Italy, pancakes and blood oranges
March 3 2025
Introduction
It’s been a while, I know and this is a bumper and random catch-up edition. Back to normal next week but I thought I should jump back in.
Last week, Shrove Tuesday was celebrated early in our house with a family gathering. As ever, I made Delia’s pancake recipe, this time doubled in a Pyrex jug so everyone could have a go. This recipe is excellent as you don’t end up with a random, spare egg white and the melted butter added in before cooking ensures the pancakes don’t stick, apart of course, the first one. Then I made a tray full of toppings, including a bag of defrosted mixed fruit, sliced blood oranges, orange curd, whipped cream with Cointreau and orange zest, and the usual suspects of fresh lemon juice, sugar, maple syrup and golden syrup to suit everybody. Truth be told, I mocked up the photo, the morning after the night before with the leftovers.
True to form, my husband still wants pancakes tomorrow night and I’m thinking of Diana Henry’s crespelle stuffed with spinach, leeks and ricotta from the Telegraph, the other two recipes were buckwheat galettes with ham, egg, mustard and Gruyère and crêpes dentelles with sautéed apples, ice cream and whisky and marmalade sauce. Eight chefs also share their favourite pancake recipes in the Standard.
If you cut me in half at the moment, I would not be be thirty different fruit and veg but mostly blood orange. From left to right, Nigel Slater’s blood orange and pistachio cake from the Observer, a salad of winter tomato, blood orange and burrata, and Anna Hedworth’s blood orange, burrata and fennel with toasted coriander seed oil from her book, Service, in the Telegraph.
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At the weekend, the Observer had its twenty best dessert recipes. I liked the originality of the Indian saffron rice pudding recipe by Tarunima Sinha and Georgina Hayden’s recipe for galaktoboureko, custard baked in filo pastry.
The week before, in Observer Food Monthly, Gill Meller gave recipes for next level tray bakes including squash, apple and black pudding in the hole and baked brill with leeks, lemon and thyme.
Finally, I made Diana Henry’s Friulian winter salad from the Telegraph with carrots, radicchio, chestnuts and fennel sausage and loved it so much i had it for my lunch and dinner. A slight variation is in her book, ‘Roast Figs, Sugar Snow.’ I’m going to use the rest of the bag of chestnuts to make Meera Sodha’s lentils with chestnut, red wine and cavola nero from the Guardian.
Books
Service by Anna Hedworth in the Telegraph
with the philosophy behind her restaurants and recipes for blood orange, burrata and fennel with toasted coriander seed oil, confit duck with roast cherries and mint salsa verde, roast carrots with fennel seeds, honey and chilli, miso butter roast sherry onions and chocolate crémeux with olive oil and sea salt.
I’ve bought this and look forward to cooking more from it and reviewing it here.
One Pan Beans by Claire Thomson in the Times
with a selection of chickpea recipes including harissa-roasted cauliflower and chickpea traybake, chickpea bulgur pilaf and chickpea and chorizo soup with fried bread and eggs where ‘you cook the chorizo first to render the fat in the pan in which you then toast the torn bread.’
Restaurants
In the Standard, David Ellis asked, are London restaurants just too expensive now? I’ve pondered on this and I’m not going to cover every restaurant in future, but ones that get good reviews, in Central London or in tourist areas.
Michelin handed out its stars and there was a plethora of opinion pieces aboiut what it meant to a chef and whether it was worth it for the restaurant. I prefer to think more about the value of knowing if a restaurant has a star for the consumer. The Telegraph obliges with the 15 best Michelin-starred restaurants for under £50 which have an affordable set menu, but with drinks, coffee, service, the actual bill will be a lot more.
The best pizzas in London in the Standard is worth a look as is their list of Chinese restaurants. I went to Golden Dragon in Gerrard St last week with a Hong Kong Chinese friend who ordered dim sum for three of us and the bill was £16 each. We drank green tea.
In the FT, Tim Hayward went to Long Friday in Newcastle upon Tyne, one of Anna Hedworth’s restaurants, the other being Cookhouse. He raved about it,
‘I love that Hedworth loves Newcastle. I love that her focus is on her ingredients and her community, and that she calls herself a cook, not a chef. I totally get the Chez Panisse comparison… Anna Hedworth’s cooking is that good. It seduces entirely.’
In the Guardian, Grace Dent went to Tropea, in Harborne, Birmingham which is ‘is a forward-thinking take on the Italian trattoria’ and sounds lovely. Read the review as it will make you want to go there.
She also went to Stark, on Mersea Island, in Essex:
‘Quite unlike anything I’ve ever been served. They’ve realised the dream of fine dining without the fuss or stress.’
In the Sunday Times, Charlotte Ivers also went to Tropea, and Myse in Yorkshire for 17 courses and the Prince Arthur in Belgravia, SW1 which she liked. observer
In the Observer, Jay Rayner went to The Great Indian in London N19.
In the Standard, David Ellis was in Soho, at the French House in London W1 and Paradise for Sri Lankan food
In the Times, Giles Coren went to Pinna in Mayfair in London W1 and
Don’t Tell Dad in London NW6
Travel
UK
The best inns with rooms in the Sunday Times.
19 of the most beautiful beaches in Cornwall to visit this summer and 10 best things to in Cornwall on a rainy day in the Independent. I must have done most of them over the years on rainy days. The Telegraph says that Newquay in Cornwall is shedding its party town image.
A personal pilgrimage on the quiet paths of Thomas Hardy’s Dorset in the Guardian
Wild beach walks, candy-coloured shops and Scandinavian-inspired spa treatments make Anglesey in the Times I was there for the first time last May and the coastal walking was superb and without the crowds you get in other parts of the country such as the South West Coast Path.
10 restaurants not to miss in Edinburgh in the Guardian
Going on a special secret morning tour of Stonehenge in the Times. I’ve only ever seen it whizzing past on the A303 or more likely, taking a roundabout route bypassing it because there are jams on the A303 so to get up close and go inside the stones sounds fun.
Europe
25 of the best hotels, B&Bs and chateaux in France in the Guardian
Sète: the seaside town with year-round sunshine in the south of France in the Guardian. It’s the main town on the Thau archipelago, 17 miles (27km) south-west of Montpellier
Italy in the Guardian, falling for Alassio – the rebirth of an Italian resort. The former fishing village on the Ligurian coast was once a favourite with the wealthy British set., it offers scenic treks and seafood feasts in glorious spring sunshine and Siena, which they cite as Tuscany’s other artistic masterpiece and readers’ travel secrets in Italy, as an extra bonus although some of the recommendations seem hardly secret.
The ultimate guide to visiting Pompeii: everything you need to know in the Times
10 reasons to visit Italy in 2025: the best new holidays and cultural eventsincludes a boutique hotel Casa Cook in the Dolomites which was a chain founded by Thomas Cook and now sold on. This was eerily familiar to me as I had nearly booked another Casa Cook in Egypt at the weekend until I read that there were ‘poolside sounds’ by the in-house DJ. Enough said.
Best things to do in Seville in the Times
and Olhao in the Times, when you go west and not east from Faro airport a sleepy Algarve fishing town ‘where you’ll find the real Portugal. The boutique hotels and chichi waterfront are new — the fresh, affordable seafood, ancient windy streets and bougainvillea-covered walls are not.
The Telegraph advises us to visit Dresden in Germany as it says that Germany’s most beautiful city, the ‘Florence of the Elbe’ has been miraculously rebuilt eighty years on from the devastating Allied bombings.
Please do like and share. Spring is coming and to finish, here is blossom at the end of my street, daffodils in St James Park and crocuses in the local park.
Reading the papers
People ask me how I read all the papers. I believe in paying for quality journalism and my husband and I have digital subscriptions to the Times and to the Telegraph.
The Times gives you two free articles a week as a registered user and the Telegraph gives you access to one free article each week if you register an account. The FT gives a certain number of free articles
Local public libraries often have Pressreader which gives access to over 7,000 newspapers world wide for free or you can subscribe to it.
Only just catching up with this and am now dreaming of blood oranges and burrata! Can highly recommend Olhao, we had a gorgeous few days there in April a couple of years ago.
Indeed! Glad you’re pleased