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Dec 3

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is on holiday.

I’m away this week and will be spending the rest of the month eating. Hurrah! But I leave you with some holiday reading:

A ‘Jewnitarian‘ Christmas.

How to bake two perfect Christmas cakes: by Felicity Cloake and Edd Kimber. (This is an interview with him.)

David Lebovitz on Christmas in France.

Seventeenth-century decorations for mince pies.

A frugal Christmas cake for the recession from the Observer.

Yum – panettone.

Eva Wiseman on the Christmas sandwich.

Making Estonian blood sausages for Christmas.

It’s time to make latkes.

Christmas recipes from Nigel Slater, Giorgio Locatelli, Sam Harris, and Jacob Kenedy.

Two of my favourite things: stollen and egg nog.

Christmas in Mexico.

Christmas recipes for those of us sweltering in the southern hemisphere.

Also, the Design Indaba magazine’s theme for its final edition of the year is food and design. Do take a look. (I’ve a piece in its Food Fight section, but don’t let that put you off.)

See you in 2012.

Dec 2

Foodie Pseudery (13)

Kim Severson has Alice Waters over for lunch, and discusses Waters’s latest recipe book:

The book is deceptively simple. As she writes, ‘Good cooking is no mystery.’ Most recipes seem to be built on salt, black pepper, olive oil, fresh herbs and garlic. But they have to be specific kinds, like chunky gray sea salt for boiling water. ‘If you are not buying the right ingredients, this is going to taste like any other food,’ she said.

The attention to detail is maddening and enlightening. She offers lovely notes on cooking eggs, and her passage on serving fruit for dessert is so thoughtful and useful it reads like gospel. She devotes a page and a half to making bread crumbs properly.