Nibbles #23
Come meet me in Central London on Saturday 18th May!
Welcome to Nibbles where once a month I share everything brilliant I’ve been reading on the web as well as some general updates from my kitchen, my vegetable garden during the growing season, and other miscellaneous ‘you really need to know about’ updates.
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Toklas Bakery Cookbook Fair - Saturday 18th May
Do you live in or near London? And what are you doing on Saturday 18th May? I hope the answer is swinging by Toklas Bakery by Temple Station where, between 10am-3pm I’ll be at their cookbook fair signing copies of my second cookbook One Pan Pescatarian alongside a fantastic group of my fellow food writers including fellow Substackers
and . I can’t wait to meet some of you!
Ed has put together the most comprehensive and brilliant post on how to serve butter beans in so many wonderful ways - a true hero ingredient!
Kristina’s Scallion Oil Fried Rice is a template, rather than a recipe for fried rice we should all take to heart:
A very long read but worth it: a fascinating look into the world of Nigeria’s Yahoo Boys, aka the romance scammers (hopefully) caught in your spam inboxes.
It’s like Rosie read my mind by sending a recipe for the spring pie I was imagining in my head right to my inbox:
David, on the niche French cheese you’re meant to dip in coffee:
As I’ve mentioned at length, it is very rare I actually want to bake a cake. But I want to make this Flourless Chocolate Cake:
These chefs in Kiev are cooking restaurant-quality food for the soldiers on the front line, and as you’d expect the concept is not without it’s challenges:
Also, Felicity has visited a kosher matzo factory in Ukraine who ship their brilliant matzo around the world. It both taught me exactly what goes into ‘kosher for Passover’ matzo vs. regular matzo, and made me also so very proud to come from such resilient stock:
Sinu introduces us to the wild hops available to forage for around Venice’s lagoon:
Debora has shared a soup for the ends you snap off asparagus spears I’m now hoarding them to make:
Florence has written some lovely words on the joy of cooking recipes that take time, when the internet seems obsessed with how to make the ‘quickest’ ‘fastest’ recipes with ‘barely any ingredients’:
I’ve got lunch, dinner and dessert recipes new on the blog this month, starting the day with my 15-minute Spicy Salmon / Trout Avocado Rice Bowls, followed by my Creamy Tuscan Sundried Tomato & Spinach Pasta for dinner (a pasta take on the Italian-American classic, but vegetarian!) with a slice of this rather excellent (if I may say so myself!!) Rhubarb and White Chocolate Cake for afters.
For my residency at local food hall Macknade this month I’ve made some Pea and Mint Whipped Feta with Slow Roasted Tomatoes - it’s one of those handy recipe for the summer months that can work as a dip, side dish or sauce, depending on the occasion. And I got to make it with local Kent tomatoes - salad season is coming!
And finally, if smoked salmon is more your jam but you still love the idea of a rice bowl over at meal prep website Project Meal Plan I’ve made some Easy Smoked Salmon Rice Bowls with an addictively creamy sriracha drizzle I can’t help but keep making and pouring over everything.
Finally after a slow start this year I’ve managed to get some seeds in the ground! I’m having one of those years where I’m trying not to buy and instead use up the ends of packets so who knows what is going to come up! In my raised beds alongside the last of the carrots I’ve already got cut and come again lettuce coming up, and still hiding under the soil I’ve got rainbow radishes, Alderman peas dried from my parents plants in their fruit cage (great place to raise peas as the trellis is already up!) and literally every single Sarah Raven sweet pea seed left in the seed caddy.
Also a first time for me my parents gave me some spare garlic plants I’ve planted in the space I pulled the last of the leeks from to go with our roast beef last night, so we’ll have to see how those do (supermarket garlic is getting worse and worse so I’ll try anything for nice fat bulbs!)
I make no secret of the fact I think the quality of new television being made is getting worse and worse, so I’m pleased to announce I’ve got something new and excellent to recommend for Amazon Prime subscribers!
I know the fact Fallout is based on a video game series might put a lot of you off (and the screen grab above that acts as the front cover of the trailer also does not help!) but give it a chance. The premise is simple: in a parallel America, the threat of nuclear apocalypse became very real. So very real, it happened. Lucy is a vault-dweller, as in she was born in a fallout shelter where her family had been living for generations after originally retreating underground to escape the first bombs that fell, and who has been forced above ground - away from sheltered society - to try and save her father who was taken from their vault. Maximus is a survivor living on the surface, a member of a militarised cult obsessed with finding technology from before the bombs fell (so no one else can have it? To destroy it? I’m not quite clear because the Brotherhood of Steel are way more sinister than they look!) but who through accident of chance has broken away from everything he’s ever known. And the Ghoul? We get to see the ghoul when he was still whole before the fallout from the bomb turned him into a mutant bounty hunter: the once suave, famous Hollywood actor who was the face of the vault project, and who it turns out started to have serious doubts about the also quite sinister project run by the corporation his wife worked for.
Seriously, even if you’re not sure give it a go: it’s very well done visually, has some great acting, a killer 50’s vibe and music threaded throughout and even if you think some of the fantasy / SciFi elements might put you off, it’s such a clever study of the human condition and the ‘what if?’ if the past might have been different (or the future, let’s be honest…) and at the very least it will provide you with an excellent few evenings of entertainment.
So much I want to read here (and a few I have and loved!). Thanks for Nibbles and everything else you do, Rachel! Wish I was in London to come to the cookbook fair!