Foodie gadgets are not a luxury

Everyone likes eating to be simple. Not me. Give me food that demands rituals and special implements

 

Kitchen tools: all the better for eating with. Photograph: Bon Appetit /Alamy

50 of the world's best food blogs

Sourced from The Independant Newspaper

Change the way you cook and eat for ever with Times Online's guide to the world's tastiest food blogs

This list comprises 50 of our favourite food blogs but is by no means exhaustive. Times Online invites users to submit their favourites for a follow-up article using the comment box below.
1. Orangette The ultimate food lovers' blog. The seductive powers of food writing are not to be underestimated - Molly Wizenberg’s words even helped to find her a husband. I cooked for almost 12 hours straight after discovering this blog - recipes range from the simple to the delectable: tomato sauce, hasselback potatoes, chickpea salad, chocolate granola. Wizenberg redeems the most uninteresting food – her cabbage gratin is one of my culinary hits of the year.
Molly Wizenberg shares food secrets in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview
2. Cannelle et Vanille The recipes say it all: salted caramel ice-cream, roasted fig frozen mousse, lemon verbena with chamomile crème brulee. This visually stunning site was started by Spanish pastry chef Aran Goyoaga in January last year to satisfy her career-break cravings. Even a snacky peek explains its overnight success.
3. The Wednesday Chef New York-based Luisa Weiss started this blog as a way of documenting her trawl through clippings of recipes from the New York and LA Times. A mix of recipes and humorous anecdotes - her boyfriend thinks he is pre-hypertensive so she reduces the salt to avoid confronting the issue of male hypochrondria - it's a charming blog packed with information (indeed, a whole 700 words about coleslaw).
4. Delicious Days Authored by Munich-based Nicky Stich, this blog has a huge following, currently at number 127 in Technorati’s Top 100 blogs (the highest ranking food blog.) Well-conceived, with an international flavour but healthy dose of German influence and easy to navigate sections including a food news feed. DD features the author’s own recipes, as well as adaptations from other cookbooks. An invaluable article offers tips for budding food bloggers.
5. David Lebovitz Another megablog, this witty food reportage by the established cookbook author and ex-pastry chef David Lebovitz has up to 25,000 visitors a day. Now based in Paris, he covers recipes, restaurants and interviews with other foodie heavyweights. Head to his FAQ page for all the culinary secrets on Paris you could wish for.
David Lebovitz reveals more secrets in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview
6. Chez Pim Not much of a foodie secret, blog celebrity and big-hitter Pim quit her Silicon Valley job in 2005 to pursue her foodie calling. And a good move it was too; more than 142,000 regular readers have signed up for daily doses of her recipes, restaurant reviews and authoritative all-round food comment. My favourite recent post? An election recipe; chicken soup for the American soul.
7. Matt Bites When blog photos are taken by a professional photographer, it really shows – see his recent molasses-glazed acorn squash, for example. One of the select number of male food bloggers, Matt is charming and humorous, and has a recent Martha Stewart TV appearance to boot.
Matt reveals more food secrets in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview
8. Serious Eats Practically everything you need to know about food can be found on this multi-contributor food website, started by New York Times journalist Ed Levine. The focus is on American foods such as hot dogs, there are restaurant and gadget reviews, food videos and recipes, including an easy recipe every afternoon to inspire that evening’s dinner.
9. 101 Cookbooks One of the most established food blogs, five years old and counting; this is the chronicle of a blogger with an overindulged habit of buying cookbooks. This Californian blog is primarily a conduit for savoury recipes, mostly vegetarian, and using natural foods - the most popular include caramelised tofu, black bean brownies and lemon-scented quinoa salad. It's technologically literate, too, with i-Phone compatible recipes, and there is a convenient index of recipes by ingredient, and by category (ie gluten-free, cookies, drinks etc).
10. Smitten Kitchen A combination of writing/photographer skills add up to culinary excellence in this well-established blog, covering recipes cooked in author Deb Perelman’s tiny New York kitchen. A Facebook group, Flickr photo pool, and Twitter following – this is a slick operation.
11. Chubby Hubby Everything you need to know about Asian food can be found on this blog, where Singaporean-based author Aun Koh writes about street food, restaurants and recipes, with charming references to his partner in kitchen crime, his wife S.
12. Chocolate and Zucchini If you haven’t heard of multi-lingual Chocolate and Zucchini by now, you’ve obviously been living in gastronomic purgatory. If reading for recipes doesn’t always appeal, Paris-based Clotilde Dusoulier has recently started a series on French food idioms, and her blog is full of Parisian gastronomic delights, with a book to accompany it, appropriately titled Edible Adventures in Paris.
Read our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers Q&A with Clotilde Dusoulier
13. Rambling Spoon As Asia correspondent for Gourmet magazine, "Food is everything we are," says travelling journalist Karen Coates. The last few months have covered Thanksgiving in Thailand, a round-up of food-related paintings in The Louvre, Paris, and haggis in Edinburgh.
14. The Pioneer Woman Cooks Home-cooking and home-schooling Ree Drummond is a real-life frontier-living cattle rancher. With Little House on the Prairie warmth and passion for the hearth to match, Pioneer Woman has garnered a huge following from responsive readers - almost 800 comments on her latest "Thanksgiving, Deconstructed" post. Impressive.
15. Dorie Greenspan With more than 20 years food writing experience, multi-cookbook author Dorie Greenspan has gourmet credentials. Her passions are pastry and Paris - this continental commuter (between New York, Connecticut and Paris) is an authority on all things bake-related.
Dorie Greenspan reveals more secrets in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview
16. Artisan Sweets Another blog for the sweet-toothed reader where even beautifully-photographed Rice Krispie Treats can have the reader salivating and running to late-night Tesco for a stash of ingredients. Savoury recipes also feature on this blog, as well as useful video demonstrations, such as how to make perfect puff pastry.
17. Eating Asia A bog-standard visit to Chinatown will never suffice after you have started reading this collaboration between seasoned writer Robyn Eckhardt and photographer David Hagerman. This is one of the most colourful blogs and its photos of ageing street vendors and vibrant street markets from all over Asia are inspiring.
18. Nordljus A bilingual food journal, written in both English and Japanese, the primary language of Nordljus is photography, with snapper Keiko capturing delectable images such as truffle honey ice cream with hazelnut dacquoise and Seville orange sponge, as well as sharing recipes and her musings on an English culinary life.
19. The Kitchn Part of the hugely popular interiors blog Apartment Therapy, this satisfies all manner of kitchen cravings; featuring stylish kitchen tours, recipes and answers to such burning questions as "How to clean a toaster" and "What is the difference between non-stick and cast iron pans?"
20. Becks & Posh Named from the Cockney rhyming slang for nosh, English ex-pat Sam Breach is currently taking part in a self-imposed food challenge to "eat local". Evangelical about eating regional and seasonal produce and infused with a healthy dose of English humour, Breach has clearly adopted California as her home, with food tales and recipes that ooze influence from the Sunshine State.
21. Simply Recipes - superb range of personal recipes
22. Sticky Rice - exotic street-food docu-drama in Hanoi
Sticky Rice reveals more secrets in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview
23. Souvlaki for the Soul - summery Byzantine bites from Sydney
24. Bitten: New York Times - news, views and recipes from the Big Apple's kitchens
25. Baking Bites - homemade cookies, muffins and much more
26. La Tartine Gourmande - gorgeous photos, scrummy food
27. Gluten Free Girl - wheat-free wonders and tips for celiacs
28. Steamy Kitchen - modern Asian cuisine by media savvy blogger
Read more secrets from Steamy Kitchen in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview
29. What's for Lunch Honey - global menu from Germany
30. Cream Puffs in Venice - Italian influenced mainly sweet-toothed posts
31. Egg Beater - insightful look at the life of a London-based chef
32. Homesick Texan - a New Yorker recreates the much-missed cuisine of her Southern childhood
33. The Traveler's Lunchbox - great writing served up with recipes
Read more secrets in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview
34. Joy the Baker - home-baked goodies from an LA-based twentysomething
Joy the Baker reveals more secrets in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview
35. Cook and Eat - striking photography and a smooth to move-about layout
36. Lucullian Delights - appetising Italian recipes from a Tuscan-based Swede
37. Café Fernando - Turkish delights from Istanbul
38. The Food Section - read all about food news
39. Use Real Butter - tales from an Asian foodie’s life in the Colorado Rockies

MY PROFILE

Read more secrets in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview

40. Tea and Cookies - charming stories accompany yummy recipes
41. Amateur Gourmet - funny writing with a useful "how to" section
42. Wild Yeast - all about bread
43. Tartelette - stunning photography and styling define this popular dessert blog
44. NYC Nosh - reviews of favourite old-school restaurants in New York
45. Not Eating Out in New York - records the rare pursuit of home-cooking in the city
46. Cooksister - South African recipes from a London-based expat
47. Artichoke: Best of British Food - well written seasonal food posts and events
48. Grab Your Fork - Sydney reviews and recipes including a useful restaurant finder
49. A Slice of Cherry Pie - home cooking from the Home Counties
Read more secrets in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview
50. The Bitten Word - a charming duo tackle recipes from a back-catalogue of food magazines.
Lynne Robinson has her own design blog at http://www.teaforjoy.blogspot.com/ which features tea shop reviews and a tea of the week.

Food fixation is the real enemy - not Fray Bentos

If the outrage caused by Delia's tinned mince teaches us one thing, it is that we can think too much about what we eat.

I personally applauded Delia for swimming against the tide with her book How To Cheat at Cooking (although that was before I saw her telly programme). I was able to gloss over the fact that she advocates putting frozen mash in a chocolate cake. I cannot imagine the conditions that would make it necessary either to freeze mash or to put it in a cake, short of a nuclear war.
She did more, with her tins of mince, than reject a freshness-fascism popular among the organic-box classes. She flew in the face of the Office for National Statistics, which has found, for the first time since the 80s, both ready meals and microwaves out of favour. This is not just, ahem, a flash in the pan, the emphasis on cooking from scratch. It is reflected in broad national trends. An optimist would say that we're seeing a new era of healthy eating. I would say, well, possibly ...

The reason I was pro-Delia, despite frozen mash-gate, was that she appeared to be standing against two strains of rhetoric that dominate the way we talk about food. The first is a kind of food purity - that we have to know the provenance of everything we put into our mouths, and be able to account for its treatment in life and the treatment of those who tended it. This is a crucible, or a saucepan if you'd rather, where laudable and defensible intentions meet self-indulgence, with the result that even the best of it tastes a bit off.

Humane farming and fair trade ought to be integral to one's enjoyment of food, sure, but not because they make things taste nicer. Rather, because a stain on your conscience would dim your appetite - I think many chefs and food writers have been flogging the free-range cause on the basis of taste, and the result is that we somehow think food that has been treated in an ugly way will taint the purity of our temple-bodies. This leads to an exaggerated horror of putting anything canned or even minced into our precious mouths, as if the very process of modern food preservation were really just glorified dog-foodising. Well, so what if people want to eat fresh food? You're right, of course; it's not the freshness I object to, it's the princess-and-the-pea preciousness.

Then there's the second curve, the demon twin of the slow-food movement - that to have a great surfeit of time in a household, long enough endlessly to pick over the bones of your best-end carcass, is as much a status symbol now as anything so simple as a car has ever been. Broadsheet supplements have been talking a lot lately of the ultimate status symbol - four children. Sure, that is among people who would have them privately educated, in which case you might just as well have four racehorses who never win. But it is also an emphasis on time: we are the sort of family who can chuck man-hours at an enterprise like breeding. We need not dirty our hands with regular work. We have staff, etc.

It's part of the same time-rich trend, I would argue, that privileges the marinated lamb shank so immeasurably far above the Fray Bentos pie that it is out of all proportion with the way they actually taste. Again, our horror of the instant edible has veiled snobbery in it; it is not entirely grounded in respect for food and its producers, if it is grounded in those things at all.

The upshot of this is not simply a dip in microwave sales and some toxic outrage raining down upon cheaty Delia. The way we have conflated so many different impulses in our consideration of food - the political, the personal, the hierarchical, the altruistic and the snobbish, the selfless and the self-important, the environmental piety and the calorie counting, the far-sighted and the simply vain - have, as you might expect, led us to take food way too seriously.

Just take one example in this week's news - medics are, apparently, worried about "drunkorexics", which is to say people (generally young women) who offset the calories they imbibe through booze by not eating during the day. Now, people with eating disorders frequently suffer from other addictions - among them, to alcohol - but that has been common knowledge for decades. There is no new evidence here at all; a story like this is simply an example of this persistent urge we have to pathologise our relationship with food.

Obesity only ever comes in "epidemics". "Orexia", I believe, will soon be an umbrella term for any life-threatening disease that only exists in the imaginations of cultural pundits. It will be very annoying for actual anorexics, but they will be too busy not eating to notice. We aggrandise simple things - greed on the one hand, dieting or even plain calorie-counting on the other - because we cannot otherwise justify the feverish seriousness with which we approach this straightforward business.

Ready-meals aren't the enemy, nor is tinned mince - we feel injured by scummy products because they remind us that it is just food, a diversion. It will never make intellectual demands on us. Gordon Ramsay can have as many Michelin stars as he likes, but he's never going to win a Nobel prize. We should all eat a frozen faggot every now and then as a mark of respect for the life of the mind.

Sourced from The Guardian

Top 10 free cooking Apps

Cooking has always been a past time that’s involved tools, whether it be cookbooks, scraps of paper holding generations old recipes, modern appliances. The apps found within theiTunes App Store have become one of the best aides within the kitchen.
1. Epicurious. Containing more than 25000 recipes, Epicurious is a great cooking application for beginners and experience chefs alike. The recipes are organized in a neat manner and the instructions are easy enough to follow. But the best part is: Epicurious is absolutely free. iPad of professional recipes from the pages of Bon Appetit and the now-defunct Gourmet magazine (Website).


2. American Recipes. In the mood to make a delicious American Recipe? Find delicious Traditional American Recipes with the American Recipe App. With this handy app you can find recipes such as Baked Stuffed Shrimp, Crab Quiche Lorraine, Chicken Spaghetti, Pizza Beer Beef and even a recipe for Honey Ribs. The App will show you the ingredients needed for the recipe as well as the steps required to complete your culinary masterpiece

3. Dinner Spinner is a Free app for the iPhone andiPod Touch that lets you spin your way to a great meal. If you don’t know what you want eat or cook, give it a spin! Tap what type of dish you want to make, what ingredient sounds good and how much time you have to prepare it. It’s Fun, it’s Quick and it’s Easy!

4. BigOven is a pretty intriguing option among the many iPhone recipe apps you can download at the App Store. It has more than 170,000 individual recipes, so BigOven may have more recipes than any other iPhone app. Designed from the ground-up for the iPad, this new BigOven app lets you look up virtually any recipe by title, keyword, or ingredient. It easily builds a grocery list from one or more recipes. It helps you get unstuck for dinner with great ideas, and shows you photos and ratings from real cooks. Together with www.bigoven.com, you can post your own recipes and photos online, and then have them easily available in a convenient application on your kitchen countertop.

5. Whole Foods Market Recipes app. For a free recipe app, Whole Foods Market Recipes (Free) includes a good amount of content. The app has a solid collection of recipes, and features like a shopping list and the ability to search by ingredients you already have on hand make the Whole Foods app a winner. Whole Foods did a nice job with this recipe app, especially the interface. It’s nice to look at and easy to browse, and it was very speedy over a WiFi connection

6. EasyRecipe This Android cooking app provides you with around 10,000 recipes of popular dishes and the cooking skills neeeded to prepare those dishes. It allows you to browse, search and save any recipe you like on your Android phone. The app has three main features – search, favorites, and recipe index. When searching for a dish, you can just enter an ingredient that you would like to cook and the app will list down all the dishes that use that ingredient. Select a dish and the app will display an introduction about the dish and other information including cooking skills, ingredients and nutritional facts related to the dish. If you like a particular dish, you can save it to your favorites and the app will store it on your phone allowing you access to it later on. The recipe index includes more than 10,000 popular dishes and their nutritional value, arranged by most popular, main ingredients, categories, cuisines, courses, appliances, and holidays

7. The Cook’s Illustrated application allows users to search for a recipe for specific items, as well as navigate through the available recipes in the app by category. Categories of recipes represented in the app include: Vegetables, Salads, Pasta, Stews, Meats, Grilling, and many others. Once you select a certain category you then have to select a country such as “French” or “Indian” before you are taken to a page of recipes. The recipes are exceptionally well organized, making it easy to find a specific recipe within the application fairly quickly.  What’s really great about Cook’s Illustrated, however, is that recipes come with videos to show you how it’s all done. Many recipes are provided free of charge, but a subscription is necessary to unlock all the member’s only recipes.

8. How to Cook Everything app, This free iPhone cooking app is an incredibly useful tool which includes 100+ basic recipes, including many best Thanksgiving recipes. If this is your first time preparing a Thanksgiving meal, you’ll find the timing charts for defrosting and roasting turkeys are particularly helpful. The app’s interface is pretty sleek, although there are no pictures to accompany the recipes. Even so, the app does include an integrated cooking timer and shopping list. How to Cook Everything also has more cooking instruction than nearly any other recipe app, with videos on everything from how to sharpen knives to how to roast a chicken.

9. The Woman’s Day Cooking Assistant app brings you recipes from the editors of the Woman’s Day magazine. The app has a list of featured articles about food with accompanying recipes, and the articles change periodically. As with other recipe apps, you can either type in a keyword to search or you can browse through them by category (Cuisine, Main Ingredient, Holiday Recipes, Budget Recipes, Course, Cooking Method, Quick & Easy and Low-Calorie). Each category has subcategories, and as you narrow down your browsing, you’ll see a variety of different recipes. As you read the recipe you can automatically add the ingredients to a shopping list with a simple tap. You can also add recipes to a favorites list so they’re easily accessible for later

10 Digital Recipe Sidekick is an interactive Android Application that allows you to use your phone as a interactive recipe reader. DRS comes preloaded with 14 recipes, but you can import more recipes from the DRS Library or from AllRecipes.com (both are accessible within the app). Digital Recipe Sidekick is a free app that will help you build, manage, and share your recipe collection; it will also read recipes to you, hands-free, step-by-step. Using DRS is simple–just select a recipe and press Start Cooking. You then have three control modes to choose from: ‘Speech and buttons’, ‘Claps and buttons’, and ‘Buttons only’. Next, you set the sensitivity of the microphone to High, Medium, or Low.


Sourced from zepy

West Asian crisis: Food prices may remain high

Impact will be more on import-dependent food items, says Economic Survey.

With political turmoil in West Asia intensifying, the government’s pre-Budget Economic Survey warns that food prices in India could go up, in line with rising global prices, even as the overall inflation might moderate in the coming months. The impact would be more on import-dependent food items, like edible oils.

Calling for maintaining an anti-inflationary monetary stance that won’t stymie growth, the Survey said inflation seemed to be driven by demand factors, in spite of improved supplies. This is in contrast with last financial year, when inflation was mostly because of poor monsoon.

Primary food articles in the revised wholesale price index (WPI) touched a historic high of 21.9 per cent in February 2010, before declining to 9.4 per cent in November and again rising to 13.6 per cent in December.

Among food items, sharp rise in prices was observed in onions, fruit, eggs, meat & fish and milk. The rate of food inflation has been in double digits for 76 weeks since June 5, 2009.

However, overall WPI, which peaked at around 11 per cent in April 2010, has been on the decline, which the survey attributes largely to macroeconomic steps taken by the government and the Reserve Bank of India.

The inflation in terms of consumer price index for industrial workers (CPI-IW) remained in double digits from
July 2009 to July 2010, while CPI for agricultural labourers (CPI-AL) and rural labourers (CPI-RL) reached double digits in May 2009 and remained there until July 2010.

CPI-AL and CPI-RL had been higher than CPI-IW because of improvement in purchasing power in rural areas and changing consumption pattern, the Survey said.

The two major contributors to high CPI-IW were food and housing. The rate of food inflation in the CPI-IW rose to 7.98 per cent in December from 5.35 per cent in November.

Sourced from Business Standard

Rise in food prices causing major concerns in Russia

Dmitry Dovlatov, Special to Russia Now 5:07PM GMT 25 Feb 2011

As Russia emerges from the economic crisis it now faces more traditional foes, with higher food prices, and capital inflows creating speculative bubbles

The worst of the crunch may be over, but as the consumer’s basket will tell you, Russia’s economic health faces a further relapse.

In 2010, inflation was 8.8pc, after being in double digits for more than two decades. But the price of the monthly basket of goods used to define the poverty level rose 22pc, to 2,626 rubles (£55).

“The reappearance of inflation could derail Russia’s economic recovery as it hits the Russian consumer’s pocket directly. With oil prices expected to be more or less flat in 2011, it will be the strength of internal consumption that will set the pace for economic growth this year,” said Alexey Moiseev, chief economist at VTB Capital.

“The rise in food prices is the major concern and part of the current global upward trend, but there is relatively little the authorities can do about it.”

Sourced from Telegraph

Shoppers gloomy over looming price rises

Consumer pessimism overfood prices has rocketed, with the vast majority of shoppers bracing themselves for bigger shopping bills and many already switching to the cheapest own-label products.

Over 90% of more than 1,000 shoppers polled by the IGD for the body’s latest monthly ShopperTrack survey said they expect food prices to rise further.

A third of those polled was even more pessimistic, saying their shopping would become “much more expensive”.

Less than one in five were so downbeat in the equivalent poll just four months ago. But a series of headlines over rising commodity prices and shopping bills has sapped confidence in retailers’ ability to keep prices low.
As a result, one in four shoppers is now vowing to buy more of the lowest-priced supermarket own-label products to make ends meet, compared with less than one in five in the October ShopperTrack survey.

“There’s been widespread media coverage of rising commodity prices and the pressures it is placing on the cost of food,” said IGD chief executive Joanne Denney-Finch. “We see the effect of this coming through in our shopper research,”

She added: “This pressure, combined with higher living costs, is causing shoppers to reassess how they spend their money.”

Sourced from The Grocer