Sometimes I’ve felt inspired to make a meaty main for the holidays, but this year I’m fully on Team Sides. The demerits of turkey have been well-discussed and it’s not...
I’ve come around to courgettes. I used to find them watery and insipid, a seasonal vegetable that grew in large gluts that were inversely proportional to its deliciousness, but I’m beginning...
This time of year in England can be hard to love. It’s one of the biggest things I miss about living in the States, where autumn (fall) is treated like a...
Oktoberfest is back. For the first time since the pandemic began, the annual festival is returning to the Theresienwiese in Munich. The event is a larger-than-life spectacle of supersized beer...
By and large I don’t consider myself much of a seasonal drinker. When the mood takes me, I’m as happy smashing stout in the blazing sunshine as I am sipping...
I've been making a lot of fried rice during lockdown(s). I'm sure I'm not alone. It’s not just that fried rice is cheap, fast, flexible and made using basic pantry...
I hate surprises. More succinctly, I hate being surprised. The nanoseconds of horror as your brain veers towards full panic while it quickly attempts to work out if these sudden,...
I discovered Jerrelle Guy's recipe for strawberry spoon cake, published in NYT Cooking, several months back – just in time to bring it along to a friend's backyard pizza party...
About a decade or so ago I was really into wheat beers for a brief time. I remember going on a business trip to Frankfurt during my previous career of...
One of the most joyous aspects of reviewing beer for Hop Burns & Black is when something completely new and utterly surprising lands on my doorstep. That was the case...
Regular readers of this column will know by now that I have a deep fondness for good lager. The more astute of you may remember that when it comes to...
Riesling is tragically misunderstood. Drinkers often avoid ordering it, assuming it is always sweet, though there are many delicious, dry Rieslings on the market. The impenetrability of the German-language terminology...
“Are you sure?” I ask Hop Burns & Black co-owner Jen Ferguson when she shoves a familiar bottle of one of Bavaria’s very best lagers, Augustiner Helles, into my hand....