Author: chefalice
My late father, Leonard Wells, and my mother, Elizabeth, were superb cooks. Dad cooked professionally for many years, first at Gander air base during World War II and then on the Newfoundland Railway. When I was born, Dad was Cook and Manager of the Buchans Hotel. During those years he learned to cook pretty much everything. He didn’t do haute cuisine, but everything he prepared was made with a great deal of love and care. This custard recipe is an example of the kind of homey dessert he loved to make.
I walked into a Cuban restaurant one day, and rolled out having had the most satisfying meal of good country food. The meal, which featured lots of things like black beans and rice, fried plantain, and so on, ended with a sensational bread pudding. The pudding had a dense, heavy texture that appealed to me. Later, I tried to duplicate the pudding I’d eaten and this recipe is the result. I figured out that the only way to recreate the texture of the restaurant pudding was to use bread crumbs instead of cubed bread or slices.
Caponata is one of my Death Row side dishes. This version is an amalgamation of numerous different recipes and methods I’ve read, tried and adapted over the years rather than one passed down from an Italian nonna. So it’s probably totally inauthentic. The charge sheet starts with the roasting (rather than frying) of aubergines, continues with the use of Romano peppers in a traditionally Sicilian dish, and carries on in the method. But it does have an awesome balance of sweet and sour and works well with rich, oily foods as well as softer and more subtle ingredients, such as…
When aubergines are aggressively roasted or grilled, their subtle earthiness is replaced by more intense savoury, caramel and smoky notes. Yet the texture of roasted aubergine is a little odd: the skin, still full of flavour, takes some chewing (if you attack it at all), and the inside turns to watery, lumpy pulp. By far the best thing to do, in my opinion, is blitz the lot, leaving you with a silky-smooth and powerful purée. The cumin and pomegranate molasses in this recipe ramp up the flavour further; it’s intense. Consider this next time you’re cooking lamb, hogget or mutton,…
We put this on everything! So don’t be a skeptic. This creamy cashew sour cream does the trick to replace sour cream in your plant-based life. It even works well as a base for other sauces, so if you have a little leftover, repurpose it into something new and delicious. Did somebody say cashew-based ranch or creamy French dressing? No, just me hearing voices again?