HB&B Blog — Claire Bullen

If there's one thing the lockdown has been good for, it's been supporting small businesses. I may not be spending money on nights out, or fancy dinners, or weekend trips; instead, I'm ordering parcels of goodies to my front door. Hearing the buzzer go is now as exciting to me as it is to the average dog or three-year-old child – altogether, the stream of little boxes and packages feels like a long, drawn-out Christmas. One of the earliest treats I bought myself during lockdown was a mixed 12-case of beers from Newbarns Brewery, a brand-new brewery in Leith, Edinburgh founded by...

The first time I tried Christian Binner's Si Rose, I laughed involuntarily. The wine was hard to believe. For weeks I'd been meaning to open it, tempted by its eye-candy shade and long-necked Alsatian bottle. As soon as my nose came within a foot of the glass, it was overwhelmed by the wine’s fragrance: there was rosewater and ginger, lychee and tangerine. If Si Rose smelled like a Turkish delight, it tasted even better. Though dry on the palate, the wine's abundant aromatics gave it an impression of nectar-like sweetness. It struck me as the kind of ambrosia that should...

One of the best podcasts I've listened to during quarantine is Home Cooking, a four-part series hosted by Samin Nosrat (author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat) and Hrishikesh Hirway (best known for his  own podcast, Song Exploder). It's charming and relatable, too: home cooks from all over send in lockdown-inspired questions about everything from soaking beans to making a birthday cake without all-purpose flour. In one episode, a woman calls in with a problem: her garden has exploded in a bounty of herbs following the unseasonably warm weather and she doesn’t know how to use up all the sudden greenery....

I had my first kathi roll many years ago, as a college freshman in New York City, though I may have been too tipsy at the time to properly appreciate it. A tiny joint a few blocks from campus called Roti Roll routinely stayed open until 4am. I remember deliriously shoving my face into a roll after a night out, heedless of the mounting chilli heat until it was too late. More recently, I fell in love with the Paneer Roomali Roll at Dishoom, from which this recipe takes some inspiration. Kathi rolls – sometimes known as frankies – are...

Until recently, the idea that anyone could “crave” salad seemed preposterous to me. Too many are inadequately seasoned, under-delicious, falling back on their health halos rather than their actual flavour. The salads I like barely count as such: they might be warm grain bowls that happen to be garnished with some token leaves, or members of the caprese family (where cheese is at least 30% of what’s on the plate), or even steak salads (drape meat across some greenery and that’s salad, baby). But then quarantine came. And after weeks of barely moving and also eating my way through regular...