We love Korean barbecue!

When someone invites you round for a barbecue, you don’t expect it to be in their kitchen. But Korean-American chef Judy Joo’s kitchen, in her enormous central London apartment, is a little out of the ordinary. Most of my kitchen could fit inside Judy Joo’s oven…

The great delicious. FoodSwap

Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? Well, yes, actually it is. Just ask anyone with a sizeable veg patch or who likes to pick wild garlic or elderflowers in the coming weeks!

After making a particularly large batch of chutney last summer, I decided there’s a limit to how much of the same thing a single household can eat. I put a few jars in a darkened cupboard, then gave the rest away to people I happened to be seeing – whether chutney-lovers or not. The seed of an idea was formed as I thought I’d much rather be giving the jars to people I knew loved chutney…. but how?

Born in the USA

 

Take a look at where the hipsters are eating in the capital at the moment, and you’ll find a whole lot of Americana. From barbecue joints to the so-called ‘dirty’ food revolution (think heart-attack sarnies, super-sized sundaes and burgers with everything), eating USA-style has never been so in vogue.

And we can absolutely see why.  At a time of economic and social instability, people always want comfort food, and what could be more comforting than the homeliness, simplicity and downright finger-licking-goodness of traditional American cooking? And it’s not all deep-fried peanut butter and flaccid hot dogs. From the freshest seafood on the coast to the subtle spicing and vibrancy of Creole cooking in the Deep South, American food is at last being appreciated for what it really is – so much more than a bargain bucket full of chicken.

Fancy inhaling your drink?

Le Whaf – turns G&T into vapour

As the resident mixologist at delicious. magazine (it’s a dirty job and all that…), whenever I set out to make our Friday afternoon cocktail, there’s a part of me that likes to imagine I’m doing something even more important: turning base metal into gold, isolating the philosopher’s stone, or simply discovering the elixir of life (though a good manhattan comes close).

So when I read about Le Whaf, a machine that uses ultrasonic waves to convert drinks into a fine vapour, or ‘cloud of flavour’ as the machine’s marketers have it, I had visions of myself as a potion-mixing potentate, a blend of Sir Isaac Newton and Dr Jekyll, with a soupçon of Beaker from The Muppet Show thrown in…

Extreme food styling

Not content with a usual food shoot in a studio the delicious. food girls opted to leave the warmth of the kitchen and indulged in a spot of extreme food styling last week when we went down to Kent on location. We prayed for sun… it didn’t happen… instead we braved the freezing cold, determined to make our miserable April look like a much hotter, sunnier part of the world. How often does your job leave you standing in a river arranging lemon wedges, whilst another member of your team sits, waiting to disrobe and reveal their summer attire from under their Parka jacket?

All part of a days work for the delicious. food girls! 

The rise of food felony

by Claudia Canavan

Nutella in french toast. 

With food prices on the rise, it seems many people are resorting to drastic measures to remain well fed. Last week, a small town in Germany witnessed a theft of £14,000 worth of Nutella. Five tonnes (or 27 million calories' worth) of the chocolatey spread were stolen from a parked trailer in the Niederaula region, north of Frankfurt. 

This is merely the latest in a spate of gastronomic felonies. From multi-thousand pound sweeps to the few quid, here are our top five crimes of (food) passion: 

The day of the locust

You have to be careful in the delicious. office. You can be engrossed in your work and not paying enough attention to the banter going on around, when you hear someone nearby say, “Sure, Les and Hugh will do that…”, you give a nod, thinking it must be an invite to the latest hot-ticket restaurant or bar and get on with things. It’s only later you realise you’ve been volunteered to eat grasshoppers. This is why, on a cold, wet Thursday evening chief sub Les and I headed off to the South Bank to Wahaca to indulge in a spot of entomophagy (that’s posh for eating insects). It's all the rage these days and it's being encouraged by the UN.

The garnish from Wahaca's chapulines fundido