Latest Posts

Efficiency, Kit

The Indian Slow cooker: Cooking Dals in a crockpot/slow cooker/schongarer – a revelation

I’ve long been a fan of crockpots/slow cookers, especially for those dishes such as soups and stews which come out wonderfully. They are very common in the USA and in the UK, considerably less so in Germany and Switzerland. They are perfectly safe to leave unattended, since they never attain boiling temperatures. There’s been another […]

Recipes

Sticky rice (Khao Neow) in Zojirushi rice cooker

For anyone having visited Laos or Isaan in Northeast Thailand, you’ve eaten sticky rice. Traditionally this rice is soaked for hours, then steamed in a woven bamboo basket over a pot, like this: That’s obviously completely impractical in a Western kitchen, so I tried to do the rice in my steamer. That turned out to […]

Tips

Don’t put your eggs in the fridge

Have you noticed that the eggs in markets are not refrigerated? Freshly laid eggs will keep up to three weeks out of a fridge and still be completely fresh. If you put them in the fridge, the three weeks get extended to five weeks, but since we have a regular consumption, our eggs are never […]

Recipes

Prik glua

One of the many gastronomic delights of Thailand are the fruit stalls. They are ubiquitous and cheap. The vendors sell a wide variety of fruit, usually pineapple, melons, mangos (which tend to be too unripe for our western tastes), and coconut. The fruit are peeled, chopped into bite-sizes, and served in a clear plastic bag […]

Recipes

Eat more salad : Stock up on homemade vinaigrette!

This is a trick I learned from my cousin Sophie. Make a batch of salad sauce in advance. It reduces the effort to spontaneously eat salad, it’s cheap, and, as long as you don’t use perishable stuff like herbs and onions, it stays fresh indefinitely. Plus, you know what’s inside. Here is my recipe:

Health

No evidence that organic food is more nutritious

Nutritional quality of organic foods: a systematic review 1,2,3,4 Alan D Dangour, Sakhi K Dodhia, Arabella Hayter, Elizabeth Allen, Karen Lock and Ricardo Uauy 1 From the Nutrition and Public Health Intervention Research Unit (ADD, SKD, AH, and RU) and the Medical Statistics Unit (EA), Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, London School of Hygiene […]