: The 11 Best Foods You Aren't eating.

... according to some guy at the New York Times.

Globe artichokes

Article/Recipe: Have a heart.

Dealing with globe artichokes. Comes with a recipe for artichoke and bacon tart.

Simply cooked and slowly plucked until the meaty heart is revealed, the largest artichokes need the least complicated of additions to make a feast. Unadulterated melted butter is hard to beat, though a little adulteration rings the changes. Try our anchovy butter, or melted, salted butter with a few chopped thyme leaves (lemon thyme in particular), a little lemon juice and a few grinds of black pepper.

Chicken, farro and pesto salad

Recipe: Chicken, farro and pesto salad

In case you ever have some farro and are wondering what to do with it. Farro, usually grown in Italy, is also known as 'emmer wheat.'

Cut Back on Meat

Article: Putting Meat back in its Place.

Or how to cut back on meat in your meals, from an American point of view.

7. Look at restaurant menus differently. If you’re cutting back on meat, there are three restaurant strategies. Two are easy, and one is hard, but probably the most important.

The first: go to restaurants that don’t feature meat-heavy dishes. It’s harder to go overboard eating at most Asian restaurants, and traditional Italian is fairly safe also.

The second: Once in a while, forget the rules and pledges, and eat like a real American; obviously you can’t do this every time, but it’s an option.

Salmon Patties

Recipe/ Blog Post: Salmon Patties.

So that we have something to do with the next large lump of Christmas salmon.

Soda bread & Beer Cupcakes

Article & Recipe: Irish Soda Bread.

Soda bread is made with buttermilk, and the acid in it reacts with the baking soda to make the bread rise. Originally, this bread was baked in a pot, which gave it a firm, moist texture.

Recipe: Beer cupcakes.

Despite the addition of Guinness, these cakes are not at all bitter; instead, the beer adds richness and moisture, and balances the sweetness of the sugar.

Khaukswe Chicken. Nutritious Mexican food

Recipe: Khaukswe Chicken.

Article/ Recipe: The nutritious way to cook Mexican food.

Tex-Mex food may conjure images of sour cream or melted cheese dolloped on top of a bowl of tortilla chips, but real Mexican food is dominated not by fat-fuelled Western interpretations of the Central American diet but by the highly nutritious cereal maize, which is made into true tortillas (thin griddle cakes) and dumplings.

Wasabi Bloody Marys. American Steak

Recipe: Wasabi Bloody Marys.

Article and Recipes: A view to a grill.

A short article about the superiority of the American steak, with some steak recipes at the end.

I discovered that one of the secrets of American steak cookery lay in the cooking process. To achieve that deliciously tasty and coveted "crust", the steak must first be cooked over coals on a grill, before being finished at super-hot temperatures, as high as 1,200F, in a large mechanism called a broiler.

Avocado Pasta, Beef Pho, Curry

Recipe: Avocado pesto pasta.

Recipe: Beef Pho

Article / Recipe: How to prepare a coconut-based curry.

Comes with sidebar recipes for lamb curry, beef curry, Penang fish curry, and two types of chicken curry.

Eggplant slices filled with bechamel

Recipe: Eggplant slices filled with bechamel.

Baby Beetroot. Peanut Soup

Recipe: Baby beetroot with spinach leaves, crisp ginger, and a curry-flavoured dressing.

Recipe: West African Peanut Soup.

This simple, rich soup is adapted from a dish popular in Cameroon. For extra flavor, try it with a savory peanut butter, such as Peanut Better's hickory smoked or onion parsley peanut butters.

Winter Couscous

Recipe: The New Vegetarian: The Ultimate Winter Couscous.

Forget couscous salad and similarly bland fare at the supermarket; this is the real thing - warmingly spicy and bursting with sweet and astringent flavours. The ingredients list may seem long, but there is actually little effort involved here.

Making Bread

Article: Get a rise out of your own bread.

Probably the most common cause of bread failure is one simple mistake, killing the yeast with too-hot water. Better to err on the side of water that is too cool - though the bread won't rise as fast as it would have with lukewarm water.

Mozzarella

Article with recipe suggestions: What to do with mozzarella.

Pouring Beer & Creaming Spinich

Article: Expert tips to pour the perfect beer.

How to pour beer.

"You never want to put a really good beer in a frozen glass. It's a waste of money," he says. "The aromas just can't get out. They get locked into the liquid."

Recipe: Creamed spinich with bacon.

The spinach gets its creaminess from a bechamél sauce based on a flour and butter roux. There's actually no cream in the spinach, it uses milk instead.

10 pancake recipes

Article & Recipe: 10 Flipping Tasty Pancake recipes.

Yorkshire puddings. Dips.

Blog Post: God's own Pud.

A post about Yorkshire puddings.

The tactics involved getting the dripping, tin and oven to solar heat, which seared the batter and made it crisp.

Then, unusually and rather dramatically, you turned the puds with a spatula and left them just long enough to crisp on the other side while keeping a very thin, semi-liquid layer within. The result was like a beef dripping pizza served with onion gravy (a whole separate science for Yorkshire pud cooks). It was heavenly.

Article: Dip Once or Dip Twice?

An article about bowls of communal dip.

The team of nine students instructed volunteers to take a bite of a wheat cracker and dip the cracker for three seconds into about a tablespoon of a test dip. They then repeated the process with new crackers, for a total of either three or six double dips per dip sample. The team then analyzed the remaining dip and counted the number of aerobic bacteria in it.

Recipe: Moroccan Carrot Dip.

A recipe for dip. Made with carrots. No evidence that it is actually Moroccan.