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Food Month Digest: Convenient home cooking and dishes to warm you up this winter

From Frugal Fiests to foodie events, here’s what you might have missed and what’s to come

What's the best way to brew your coffee at home? Joyce Hickey investigated this week. Photograph: EPA

Sun Nov 20 2022 - 15:09

Welcome back to the weekly Food Month digest, which brings you all the must-see content from the week gone by plus a sneak-peek and what is still to come.

Frugal Feasts

It was all about convenient home cooking this week, with recipes the whole family will love that are quick and simple to make. This slow-cooker lamb and potato curry recipe from Nathan Anthony, who runs the Bored of Lunch Instagram account, has only one step in its method but promises a hearty, filling meal that is packed with flavour.

Meanwhile, television presenter Angela Scanlon shares her favourite one-pan bean and cavolo nero supper, which she says is “not a soup, it’s not a stew or a curry, but it’s also not none of those things”. It is, however, an “easy, healthy evening meal for your little crew with stuff that’s mostly in the press already”.

Angela Scanlon’s one-pot wonder

Don’t fancy cooking?

If you’re heading out for dinner and need recommendations, check out Corinna Hardgrave’s four-star review of Hyde, a four-storey establishment with “shiny new terraces, bars and restaurants”. The menu is Asian-inspired and there is an impressive choice of drinks, including a €16,970 bottle of Chateau Laffite Rothchild 1986. “Our waiter carts out the six-litre bottle for a doubter’s show-and-tell. I get the sense that this is not the first time he’s done this in the few days since they’ve been open,” writes Hardgrave.

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The restaurant behind this week’s takeaway review specialises in chicken burgers that “slap you in the face with flavour” and loaded fries that are a “total indulgence”. Even photos of this establishment’s produce would make your mouth water. Find the review here.

This week's takeaway review. Photograph: Alan Betson

Kitchen must-haves

Joyce Hickey filters out the best home coffee machines. As well as giving her expert view on the latest caffeine technology, she recalls buying a coffee machine with her father, which sadly outlived him. “Every time I use it, I think of the texts he used to send from Dublin Airport: ‘AT BUTLERS ALLWELL LOVEDAD’.”

What is a kitchen without a collection of good cookbooks that can be flicked through for years to come? “Like a good novel, a good cookbook should be full of character, create a real sense of place and come garnished with turns of phrases as memorable as a great meal,” writes our book editor Martin Doyle. He asked writers, including Louise Kennedy and Séamas O’Reilly, to share their favourites. Find them here.

What’s next?

There are plenty more recipes to look forward to this week, including a sausage and butterbean stew and a chicken pot pie – perfect to warm you up this winter.

We’ll also chat to Kristen Jensen, the founder of Nine Bean Rows Books, a boutique Irish publishing house that specialises in all things food. She’ll give insight into the inspiration behind the publishing house, and provide some excellent book recommendations.

A special coffee and crafting morning will take place for readers on Monday with our food columnist Lilly Higgins. As guests enjoy fresh pastries and coffee from Tassimo in the cafe above Books Upstairs, Higgins will lead demonstrations for her foodie crafts. Tickets, available here, also include a copy of Higgins’s new book, The Homemade Year, and a goody bag.

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