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 […]
Your local Asia shop might seem intimidating, but there are many bargains to be found. Certain articles are of much higher quality and much lower price than our western supermarkets. Off the top of my head these are: Rice Soy Sauces Noodles The only issue is that sometimes the quantities are geared for ‘we cook […]
A family favourite, and inexpensive.
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 […]
There are some commercial products that are excellent and that I wouldn’t hesitate using (say, puff pastry or dried spaghetti). But those little bottles of expensive pesto just don’t cut it. The real stuff tastes a million brazilion times better, and it’s really easy if you have a food processor. The real stuff has a […]
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 […]
I’m a huge fan of modernist cuisine, and can heartily recommend their book Modernist Cuisine at Home, which introduces loads of funky geeky concepts with delicious, reproducible results. Modernist Cuisine at Home They love using pressure cookers, mostly because one has a controlled environment in terms of temperature and air humidity (the latter affects cooking […]
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:
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 […]
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 […]