Tag Archives: The Telegraph

The Ultimate Fat Finding Mission

The Telegraph

Finally – a holiday fat map. Holiday destinations guaranteed to make you porky. When’s Part Two? The guide to places you get dysentery.

I remember the moment my food fatigue set in. I was at a business lunch in New York a fortnight after moving to the US and a third of the way through my ranch dressing-soaked excuse for a salad when the scene took on the quality of a nightmare. The snuffling noises emanating from a nearby table – where a man was inhaling heaped forkfuls of spaghetti carbonara – seemed to be growing grotesquely loud; the woman reaching for a spoonful of her son’s chocolate sundae predatory in her gluttony. All around, diners were engaged in the same robotic hand-to-mouth gesture, like drones with a grim job to do.

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A Reason to like Fennel

The Telegraph

For years my brain has said ‘Yes’ to fennel while my tongue screams ‘Ugh’. Last night I made this and they agreed to disagree. Yum.

Spiced pork and cumin sausages with fennel and preserved-lemon salad recipe. Home-made spicy 'sausages' served with bread, yogurt and a salad of crunchy fennel and piquant preserved lemon

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Wake and bake

The Telegraph
You can keep your automatic bread maker – this is my kind of alarm clock!
Wake up and smell the bacon – with an alarm clock that allows you to do just that. This new alarm clock wakes you up with the smell of freshly cooked bacon. Wake n Bacon is the only alarm clock that not only wakes you up but also cooks you breakfast in bed.
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Dinner, London, Restaurant review

The Telegraph, Matthew Norman
Men and meat fruit. Haven’t seen an hysteria like this since I brought cake into an office filled with women on January diets
If the biggest box-office draw in the business was racked by first-night nerves on Monday evening, he made a fine stab at masking it. One minute posing happily for a photo with the neighbouring table, the next squatting beside ours to deliver passionate, rapid-fire discourses about the provenance of his intriguingly historical menu, Heston Blumenthal appeared to be relishing his West End debut. Small wonder. It has taken a long time for the lieber Meister of snail porridge to bring his act to town, but Dinner – a sibling to the Fat Duck and the Hind’s Head in Bray – is more than worth the wait. In fact, darlings, it’s a theatrical tour de force.
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Kopapa, London WC2

Zoe Williams, The Telegraph
Yup. More small plates of food
Kopapa is not a very inviting space, with its clackety encaustic tiles and hard, stout chairs, plus I didn’t warm that much to the large and incomprehensible pillars. Perhaps they perform some structural function. Nevertheless, everything feels quite expensive. It has the perfect atmosphere for a modish business lunch; it puts the funk into functional, if you like (no, I didn’t think you would?). Peter Gordon pretty much invented the cookery style that calls itself ‘fusion’ (or, as my friend T calls it, ‘a posh word for a fridge raid’), so, if that’s the kind of thing you like, this is the place you’ll come for it.
Derivation of thought process behind: “Yup more plates of small food“.
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El Bulli chef’s magic food academy

The Telegraph
It could be a gastronomic laboratory designed by Willy Wonka – a culinary think tank set within giant glass jars and caverns resembling coral beside a pool of edible algae. Ferran Adrià, one of the world’s most celebrated chefs, has unveiled plans to transform his restaurant, El Bulli, into an environmentally friendly academic research foundation dedicated to pioneering molecular gastronomy to even greater heights. The Catalan chef announced a year ago that the three Michelin-starred establishment, crowned best in the world five times, would be closed throughout 2012 and 2013.
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An affair to remember: dates with a difference

Telegraph
Pets, whiskey or performance art: just don’t take her to Ask
The Wapping project Supper at a restaurant. An art exhibition. A night at the theatre. All classic date territory but not exactly original. Unless you try the Wapping Project. Once the Wapping Hydraulic power station, it?s now part-restaurant, part-performance space, and, well, just about the coolest place in London. Indeed it is so trendy that guests sit between brooding photographs and pieces of industrial machinery. The building boasts an in-house butcher; the furniture is, to be frank, ugly and the website is so ephemeral that it is almost impossible to navigate. But, East London edginess aside, the restaurant is excellent, and the layout is in a constant state of flux, meaning your meal may overlap with anything from a post-Postmodern art installation to a classic film night. To book a table visit www.thewappingproject.com
Then ask her to marry you
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Tried and tested: low-power cookers

Telegraph
Can’t pay your bills?
Every appliance in my house is overpowered. The combined noise of the vacuum cleaner, hair dryer, washing machine and tumble drier can create a din on a level with Heathrow Airport – when it is not snowing, of course. Every gadget I switch on has a super-fast or extra-hot option. When we have guests to dinner, I have to choose between dirtying up the kitchen with cooking fumes or allowing the cooker-hood fan to drown out the conversation.
Well it’s better than being lectured at by Martin Lewis
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