This used to be the name of coloured sprinkles you could buy to put on cakes and ice cream.

I was thinking of it today as the number of my followers has today exceeded the number of posts I’ve put up - more than 1000.

Michelle Obama and Justin Bieber have millions of followers for their Twitter tweets. I wonder whether they alter the content to match the interests of their fans?  I don’t expect so!

But I want you all to know that I look at what you do and take note of what you are interested in. 

Have a nice weekend!

The real thing…. or what?

This is a picture of lemon blossoms and fruit, growing on a tree in Italy. I’ve just received some PR information about a drink called Orangina. Here’s what they say about it:

The original taste of the Mediterranean. Packed with natural pulp and real orange pieces, it’s made of a blend of four citrus juices. It has no added colour or sweeteners.

Dig a little further and you’ll find that Orangina contains mostly carbonated water and only 12% citrus juice.  As for the sweeteners, it has high fructose corn syrup, which has been the subject of several scares. Click on the picture to read more about it.

Meanwhile, if you’re thirsty, you’d do better to eat an orange and drink a chilled glass of water with a slice of lemon in it.

Happy Monday?

Does it depend on the weekend you’ve just had, or the week ahead of you? Are you thinking what to make for dinner, or are you young enough not to give it a thought, with all your meals provided by someone else?

Either way, why not take a little time to play? These are meringues, bananas, medjoul dates and crackers filled with cream or mascarpone - the most delicious Italian cream cheese.

You don’t need a child to do it with you, but it helps!  For more ideas on kitchen games and experiments, click on the picture.

Spring magic

A clash of colours but a perfect mingling of flavours. Here’s an idea of what to do with a ripe passion fruit. You can just eat it with a spoon. Or cut some strawberries in half, and if they are out of season and not too ripe, sprinkle over a little sugar. Add a squeeze of lemon juice. Then spoon over the flesh and seeds of a passion fruit.  Cover with clingfilm and leave for an hour or so for the flavours to mingle. Magic.

Passion

This is the flower of the passion fruit. The plant is said to be easy to grow (mine happened by accident to appear on the right facing wall). The flowers are so perfect. Click on the picture to see a different purple variety which is lacy and delicate - far superior to the much feted orchid.

Then scroll down to see the ugly looking fruit it produces.

The fruit of the passion flower

Unlike almost every other fruit where the skin is smooth, a passion fruit is only ripe when it is wrinkly. It doesn’t look too exciting when you cut it open - a soft, orangey centre with pips.

This one is definitely not ripe.  It needs to be left for another 4-5 days till the skin wrinkles and the flavour develops.

Fear of frying?

Anyone knows it is messy and risky. Hot oil spatters everywhere; your clothes and hair smell of frying and then you’ve got all the clearing up.

Would you believe you can cook chips (french fries) from cold oil? Savvy cooks all know the oil should be fiercely hot before you start, but amazingly this method works. 15 mins from start to finish - totally delicious chips and almost no mess.

You have to try it: click on the picture to find out how it’s done.

The bit that wasn’t ‘ate’

The cake originally had the word ‘chocolate’ but as you can see, half of it has been eaten! The word was done by putting covered alphabet cutters on the sponge cake and then sprinkling over icing sugar. You need to lift off the cutters very carefully…

More is more, so you need chocolate sauce on top.  This is made by simply melting a bar of good dark choc, a little golden syrup and a knob of butter in the microwave.

Pastry - not just for pies

One of the joys of working at home is that I have time to play. All you need for this is:

- some pastry (home-made or rolled out bought pastry is fine)

- then, unless you’re very handy with a sharp knife, a set of metal alphabet cutters.

Click on the picture to find the details. They’ll cost you the same price as a novel, or two tickets on the London Underground, or a few coffees at Starbucks.

Once you have the letters you can use them to cut out ready-to-use icing or even pieces of carrot or apple. The pastry letters were baked at 190C/380F for about 10 minutes on a sheet of baking paper.

A surprise?

A couple of years ago, British author Ian McEwan conducted an admittedly unscientific experiment. He and his son waded into the lunch-time crowds at a London park and began handing out free books. Within a few minutes, they had given away 30 novels. Nearly all of the takers were women, who were “eager and grateful” for the freebies while the men “frowned in suspicion, or distaste.” The inevitable conclusion, wrote McEwan in The Guardian newspaper: “When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”

Is this a surprise?  Surveys consistently find that women read more books than men, especially fiction. Explanations abound, from the biological differences between the male and female brains, to the way that boys and girls are introduced to reading at a young age.

What about blogs? Are there more women tumbling than men? Are men more or less interested in reading about food?

Tell me what you think. I’d love to hear from you.  Click on the Ask me Anything button and let me know your views.

The research in this post is reblogged from wordpainting:

Find more details by clicking on the picture.

Just eat half

Antonio Carluccio, the ebullient Italian chef, has come out with a pronouncement that makes sense: don’t eat differently, just eat half.

He first applied this maxim to his own life when he wanted to lose weight. Instead of cutting out fat and all the things he likes, he claims he just ate less. It doesn’t need much more willpower to refuse second helpings, than to stick to a miserable low-carb, low fat diet. The end result of both is that you are putting far less into your body, but the ‘eat half’ method is far easier when you are eating out, and in the end much more pleasurable.

Changing to smaller portions can be done in different ways:

frequent very expensive restaurants where everything on the plate is in miniature

serve yourself at home on smaller plates

wait at least ten minutes after you’ve finished, before even thinking ‘do I want more?’. Chances are you really don’t.

and lastly, if you’re trying to cut back on sweet things too

end a meal with a fruit like kiwis or grapefruit. The slightly acid taste stops you wanting chocolate.

The photo shows tomato-flavoured savoury rice, cooked in vegetable stock with fried onions, celery and carrots. I could eat the big portion, but taking Carluccio’s advice I’ll go for the smaller one.

Scroll down to see how the chef applies his ‘just eat half’ idea to what children eat.

Play with your food

Antonio Carluccio has begun a war on British restaurants and pubs, telling them to stop serving children’s menus. He is convinced that offering a selection of chips, fish fingers and chicken nuggets is contributing to making children fat. More important, by providing them with separate (mostly fried) foods, it is establishing the idea that children can’t be expected to enjoy the same foods as adults. In his own restaurants there is no separate ‘children’s menu’ - just smaller portions.

Of course if you offer a child a bowl of radishes, olives and a drink of Campari  they’d prefer to eat some crisps. But if everyone sits down to the same food and there is enough choice children will get to love some unexpected things.

I played a game with a non-eating grandchild, inviting him to ‘rate’ a dozen foods I’d put on the table for supper with his cousins. Picking up his pencil and paper, he happily tried many things he’d never have considered at home, and after tasting peppers, mushroom soup and fried courgettes, chose a ‘rating’ and admitted he might even try them again. 

The other way to get children away from the standard food they expect is to let them play. The beetroot in the picture is the result of a little ‘playtime’ with cooked beetroot and plain yogurt. The child who helped me do this ended up admitting it tasted sweet and ‘quite nice’.

Click on the picture if you want more ideas.

A thousand leaves

In French, the word is ‘mille-feuille” and this is the name of these pastries. They’re not difficult to make - just time consuming. The layers or ‘leaves’ are puff pastry, filled with creme patissiere (custard) and topped with white and coffee icing. They don’t look as perfect as the cream-filled ones you buy in the stores. But they taste oozingly, scrumptiously delicious - a wonderful combination of crisp, creamy and sweet.

I was going to point you to a recipe but the prep and cooking time added up to 3 hours 20 minutes. Quick, click on the next post!

Get back in the kitchen

This isn’t an old-fashioned order aimed at women. It’s a strong piece of advice from researchers in Chicago, who have been studying the day-to-day activity of elderly volunteers. It turns out that cleaning, washing dishes and cooking can dramatically reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, even in people over 80. Those who were least active were more than twice as likely to develop the disease.

Dr. Anne Corbett, research manager at the Alzheimer’s Society, says “regular physical exercise can reduce the risk of developing dementia by up to 45%.”  She adds: “Eating a Mediterranean diet (including oily fish and the odd glass of red wine) can also help.”

So go into the kitchen and cook yourself a plate of pasta - and when you’ve finished, zip back into the kitchen to wipe down the worktops and do the clearing up.  It’s all in a good cause.

The tops

Want a chance to taste the finest cooking in the world? Rene Redzepi of the famous Noma restaurant in Copenhagen is to run a two-week pop-up at London’s Claridge’s hotel this summer.

The chef, whose restaurant has twice been named the best in the world, will run A Taste of Noma at Claridge’s from 28 July to 6 August in celebration of the London 2012 Olympic Games. Redzepi and his team of chefs is  offering a five-course menu of signature dishes priced at just under £200 ($325) per head. The menu will be a mix of costly and everyday ingredients. In Denmark he sends his chefs foraging for fish and cloudberries in the morning and serves them up with home-made vinegars, beers, spirits and wines. It will be intriguing to find out what he does with British produce.

Redzepi is 34, the son of a Danish cleaning lady and a Muslim taxi driver. He’s married to a Jewish woman.  From her he might have learnt the word ‘mensch’. What is a mensch? In today’s language it’s ‘a great guy’. Redzepi is a real mensch; he’s not a show off, swearing at his crew. Instead, at the prize winning ceremony, he wore a t-shirt with a picture of one of his team, 54 year-old washer-up Ali, who couldn’t get a visa to be in London for the awards. Unlike the TV chefs with big egos, he knows that cooking is a partnership, whether it’s his team at Noma, or simply providing food for others to enjoy.

Bookings start on 9th May.  Click on the picture to find out more.