Christmas recipes from Julie Biuso’s “Sweet Feast.”
December 6, 2011 by admin
Filed under Book Reviews, Recipes
Do Christmas desserts and treats have to be loaded with calories or are there some which are relatively fat free and healthy but still delicious? I had a chat about this recently with Julie Biuso, food editor of Taste Magazine and author of recently published “Sweet Feast”. It’s packed full of tempting desserts and baking, [...]
Christmas Baking for the Slack Mummy’s Club
Slack Mummies haven’t spent much time in their kitchens lately but sooner or later Christmas will catch up with them and they’ll have to make a bit of an effort. I am sure they would rather drop into Nosh or Farro Fresh and buy up some Christmas goodies to brazenly pass off as their own.But [...]
The Best Whiskey Christmas Cake Recipe
My quest for the best Christmas cake to bake this year is over. The winning recipe was for a Whiskey cake which is effortless, moist, fruity and not too expensive. Up until last week there were three in the running. The first: Dame Alison Holst’s Pineapple Christmas cake which she says has been baked and [...]
Limoncello in Eighty Days
The best time to make limoncello, a sweet lemon liqueur, is right now while there’s a glut of lemons and they are dropping off the trees. Homegrown unsprayed thick skinned lemons give the best flavour. Avoid the smooth thin skinned variety available in the shops. On the Amalfi coast in Italy where limoncello originated it [...]
Easter roast with Wine and Chocolate
Great to have Easter dinner sorted – due to a chance encounter! I had just filled my shopping basket with fresh veggies at Nosh in Ponsonby Road when I spotted Marcus Gillum at Liquor King next door. He was hosting a small blind wine tasting. The challenge: to guess what four different wines were and [...]
Feijoa smoothies: Health in a Glass
Lucky us! Our neighbours are collecting bucketfuls of feijoas at present and they keep giving us bags of them. Fijoas are so aromatic and juicy when they have just fallen off the trees and been freshly harvested. The flavour is somewhere between guava and pineapple with a trace of lemon. Apart from cutting them in [...]
Easy summer entertaining ideas from Telegraph Hill Olive Estate
Summer is the best of times to sit out on the deck and have friends over. But when the weather is hot, who feels like cooking? I’d rather serve food which is quick and easy to put together. It can still be delicious. So I had the idea this week of assembling a small but [...]
Baking Christmas Cookies (Joulupiparkakut) from Finland
The spicy gingersnaps featured this week come from Finland which is home to over 200,000 reindeer. Santa will have no trouble recruiting some of them to pull his sleigh so avoiding their more usual destination, reindeer stew! There are many variations of this recipe. This particular one arrived at my friend Deb’s house via a [...]
Te Mahi Kai: The Language of food
The theme for Maori Language week this year is Te Mahi Kai: The Language of Food. Activities all over New Zealand will give people a chance to get their tongues around some Maori Language, and their teeth into some good kai. It should be a great week. Since Maori Language Week began in 1975 Kiwis [...]
Pumpkin soup and cheese rolls from the Mainland
The best pumpkin soup I have ever tasted arrived in my mailbox recently, from my sister Margreet. It comes from Omakau; near the Otago Central Rail Trail.To make it you need a whole pumpkin. You simply make a few cuts into it with a knife to make sure it doesn’t explode, and then cook it [...]