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      Forget roast, mash and boiled: alternative potato side dishes | Kitchen aide

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 3 days ago - 14:00 · 1 minute

    Fried, roast and boiled are all well and good, but to make your spuds the stars of the Easter show, spice them up, stick them on the barbecue or drown them in cream

    A celebration without spuds is really no celebration at all. Whether you keep things humble with nothing but butter or go for something more performative, choosing the right variety of potato for the job is essential, as is the addition of fat and salt. “They’re the three things that make potatoes amazing,” says Elliot Hashtroudi, head chef at Camille which opened in Borough Market, London, last month. Chips are the prime example, though that’s not to say potatoes should be confined to a side: “They’re always the bridesmaid, but never the bride, so make a main out of them for Easter,” Hashtroudi says.

    With the long weekend falling earlier than usual this year, you’d be hard pushed to better a tartiflette. You’ll need waxy potatoes, plus the usual creme fraiche, onions, lots of garlic, white wine and reblochon cheese, but Hashtroudi would “put a spin on things” by swapping the traditional lardons for smoked eel. “Cheese, potatoes, a bit of wine: you can’t really go wrong,” he says. “A simple side salad with that, plus chocolate for after.”

    Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

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      Nigel Slater’s recipes for potatoes with mussels and dill, and filled with cauliflower cheese

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 17 March - 10:30

    Whether small, waxy new potatoes in a salad or big floury spuds best for baking, you can always turn to spuds for satisfaction

    When my garden was more of an allotment, there was nothing I enjoyed growing more than potatoes. The planting and earthing-up, the first green leaves poking through the soil and the mauve and white flowers like tiny stars were pleasures enough; the real business started when I plunged my garden fork into the earth and dug them up.

    I no longer grow them – this garden is tiny – but I will pounce on any good-looking tattie when I’m shopping. Potatoes, pasta and polenta get me through the winter and those first chilly days of spring. Waxy fleshed or floury, “new” or as big as a brick, I always come home with a few potatoes, to bake, steam or sauté till their edges are crisp and golden.

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      Rachel Roddy’s recipe for Puglian rice, potato and mussel bake, or tiella | A kitchen in Rome

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 11 March - 11:00 · 1 minute

    A layered bake of potatoes, risotto rice, cheese and mussels that will leave your kitchen smelling like the sea


    Leafing through Luigi Sada’s book of La Cucina Pugliese , I couldn’t find riso, patate e cozze (rice, potatoes and mussels). I was looking for rice dishes in primi piatti , lost in the countless, great-sounding recipes for mussels and other shellfish from the heel of Italy – in short, the wrong chapter. This layered bake of rice, sliced potatoes, tomatoes, cheese and mussels is the first recipe in the chapter titled Les Soupes (oddly, in French). Sada crowns riso, patate e cozze , also known as tiella , the queen of minestre ”, and notes that it is made differently from town to town, and that this “mothership recipe” is tiella barese from Puglia’s capital, Bari. It includes courgettes and uses pecorino. Meanwhile, other recipes from Bari remind us that there is no such thing as a definitive version, each suggesting wildly different proportions and all sorts of rice, or not to include courgettes and to use parmesan instead.

    What everyone seems to agree on, though, is that a rest brings out the best in tiella – they all advise waiting before eating – as well as the importance of opening the mussels by hand. Several people reassured me that this is just like opening oysters, which, after being defeated by shell-clenched oysters and shamed by a professional shucker, I didn’t find reassuring at all. However, it turns out that if you insert the point of a knife near the hinge, then run the blade between the two shells, mussels, while a faff, are much easier to lever open than oysters. Yet they’re no less dramatic when you pull apart the shells apart and see the soft, secret flesh inside.

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      How to make the perfect Japanese curry rice – recipe | Felicity Cloake's How to make the perfect …

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 6 March - 12:00 · 1 minute

    There are as many different recipes for kare raisu as there are cooks who make it, so can our in-house perfectionist discover the winning formula?

    In the early years of this century, not long after I ate my first “sushi” (M&S vegetarian selection, since you ask), I tried my first katsu curry at a cool London noodle bar, with my cool new university friends, one of whom had been banging on about this Wagamama place since freshers’ week. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I found that the thick, brown gravy dolloped over neat slices of breaded chicken reminded me of nothing more than good old chip shop curry sauce .

    Of course, I didn’t mention this at the time, for fear of ridicule – it wasn’t until many years later that I found out this was no mere coincidence. As Japanese chef and author Hiroko Shimbo explains , “Indian curry came to Japan from England”, via the Royal Navy, when the country first opened up to foreign trade in the second half of the 19th century. After adoption by the Japanese armed forces, it became more widely popular as an example of yōshoku , or western food.

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      Rukmini Iyer’s quick and easy baked gnocchi with mozzarella recipe | Quick and Easy

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 4 March - 13:00

    Weeknight heaven: throw blanched gnocchi, cherry tomatoes and peppers in a roasting tin, cover with sliced mozzarella and within half an hour you’ll have yourself a panful of gooey, crisp goodness

    Can you have too many recipes for crisp gnocchi? I think not, especially given what a cinch it is. This is an amalgamation of two favourite dishes from my Roasting Tin books, and it’s a total winner on a cold night. Don’t bother with upmarket mozzarella in water for this dish – you want the firm, melty cooking stuff that browns beautifully on top.

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      Rachel Roddy’s recipe for cauliflower, potato and mint fritters | A kitchen in Rome

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 4 March - 11:00

    These sprightly, mint-infused fritters are great straight from the pan, but taste even funkier after a rest of 20 minutes or so


    Walking home the other afternoon, I passed a car with a weed growing around one of its tyres. I found myself stopping, so I looked to see where the weed started and where it ended – it went almost all the way around it, like a snow chain.

    It was only when I was right down near the tyre, surrounded by the smell of weed and rubber, that I realised I had done exactly the same thing during the first lockdown. Not with the same car, but one similar – which, like so many cars in so many cities, sat in the same spot for so long that the weeds took over and started using it as a climbing frame. For two odd, vertiginous seconds, it was lockdown again. Then I found the start of the weed in the crack where the pavement met the road, along with a cigarette butt and a damp lottery ticket, rotting leaves and other weeds, including a tuft of mentuccia .

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      Rachel Roddy’s recipe for chickpea, kale and potato soup with cumin pesto | A kitchen in Rome

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 26 February - 11:00 · 1 minute

    A hearty winter soup with an ancient punchy pesto called cuminatum – can you guess its magic ingredient?


    Frustrated by our inability to do not just urgent things in our small flat, but anything, I recently forced the issue and pulled everything out of an extremely large wardrobe. Weeks later, the empty wardrobe is still waiting to be removed, while the rest of the flat is inside out, there’s no hook without nine things hanging on it and no surface clear. Except one. One of three shelves in the cupboard above the washing machine – the one I look at most, with the tea, custard and jars filled with things that are not only tidy, but clean, so I can see what is cocoa and what is cumin.

    In De re coquinaria , or Apicius , an extensive source of ancient Roman recipes, cumin is medicinal and a pantry staple. Its warm, volatile nature adds spice and stimulates all sorts of appetites. The dried seed of the herb Cuminum cyminum – part of the Umbelliferae family along with parsley and celery – cumin is ancient and has its origins in Iran. It is also precious and useful, which is why it travelled so widely. Three types are described in Apicius: Ethiopian, Syrian and Libyan cumin, all of which are used in various recipes, and also made into a cumin-based sauce called cuminatum .

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      The moment I knew: we were ‘intimate partners’ during lockdown – then he asked me to be his Potato Queen

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Saturday, 17 February - 19:00

    First Milan and Shannon Regan dated over Zoom, then they were allowed to visit each other’s homes. One night, after a decadent dinner, he popped the question

    Milan and I matched on a dating app in April 2020, the early days of the pandemic. Melbourne was in hard lockdown so our first two dates were via Zoom. I appreciated Zoom dating for its convenience and minimal effort – I didn’t have to leave the house, pants were optional and the bottle of wine was always within reach.

    On our first date, Milan apologetically said he’d have to pop out partway through to join a call with his mum and grandparents. I thought it was cute that he would prioritise his family over a date (especially with someone as potentially charming as me, for all he knew) and I didn’t object. Part of me wondered if it might be a ploy to escape the date but he actually returned and we chatted for two more hours that evening.

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      Rachel Roddy’s recipe for potato, cavolo nero and bechamel bake | A kitchen in Rome

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 5 February - 11:00

    Potato and wilted cavolo nero or spinach, all bound together by a bubbling, cheesy bechamel and coated in toasted breadcrumbs


    The first time I read the instruction “strip the cavolo nero”, I took it to mean that I should cut it into strips. So I gathered a few leaves into a bundle, then cut across the lot, forming thick ribbons before continuing to cook whatever it was I was making, which might have been soup. I prepared cavolo nero like this for years. Until, that is, I watched a cookery demonstration at a country festival in Umbria where the chef demonstrating held a stem of cavolo in one hand, then, with the other, clasped the leaf and pulled, separating the tough midrib from the bubbly green.

    Now, for anyone familiar with cavolo nero, I am no doubt describing a logical and completely obvious preparation. For me, though, on a cold Sunday near Perugia, he was a magician and I was an idiot.

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