HB&B Blog

I should confess: I’m not much of a dessert person. Most days, I would rather have a wedge of cheese than a slice of cake at the end of a meal. Whenever I have a chocolate dessert, I last about three spoonfuls before getting overwhelmed by its intensity. I’ll choose a plain, buttery croissant over one filled with almond paste or glazed with vanilla. But every now and then, I find myself craving something sweet – usually around this time of year, when there’s a new chill in the air and the nights are drawing in. Blame it on vestigial...

I know it’s autumn, even without looking out the window or checking the forecast. My body knows, because almost to the day that the calendar ticked over to October 1, it began to crave pumpkins and sage, chestnuts and mushrooms, bitter greens and browned butter. What I want to eat right now is stew. I’ve had a recipe for this particular stew – called khoresh-e beh – open in one of my zillion tabs for months, just waiting for this time of the year to hit. I like Persian stews like this one because they go beyond mere stodge; they tend...

There are few better teachers – or creative constraints – than necessity. The best of my cooking over the past year has arisen out of leftovers that urgently needed using: wilting spinach and stale sourdough that turned into ribollita, old takeaway pulao that was reborn as fried rice. Striving to avoid food waste has become less a slogan and more a challenge – one taken up with some gusto and humility, and one that has pushed me to the outer limits of my knowledge. There are few better examples of necessity cooking than chilaquiles – stale tortillas sliced, fried into...

I’m not on TikTok (after spending much of the past decade donating large parcels of my brain to social media, I’m moved to defend the last stake of my sanity), but I still get cooking inspiration from TikTok. The most recent: corn butter tomato toast, made by a guy named Pierce on a farm in Montauk. The idea – grilled sweetcorn blended with butter, slathered on toast and topped with freshly salted slices of heirloom tomato – is so ingeniously simple that it astounds me that it’s not already a canonical summer dish. Most commenters seem to agree: “CORN BUTTER?!...

If you hear Oktoberfest and think autumn – frothy litres flanked by hearty stews, falling leaves and thick jumpers – you could be forgiven. But the name of beer’s biggest festival is misleading. Oktoberfest actually kicks off in September and winds down by the start of the following month. The event is really a celebration of summer’s end – and an excuse to savour the last of the season’s produce. This time of year you’ll find me scarfing as many peak-ripe heirloom tomatoes as possible before the season ends. You’ll also find me tucking sweetcorn into almost everything. This month’s...