#cooking
Cooking Terms
I love cooking but the terminology seems very fluid to me until I hear chefs talking to each other about how they prepare an ingredient in a way that sounds so specific. It turns out these words do have distinct meanings that I struggle to hold in my head. A very awkward Frenglish word. Means frying ingredients in not very much oil but over a relatively high heat. A larger ingredient like a meat is cooked over a very high heat just to brown the surface. The process that makes things go brown is called the Maillard reaction. Usually things...
Time to cook
I like to cook a lot. Sometimes I cook all afternoon, one meal after another. I end up with a fridge full of boxed up meals that I can pile through in the week or give to loved ones. Dinner guests are relatively rare these days, in the wake of the pandemic year. Some people have been scattered away from the pestilent city centre. Some people are understandably still reluctant to dive into a full social calendar. Others, like me at the moment, are busy all the time because they’re making up for lost time. Today I’ve been on something...
Museums of Oxford
It’s getting darker and colder, but so far I don’t mind. Like I said before, I’m cooking a lot of satisfying food. It’s still warm enough to get into the Hampstead Heath ponds every Saturday morning. The crowd there is thinning out and there’s now a pleasing corps of batty and rich ladies of a certain age who we’re starting to see on a regular basis.
Eating and swimming
Running’s been difficult lately, but swimming in the ponds is getting better each week. It’s cold enough now that it burns your skin all over when you get in. It’s cold enough that when you feel the cold on your legs as you step down the ladder you think, “not everybody would do this”. Very self-satisfied of me. When the burning fades off, this sudden feeling of wellbeing washes over. Other than that the weekend was quiet There was lots of good food: more red riso arancini, celeriac soup, pancakes with bananas and Biscoff, sourdough from the bakery, embarrassingly good...
Carbohydrate tubes
I ran out of steam with cooking a little bit this weekend. A lot of that probably has to do with some gargantuan hangovers I inflicted on myself a few days in a row. It also has to do with the fact that I’ve been a victim of my own success in using what’s already in the cupboards. I used up those spices that have been sitting around. I used up those frozen sausages in the freezer. I used up the dregs of that short-grain rice. The upshot is that my cupboards and my fridge are more fundamentally empty than...
The mountains and the beetroots
When I cycled to work this morning the air felt like the mountains. Maybe once it gets cold and dry enough the smog drops out of the air or something (unlikely). Either way, the sky was blue, the sun was low and golden and blinding. The roads were full of cyclists breathing steam and I didn’t trust any patches of glittering moisture I saw not to be ice. I got to work early; I just didn’t want to squander those hours of sunlight when the night comes on so early. By 6pm it can feel like it’s always been dark...
Historical Cookbook Database
— A Database of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks Is Now Online, and You Can Help Improve It, Reina Gattuso in Atlas Obscura