Blog Post & Recipe:
Masala Omelette - a perfect hangover cure
I had a quick google around and found Nigella's recipe, which is what I based mine on. I think she uses way too much of the spices - 1 tsp each of coriander and cumin would be mightily overwhelming. This was delicious; delicately spiced, a little bit of heat from the chilli, and best of all, it cured me.
Article & Recipes:
Build a meal around dumplingsThese are not dumpling recipes but recipes for side dishes to go with store-bought Asian dumplings.
What do Chinese potstickers, Japanese gyoza and Polish pirogi have in common? They're all vegetable- or meat-filled dumplings, sold frozen at local supermarkets ...
We've developed some tasty, nourishing recipes to complement a dumpling dinner – all of them quick fixes.
SPINACH WITH TOFU ... CHICKPEAS AND SPINACH IN SMOKY BEEF BROTH ... SUBSTANTIAL SALADS
Blog Post & Recipe:
Madeleines w/ Chocolate Dipping Sauce
A well-made madeleine has the ability to pause time, and allow one the chance to reflect and savor the simple beauty in life ... I rarely find a madeleine that has time-pausing goodness ... Time paused. For quite a long time. Everything I had been searching for and intimately longing for in a madeleine had now been found.
Reading this dewy-eyed stuff, I'm reminded that Proust was far more tough-minded than people give him credit for. A piece of trivia: his narrator's madeleine only had its effect after he had dipped it in tea and sucked up some wet crumbs in a spoonful of liquid. The legend that follows the book around lets you think that he took a bite of a biscuit alone, but no, he makes it clear that the connection of tea with crumb was absolutely necessary.
And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me ... immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents ...; and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.
It also seems to me that (according to the legend) the whole madeleine business is thought to be fairly relaxed, sweet, genteel, but within the landscape of the narrator's mind it has the force of two planets smacking together, and the memory that comes out of it is often an ugly one -- people are imprisoned, bullied, humiliated, patronised, driven frantic, and abandoned. The book's most celebrated character, aside from the madeleine, is an elderly aristocratic snob who employs attractive young male prostitutes to whip him in brothels.
