HB&B Blog — Natural wine

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?!...

At most weddings, the food is barely worth remembering – but at this one, there were empanadas. Beef empanadas, cheese empanadas, all dressed in a deliriously spicy orange sauce. I remember them, but I can’t for the life of me remember how many I ate. Ever since, I’ve thought about making them at home. Empanadas are made across Latin America from wheat flour, corn or even cassava; their fillings and styles and colours vary, they can be baked or fried, served hot or cold. In this way, the empanada feels less like a singular entity and more like a category, capacious enough for flights...

I am a creature of habit. When July comes, I know it’s time to eat as many tomatoes and peaches and nectarines as I can. The opposite of a squirrel hoarding acorns for winter, I bring home bushels to devour as quickly as possible, savouring the short-lived bounty before it disappears again. Maybe that’s why I keep making tomato salads – like last year’s, accompanied by fig-leaf-wrapped goat cheese, or one from years past with strawberries and mojama. Then there were those in our cookbook: a caprese salad with burrata; nectarine and panzanella. But this one, which feels like a synthesis...

The season of no-cooking cooking has arrived at last. By which I mean: mangoes and stone fruit eating drippingly over the sink, or with granita or sorbet on the side. Salads of tomatoes and burrata, dressed with the last of the wild garlic pesto saved in the freezer. Hunks of sourdough and plates of cheese and prosciutto. And this plate of carpaccio, with its own rocket and fennel salad. One of carpaccio’s advantages is its ease of preparation, especially if you ask your butcher to slice your fillet for you. (As you’re eating it raw, it is worth going to...