Seasonal transitions are my favourite time of year, and I love it as spring slowly and inexorably flows like warm syrup into the humid and fecund days of June. The...
Recently, I visited a greengrocer to pick up some basics. I found myself lingering over the vegetables, feeling covetous: the ruby bunches of radishes, the broad beans swelling in their pods,...
Alongside gumbo and jambalaya, shrimp étouffée is a stalwart of Cajun and Creole cooking, and a classic New Orleans dish. Étouffée means “smothered” in French, and in this dish, pink...
Years ago, when we all still lived in London, a group of friends and I developed a ritual: Every Sunday, we would meet at one of their houses for “family...
If I am guilty of one thing every spring, it is of losing my shit over the annual return of wild garlic. I’m aware that I make a slightly parodic...
One of my favourite Instagram accounts belongs to my friend Katie. At @nytfortea, she reviews New York Times Cooking’s vegetarian (or veggie-adjacent) recipes, including star ratings, tweaks and overall impressions. The...
Some of the very best things are simple. Sun on a winter morning after weeks of rain. A well-made cup of coffee, served at exactly the right temperature. Dinner with good friends....
Compared with the abundance of summer, February's menu can seem mean, lacking. It is the season of hardened root vegetables, unyielding and caked with earth. All those parsnips and swedes rolling...
The first time I ever had borscht, it was at Veselka in New York City, it was 2am, and it was snowing. Veselka is a downtown institution, a Ukrainian restaurant that’s been serving NYU...
In her recent book, Cook, Eat, Repeat, Nigella Lawson shares “a defence of brown food”, both a celebration of unlovely-looking but joyous-tasting stews and braises, and a rebuttal against the high-gloss...
If there’s anything I dread more than January’s arrival – its short, gloomy days; its long, cold nights; the lingering post-party malaise – it’s the annual Dry January discourse that...
I have hated peanut butter my whole life. This is a controversial statement, particularly back home in the US, where peanut butter seemed an almost inescapable part of growing up. The...
Pizza parties, taco parties, bagel-and-lox parties… If you ask me, there’s no better dinner (or brunch) party format than “food item you create and customise yourself from a spread of...