A Defence of Small Plates
I do sympathise with those who ardently hate on the small plate. It’s easy to feel conned when a £14 dish arrives on a plate the size of a coffee coaster, and you realise you could easily devour the morsel in a singular bite. Or - a small plates favourite - when you dutifully order the recommended ‘2-3 plates per person’, wind up £50 lighter - and still leave the restaurant hungry. This modern phenomenon of small plates is an extremely fine line to balance, and let's be honest, some restaurants aren't quite getting it right.
Read More
A Plant Feast - Eartha Review
Cardiff’s City Road might not strike you at first as a place buzzing with Gen-Z hangouts. But take a stroll down the street a hundred yards and you’ll find a café-shop that might persuade you otherwise. Heralded as a hidden gem amongst plant fanatics, Eartha attracts green-fingered students by day and hungry foodies by night.
Read More
Sharing Mezze Feast at Soukitchen, Clifton
Now, it may be cliche to admit that from the very first course of the mezze feast I knew we were in for a treat, but cliches exist for a reason and, in the case of this particular feast, it was true.
Read More
How to Overcome Your Diet and Cooking Anxiety
Cooking can cause all sorts of anxiety, stress and some embarrassment not because you can’t cook but perhaps, you feel like others will judge you. Maybe you have a favourite snack which is just combo mad, perhaps you’ve never even heard of hummus or don’t know how to use a microwave!
Read More
Your 101 Guide to a Vegan and Plant-based Christmas 2021
Christmas is just around the corner and with recent trends showing a consistent rise in plant-based eating. Statistically speaking a recent survey shows that 19.6% of Brits are expected to choose vegetarian or vegan food this Christmas and in 2021 82% of people who tried Veganuary had drastically cut meat intake, according to a 6-month survey carried out by Veganuary.
Read More
Rising Food Insecurity in the UK and the Cost for Children
According to the ONS, one in eight adults were left unable to buy essential goods in their local supermarket in October due to the shortages we’ve seen in recent months. Politicians have spoken about a potential “winter of discontent”, with rising energy bills, increasing prices and a critical shortage of workers resulting in significant food and fuel shortages due to supply constraints.
Read More
‘Stir-up Sunday’: A Multi-Generational Ritual
During the war years, my great-grandmother Margaret took her four children into Newcastle city centre with her mother, my great-great-grandmother Elizabeth. They were to visit a shop on Blackett Street that my grandma remembers as being magical.
Read More
Ruby Tandoh - Cook As You Are Review
It is Ruby Tandoh’s Eat Up: a small, green sliver of magic that encourages us to eat for joy, and the recipes that are sprinkled throughout were the first time I felt seen when faced with cooking.
Read More
Vegan Food vs. Conventional Food: A Snapshot of The Science Behind What We Eat
Evidence shows that people have chosen to avoid animal products for over 2,000 years. As early as 500 BCE, the likes of Pythagoras promoted benevolence among all species and Buddha too, discussed the vegetarian diet with his followers and so the concept is not as new as we all believe.
Read More
Is A Flexitarian Diet Just A Cop Out?
More people are taking on a ‘casual vegetarian’ lifestyle, or ‘flexitarian’ diet as more of the mass media calls it. This means that people are drastically cutting out their meat consumption – whether this is for ethical reasons, health concerns or environmental causes.
Read More
Why a Plant-Based Diet Will Save the Planet
Our leading biodiversity experts predict there will be more pandemics in the future unless we stop the senseless destruction of the natural world. If you have ever considered changing to a plant-based diet specifically to save the planet, you have to do it now.
Read More
Seasonal Food: How (and Why) I Eat Seasonally
On a planet with finite resources and entering the not-so-humble beginnings of an irreversible climate crisis, the way that we are currently producing, manufacturing, and consuming our food is unsustainable and inexcusable.
Read More
For Wine Is the Kingdom
Knowledge and wine appreciation are two completely different things. It’s easy to feel intimidated out of appreciating wine by not having a comprehensive understanding of what it is and what differentiates wines.
Read More
What Is Intermittent Fasting? Discover Its Benefits.
Fasting has a philosophical, spiritual, and psychological meaning: it represents the ability to choose over cravings. In recent years, various experts have increasingly proposed intermittent fasting as the miracle cure for losing weight and improving energy levels, attachment, negative thoughts and feelings that drive human suffering.
Read More
Why Food Waste Turns My Stomach
We have a systemic problem with the way we interact with food in this country. The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) released a report last year that explains in blunt reality just how much food the UK has wantonly disposed of in the last few years, how it has been wasted, and by whom. It quickly reveals that in 2018 we as a nation wasted 6.65 million tonnes of food.
Read More
Some Like It Hot: Tea, But at the Right Temperature, Please.
There is no hot drink as pleasurable to sip than a cup of tea at its perfect drinking temperature, but getting tea at its best needs a certain degree of patience. It can be lip scaldingly hot at first, so timing is crucial here. Wait too long and it will be disappointingly cool, but there is a perfect temperature for each of us. For me, it is 57.3C precisely. I know this because I am a sad tea anorak and have measured it.
Read More
What Brexit Means for UK Farming - and Your Shopping Basket
I woke up to my complacency, maybe even entitlement when queuing outside Sainsbury’s in March 2019. Overnight, shelves were stripped of old faithful fusilli, and passive-aggressive loo roll disputes broke out. Before Christmas, freight out of the UK was blocked by European countries after the emergence of the super spreader Covid-19 strain, triggering concerns over fresh food shortages.
Read More
Drink Heavily with Locals When Possible
Everyone seemed to be drinking the same thing, which made us very curious. It looked so refreshing, and we were beginning to feel a little left out, so we grabbed a table under the shade of a palm tree at the nearest bar.
Read More
Culinary Crossovers
It is an inconceivable privilege that in some parts of the UK we can sample Ethiopian injera one week and Georgian khachapuri the next.
Read More
The Dish I'm Dreaming of this Christmas
Nothing brings back those nostalgic memories quite like dumplings. Specifically, Slovak pirohy. Stodgy, potato-y, fatty dumplings that hug me from the inside and make me feel like everything’s going to be okay.
Read More
