Health @ Taste Online

Baby sea eagles, baby penguins and owlets are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

Genelle Frenoy Georgianna Robertson Georgina Grenville Gina Carano Gina Gershon

I don’t know if I really need to sell this to you, but just in case: this is gooey butter cake + strawberry shortcake, so basically, it’s perfect.

My fear is that you?re going to immediately deem it too sweet for your taste, so let me address that first: this dessert has the perfect balance of sweet cake, tangy berries, and freshly whipped cream that, without sugar added, lends a rich background bitterness. In short, it?s quite a savvy combination and not cloying in the least. I actually expected the Gooey Butter Cake itself to be too syrupy sweet for me, but was pleasantly surprised at its flavor.

Essentially, this cake is a beautiful, simple harbinger of summer.

Gooey Butter Strawberry Shortcake Recipe by: Willow Bird Baking, adapted from one provided to St. Louis Today by Fred and Audrey Heimburger of Heimburger Bakery. Yield: would easily serve 4-6 people Crust Ingredients: 1 cup cake flour 3 tablespoons granulated sugar 1/3 cup butter, softened Filling Ingredients: 1 1/4 cups granulated sugar 3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter, softened 1 egg 1 cup all-purpose flour 2/3 cup evaporated milk 1/4 cup light corn syrup 1 teaspoon vanilla icing sugar Toppings Ingredients: 1 pound strawberries, quartered 2 cups heavy whipping cream Directions: NOTE: If you don’t have a skillet, I believe you can bake this in a greased 9-inch square baking dish (I’d use a glass one if you have it, and check it early and often. Remove when there’s some jiggle left.) Let us know how it goes if you try it this way for all the other skilletless people! Make the crust: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Whisk together cake flour and sugar in a medium bowl. Cut in the butter with a pastry cutter or two knives until the mixture resembles fine crumbs and starts to cling together. Press the mixture into the bottom (this step is a lot harder than it sounds, but be patient and use the back of a spoon to help spread/press the mixture down. I also stuck mine in the fridge for a bit to make the butter less sticky) and up the sides of a 10-inch cast iron skillet. Make the filling: Cream together the butter and sugar until fluffy and pale yellow (about 2-3 minutes). Mix in the egg until just combined. Alternate adding the flour and evaporated milk, mixing after each addition. Mix in the corn syrup and vanilla. Pour the filling into the crust and sprinkle the top with icing sugar (I forgot to do this, and did it afterwards. Oops). Bake and assemble the cake: Bake for 25 to 35 minutes or until cake is nearly set (mine was probably ready around 30). Some jiggle is fine — do not overcook! It’ll finish setting up as it cools. Let it cool in pan for 2 hours. In the meantime, beat heavy cream to stiff peaks. Pile heaps of fresh strawberries into the center of your cooled, set gooey butter cake, top with a mountain of freshly whipped cream, and serve.

To read my list of very important summer plans, read more the gooeyness and strawberryness of this cake, and see more photos, please head over to Willow Bird Baking!

x-posted to food_porn, cooking, picturing_food, and bakebakebake

Ananda Lewis Angela Marcello Angelina Jolie Anna Faris Anna Friel

Ok, I'm getting bored with my standard dinners, and am looking for interesting recipes. However, I have several challenges, since I have to meet various dietary restrictions for my family.

So, I come to you for help and inspiration. And, here is the exhaustive list of restrictions:

Lower calorie
Well balanced (as close to equal as possible of protein, carbs, and fats)
low sodium
Very low potassium – no beans or legumes, very little dairy, no fresh tomatoes (a very little bit of canned tomatoes are OK), potatoes only if they are boiled and/or soaked first, no leafy vegetables, no squash, absolutely no bananas, and very limited fresh fruit.
While I love whole grains, the rest of the family is meh about them, so if whole grains (brown rice, quinoa) are included, the recipe better be really good to "make up" for that
No shellfish
Budget friendly
And, finally, since I get most of my meats (except chicken breasts) from raising them ourselves, any cuts of meats need to be as little processed as possible.

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Dita Von Teese Dominique Swain Donna Feldman Drea de Matteo Drew Barrymore

When my friend Kerissa Barron first told me about this buttery rice pilaf, I couldn’t wait to try it. Then she told me it had saffron in it. Uh oh. For some reason, saffron is a spice that sort of tastes like soap to me. Not a big fan. But, I’ll try just about anything once, and in this case, thank goodness. I couldn’t stop eating this rice. Browned in clarified butter, with cinnamon, cardamom, and cloves, cooked in a saffron infusion, and tossed with nuts and raisins, this rice is the bomb.

Continue reading “Saffron Rice Pilaf” »

Brittany Murphy Brittany Snow Brittny Gastineau Brody Dalle Brooke Burke

The ‘always-on’ connectivity of email on smartphones has become a life-destroying monster. You need help?

One of the great cautionary adages of our culture is: “Be careful what you wish for; you might just get it.” And it applies in spades to the kind of instantaneous, always-on connectivity that many of us now enjoy, courtesy of the internet and mobile phones. Except that enjoy is perhaps not quite the right word. Talk to any busy person nowadays about the joys of email, for example, and the most common response is a rueful shrug. A technology that was once a magical tool for communicating has somehow become a millstone round people’s necks.

It was bad enough when email was confined to desktop PCs. But, once the smartphone arrived, first with the BlackBerry then via the iPhone and Androids, email had the power to penetrate into the deepest recesses of the day ? and night. The result was an inexorable lengthening of the working day, especially for those working in high-pressure jobs, because of an expectation that they could always be reached by email ? and a corresponding expectation that any message would receive a speedy response.

Email has become the central communications channel of all modern organisations, to the point where none of them could now function without it. But there’s increasing evidence ? both anecdotal and empirical ? that it has become dysfunctional. It eats into people’s working and thinking time, for example, distracts them from doing “real” work and generates guilt feelings that ratchet up stress levels to unsustainable levels.

In the old world of desktop PCs, you could at least leave it behind when you left the office. But the advent of the smartphone changed all that. Email has now infiltrated leisure time, family time ? even sleep time. It’s become a monster that’s destroying our lives.

Deep down, most of us know this. But we daren’t talk about it out loud, for fear of seeming inadequate. After all, our colleagues seem to be able to cope. So each individual comes to see his or her inability to cope with the email torrent as a personal failing, and therefore as a problem to be solved on a personal level. We make resolutions to be more efficient, to respond immediately (and as succinctly as possible) to each message as it arrives, to archive and file messages at regular intervals, and so on.

These personal strategies appear to work for a week or two, but they’re doomed to failure. This is partly because the more efficient you are at responding to email, the more quickly your inbox fills up in return. But it’s mainly because the email problem is a systemic one rather than a manifestation of the inadequacies of individuals. If you work in an organisation that is dysfunctionally addicted to email, no action that you take on your own is going to solve that; indeed, it may have serious downsides for you.

Which brings us to some intriguing research by a Harvard academic, Leslie Perlow. Four years ago, Professor Perlow conducted a pilot experiment with a six-person team at the Boston Consulting Group, an elite business consulting firm. The team was a classic example of “always-on” professionals who were caught in what Perlow christened the “cycle of responsiveness”.

“The pressure to be on,” she writes, “usually stems from some seemingly legitimate reason, such as requests from clients or customers or teammates in different time zones. People begin adjusting to these demands ? adapting the technology they use, altering their daily schedules, the way they work, even the way they live their lives and interact with their families and friends ? to be better able to meet the increased demands on their time. Once colleagues experience this increased responsiveness, their own requests expand. Already working long hours, most just accept these additional demands ? whether they are urgent or not ? and those who don’t risk being branded as less committed to their work.”

Perlow persuaded the team to try an experiment ? collectively to agree to disconnect from their smartphones and computers for a few predetermined hours every week. She called it Predictable Time Off (PTO). The results surprised both her and them. The consultants reported that they felt more motivated, had increased job satisfaction and were more satisfied with their work-life balance. They also reported that they had become more efficient, effective and collaborative as a team. The PTO experiment was then replicated across most of the teams working in the BCG’s north-eastern US offices ? with results that confirmed the findings of the pilot study.

Perlow has now published an extensive account of her research in a new book, Sleeping with Your Smartphone, which should be required reading for any senior executive concerned about the dysfunctionality of “always-on” connectivity. It shows that, while the email monster might be impossible to slay, it can be tamed by collective action. And that’s definitely something worth wishing for.

Estella Warren Esther Cañadas Eva Green Eva Longoria Eva Mendes

Do you ever have those moments where suddenly lunch becomes the most important event in your life?

Surely, I spend most of my days planning, cooking, and photographing food, but this was different.

I was running around town a few days ago taking care of household matters, such as changing the oil of my car, when I was overcome by this urge to run home and make myself a nice lunch. Not a quick salad like most days when I have to run, but something else. I needed some quinoa and sweet potato cakes in my life.

I had not been planning on styling or shooting anything that day, but I had to return home. I left half of my checklist unfinished and came into the kitchen to tend to this pressing matter – lunch.

This is how these quinoa and sweet potato cakes came about, which took no more than half an hour to make I must add. I enjoyed every morsel and had leftovers for Jon and Miren when they arrived home from school.

How about you? Did you have to drop everything to run to the kitchen to cook that one recipe? Would love to hear.

Quinoa and Sweet Potato Cakes

makes 8 cakes

1/2 cup (90 g) quinoa, rinsed
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for frying
1 small yellow onion, diced
1 garlic clove, minced
1 cup (150 g) grated sweet potato
1/4 teaspoon coriander
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
2 eggs
1/3 cup (50 g) gluten-free, panko-style breadcrumbs (make them by drying gluten-free bread slices in the oven and chopping them in food processor)
1/3 cup finely grated parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley
1 tablespoon finely chopped chives
Greens, radishes, green onions, as garnish

Bring 1 cup (250 ml) of water to a boil in a small saucepan over high heat. Add quinoa and 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Stir, reduce heat to medium low, cover with a lid, and cook for 20 minutes until quinoa has absorbed all the water and it’s tender. Set aside to cool.

Heat a medium saute pan over medium high heat. Add the olive oil and cook the onions and garlic for 3 minutes. Add the grated sweet potato, 1/4 teaspoon salt, coriander, and black pepper, and cook for another 3 minutes. Set aside to cool slightly.

In a bowl, whisk together the eggs, breadcrumbs, parmesan cheese, parsley, and chives. Add the cooled quinoa and sweet potato mixture. Stir to combine.

Heat a large saute pan over medium high heat. Add enough olive oil to cover the bottom os the pan. Spoon 1/4 cup of the mixture and shape it into a round cake. Add enough cakes to the pan without overcrowding it. Cook for 3 minutes on each side or until golden. Finish frying all the cakes. Drain them on paper towels if needed.

Serve the cakes while warm with a green salad with radishes and chopped green onions.

Amerie Amy Cobb Amy Smart Ana Beatriz Barros Ana Hickmann

Ok, I'm getting bored with my standard dinners, and am looking for interesting recipes. However, I have several challenges, since I have to meet various dietary restrictions for my family.

So, I come to you for help and inspiration. And, here is the exhaustive list of restrictions:

Lower calorie
Well balanced (as close to equal as possible of protein, carbs, and fats)
low sodium
Very low potassium – no beans or legumes, very little dairy, no fresh tomatoes (a very little bit of canned tomatoes are OK), potatoes only if they are boiled and/or soaked first, no leafy vegetables, no squash, absolutely no bananas, and very limited fresh fruit.
While I love whole grains, the rest of the family is meh about them, so if whole grains (brown rice, quinoa) are included, the recipe better be really good to "make up" for that
No shellfish
Budget friendly
And, finally, since I get most of my meats (except chicken breasts) from raising them ourselves, any cuts of meats need to be as little processed as possible.

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Alicia Keys Alicia Witt Amanda Bynes Amanda Detmer Amanda Marcum

Originally published in the Observer on 24 May 1964

The Mod and Rocker season will probably last in its present form until August Bank Holiday. It will feature renewed forays to the south coast and possibly to Southend. Last Monday’s fighting at Brighton and Margate, followed by skirmishes throughout the week in London, is then expected to enter its final phase. That, in any event, was the opinion of a Mod who stood outside the Scene, the rhythm and blues club off Great Windmill Street, early yesterday. It was raining and dark and he wore sunglasses.

He was a smallish boy who came from Liverpool to find work and had got a job loading crates in a London milk depot. The languid Merseyside tone underplayed the alternating exhilaration and disappointments of his life ? the T-shirt he got by “chatting up a Yank”; the purple heart pills he could buy at 18s 6d for 20; the singlehanded fight he almost had in Paddington with three Rockers; and the battle of Margate. “We just charged up the beach. There were 800 of us and 100 Rockers. I didn’t see what was going on because I was at the back with my tart.”

Last week’s fighting in London isolated both factions even further from the public, which welcomed the hearty talk about “hooligans… rats… and miserable specimens” from the seaside magistrates’ bench. The heavy sentences handed down last week have led to some ominous threats of retaliation. “If anyone fined me £75,” a Mod said, “I’d go back and do some real damage; put a few windows through with a hammer.”

Mods and Rockers have co-existed comparatively well for a year or so ? the Mods, neatly dressed and on scooters, the Rockers in studded leather jackets and on motorbikes. The Rockers may have jeered at the Mods’ fancier ways (sublimating sex, as one Mod’s father put it, to the problems of motorbike clutchplates) but they had been slowly copying the Mods’ form of dress. When, for example, the Mods’ high-heel boots went out of fashion, the Rockers started wearing them.

Mods are losing interest in their scooters but they do care about changing fashions and spend £4 or £5 a week to keep up to date. The latest trend is towards American crew-cuts, T-shirts with big letters, Y for Yale, H for Harvard.

Seventy-five per cent of the Scene’s members are reckoned to be middle class and can usually afford to follow the trends; the rest tend to say that fashion is no longer so important.

Four of the Mods outside the Scene at 2am yesterday ? two still carrying their Margate war wounds ? said they stayed out all night because they wanted to enjoy themselves while they still had time. One said: “My old lady raised hell the first few times. I’m not going home tonight. I might go in for a wash-up tomorrow but I’ll be out again all tomorrow night.”

This is an edited extract

Brittany Lee Brittany Murphy Brittany Snow Brittny Gastineau Brody Dalle

Despite the fact that I love seafood, I don’t have many seafood recipes posted on here on EBF. I’ve decided it’s time for that to change! To kick things off I’m sharing a delicious and healthy salmon recipe today. The best part about having fish for dinner is that it cooks super fast and you [...]

Brittany Lee Brittany Murphy Brittany Snow Brittny Gastineau Brody Dalle

Venice Baroque Orchestra/Chryssicos
(Naive)

You might mistake this for a recording of Vivaldi’s opera L’Olimpiade (The Olympic Games) which, after long neglect, and as a nod towards London 2012, is suddenly back enjoying UK premiere performances: on stage at Garsington next month and in concert at the Lufthansa festival last night. Instead, this is a “pasticcio”, with music by 16 composers set to the same libretto by Metastasio in which, yes, the winner gets the girl. Vivaldi is represented by only one aria (Mentre dormi). The familiarity of the other names will depend on your passion for (mainly) Italian composers from the 1730s to 1800: Galuppi, Caldara, Jommelli, Cherubini and Piccini among them. Sung and played with freshness and spirit by the Venice Baroque and six youthful soloists, this disc ? full of showpiece da capo arias and gleeful coloratura ? may up your game on the obscure opera front.

China Chow Chloë Sevigny Christina Aguilera Christina Applegate Christina DaRe

Dear friends… we are back from our trip to the Basque Country. I already miss it very much.

It has taken me days to recover this time – must be age?

I was looking through the thousands of photos I took (yes, nearly 2,000) and wondering if there was a theme behind them all. I will show you soon. I think you will clearly see it.

But in the meantime I leave you with photos of a recipe I made inspired by a spring-filled dish my aunt and I ate at Boroa a few days ago. Cannot wait to share more.

I missed you.

Amber Brkich Amber Heard Amber Valletta America Ferrera Amerie

Scenario:  Husband’s 30th birthday party.  Surprise party.  He’ll be out of the house for the 3 hours prior to the party, at which point I’ll have to acquire and prepare all the food and decorate the house, while taking care of a 10 month old.
Ideas for food?  I’m already ordering pizza
What are your easiest party recipes?

Ali Larter Alice Dodd Alicia Keys Alicia Witt Amanda Bynes

Eagle-eyed spotters can see ospreys, quails and even skylarks in Britain’s towns and cities

Every British city has something to offer the curious birder. You’ll find snipes, pied wagtails and meadow pipits on the brownfield sites of Leicester, for example. In York, there are little ringed plovers living in gravel pits on urban wasteland. In Old Trafford, Manchester, I’ve seen sparrowhawks and cormorants fly over while I’ve been watching the match. Show me a city, and I can show you a bird ? that’s my philosophy.

My enthusiasm for city birding goes back to my childhood. When I was a young kid, birdwatchers came in one guise: tweed-wearing, walking-stick wielding, white, middle-class, middle-aged country-dwelling men. As a black kid from London, I was a true anomaly.

I was born with an innate curiosity about birds. They held a special fascination for me from an early age. I remember trying to lure birds by sticking scraps of newspaper to my clothes and squatting by the back door surrounded by pieces of bread ? Needless to say, my early attempts at attracting birds failed, so I resorted to exploring my immediate surroundings, studying every bird book I could get my hands on. Over time, I became a fully-fledged “urban birder”.

Even today, birders remain sceptical of the term, shunning the city in favour of deserted coastal headlands, but I’ve had some incredible experiences of birding in cities. Nowadays, my local patch is Wormwood Scrubs in west London. During the migratory season in April and May, I’m out there every morning from sunrise. I’ve seen ospreys flapping overhead and heard quails singing in the grass. And I consider myself blessed because, for eight years, my all-time favourite bird, the ring ouzel (a blackbird-sized thrush with a white crescent on its chest), has stopped off here on its migratory path. Predominantly found in remote mountainous areas in the north and west of Britain, these birds are really hard to spot. Even in their natural habitat you can’t get within 100 yards of them, so I feel incredibly lucky to have them visit my patch.

The most emotional experience I’ve had birding occurred in April 2010, when I noticed a pair of skylarks had decided to settle on Wormwood Scrubs. They are such rural birds I felt duty bound to protect their space, so I worked out where they were nesting and warded off the dogs-walkers in a desperate attempt to encourage their stay. But sadly, the clamour of the city proved too much. I was there the morning they took off east, never to return. That was probably my saddest day in birding.

That said, there are birds that thrive in urban settings. The black redstart, for example, is the archetypal urban bird. They first bred in the capital in 1922 and, during the second world war, nested in bomb sites. There are only 25-73 pairs of these birds left breeding in the UK and yet, occasionally, in bustling Soho, you can look up and find a male singing on top of an aerial. How amazing is that?

While not every species can survive the city, urban areas provide nesting, resting and feeding sites in a multitude of habitats. This is partly because urban centres generate a “heat island” (the temperature can be three degrees warmer in the day and 10 degrees higher at night than the countryside), but also because we city-dwellers love to feed our garden birds.

Nowadays, I offer urban birder masterclasses. These guided tours can be on your doorstep: in local cemeteries, on heathland, even in the concrete-clad city centre. I’m not trying to turn everyone into a birder, just to give city-dwellers more of an awareness of the spectacular sights that surround them.

Urban birding for beginners

The following will help fledging birders, but remember you don’t have to identify everything: just enjoy birds for the beautiful creatures they are.

Feed the birds
Gardens are great places to learn about urban birds. By providing nest boxes and food you will attract garden birds. Surprise visitors might include a marauding sparrowhawk, a squawking parakeet or a handsome great spotted woodpecker.

Buy a book and binoculars
Keep a bird book by your kitchen window (the RSPB Handbook of British Birds is ideal for beginners). Soon you will be able to identify everything that ventures into your garden. And ask for a pair of binoculars for your birthday. They will open up a whole new world of delight.

Look up
Even in the very centre of Britain’s cities, birds are flying overhead. You only have to look up to notice gulls, wood pigeons and peregrines soaring through the skyline.

Find fellow birders
Hang out with and learn from more experienced birders by joining your local bird club or RSPB group.

Mark your territory
Find an area close to your home and start watching it on a regular basis. Get to know the resident birds and, over a year, you will notice changes in the populations as the different seasonal visitors make their appearance.

? David Lindo is a writer and broadcaster. His latest book, The Urban Birder, is published by New Holland at £9.99. Watch David explore his local patch at guardian.co.uk/environment

Cristina Dumitru Daisy Fuentes Dania Ramirez Danica Patrick Daniella Alonso

Some time last year, I was approached by fellow blogger Mayssam Samaha of Will Travel For Food to see if I was interested in teaching a class in Montreal where she resides.

It was a crazy time for me as I was in the middle of writing my upcoming book, but I knew it was something I wanted to do in a city I have been eager to visit for a while. She patiently waited for me and today, I am thrilled to announce the workshop that I will teaching late this spring in Montreal.

Two full-day food styling and photography workshops at the SAT’s Lab. Please do check out this space even if you are not planning to attend the class. It’s amazing.

Here are the details:

When: June 16 or June 17, 2012, from 9am to 4pm.

Where: The SAT?s FoodLab, Montreal.

What: A 6-hour food styling and food photography workshop.

Cost: $300 for the 6-hour workshop (includes lunch).

Space is limited to 10 students per workshop.

The workshop will be taught in English.

Registration will open on Monday March 5th at 10am EST. To register, please visit Mayssam’s blog.

Will you join us?

Jessica Simpson Zooey Deschanel Aaliyah Abbie Cornish Adriana Lima

iD Fest, Derby

“Exploring identity through cinema” is about as broad a remit as you can get away with, but any event featuring Brian Blessed, Mike Hodges and Paddy Considine is always welcome. They’ll be talking about their careers and looking back on old favourites. There are new films, including a Kent fruit-picking mystery (Strawberry Fields) and a Korean supernatural thriller (Haunters). But the main draw is an eclectic mix of films such as OSS 117: Cairo Nest Of Spies, Rupert Everett zombie movie Dellamorte Dellamore and Bogart noir classic In A Lonely Place.

QUAD, Thu to 27 May

Bauhaus Film Season, London

They did everything from pottery to architecture, so it was inevitable the Bauhaus would stray into film-making somewhere along the way. Complementing the Barbican’s current exhibition on the German design movement (to 12 Aug), this season brings together Bauhaus-related documentaries and rare abstract, animated and projected experiments by Bauhaus students, mostly accompanied by talks and live music. Towering over the Bauhaus film legacy is versatile Hungarian artist/teacher László Moholy-Nagy, whose own short films are augmented by a recreation of the 1929 film festival he curated with Hans Richter (with films by Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger, among others), a documentary on his eventful life, and an appearance from his daughter, Hattula.

Barbican Screen, EC2, Fri to 31 May

Showcomotion, Sheffield

There’s much here you won’t find at grown-up festivals, including homemade sweets, fancy-dress events and workshops on comedy, puppetry and astronomy. The films, too, stray from the predictable, showing what’s out there for young audiences beyond the multiplex behemoths ? though there are a few of those too (forthcoming Dr Seuss animation The Lorax, for example). In Canada’s The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mum, an adopted girl imagines her own parentage; in Belgian fable On The Sly, another little girl runs off to the forest; while Maori Boy Genius follows New Zealand’s future Obama (possibly). Closer to home, the team behind poppy CBBC comedy Sadie J share their secrets, and there’s a preview of Sky’s new Sinbad.

Showroom, Fri to 3 Jun

Cine-Excess, London

Mining the golden years when too much was never enough, Cine-Excess debates issues of censorship and exploitation, reappraises maligned reputations and gives you movies like they don’t, won’t and can’t make any more. Two titans of 1970s Italian cinema are in attendance: Enzo G Castellari and Sergio Martino. The former is best known for Tarantino-influencing The Inglorious Bastards and spaghetti westerns such as Keoma; the latter for florid, satanic giallo movies such as the brilliantly titled Your Vice Is A Locked Door And Only I Have The Key. Also look out for Jack Cardiff’s freak horror The Mutations and Aussie shocker Fair Game.

Odeon Covent Garden, WC2 & Italian Cultural Institute, SW1, Thu to 26 May

Ana Paula Lemes Ananda Lewis Angela Marcello Angelina Jolie Anna Faris

Lux/ICA Biennial Of Moving Images, London

As you might expect from an institution associated with the development of video art, Lux’s first biennial, conceived in conjunction with the ICA, has all bases covered, from screenings to education and events. Eleven artists and curators at the forefront of the medium have been invited to put programmes together. These include director Ben Rivers, feted for his hand-processed documentary portraits (Sun); and Pulp guitarist and experimental film curator Mark Webber, whose 1990s ICA-based music and film club Little Stabs At Happiness kicks off proceedings (Thu). Other highlights include a programme of Luther Price’s hallucinatory reconfigurations of old, junked film (Fri). There’s also a five-day school for artists, live performances, a student symposium and writers-in-residence responding to the goings-on.

ICA, SW1, Thu to 27 May

Skye Sherwin

Yto Barrada & Bedwyr Williams, London

A pile of bricks stands dead centre surrounded by a building site; a ladder is propped against a fig tree giving access to a raft beached among its branches: Yto Barrada’s photographs afford a cryptic significance to the apparently banal features of her native Tangier. The subjects might seem inconsequential, yet the overall aesthetic is meticulously considered. The accompanying show by Bedwyr Williams relies on a more madcap form of mystification. He evokes an atmosphere of cultural siege, taping up windows and piling up sandbags. Enter his Stevenson Screen and you hear the whimpers of Dr Jekyll metamorphosing into Mr Hyde. Williams becomes an artist precisely by pretending to be one or another.

Ikon Gallery, to 8 Jul

Robert Clark

Yael Bartana, London

And Europe Will Be Stunned ? might be Israeli artist Bartana’s masterpiece: a deeply provocative meditation on Jewish identity that levels political punches with surreal wit. The film trilogy begins with a young idealist speechifying in a weed-strewn stadium to a few kids in uniform. It’s a broken echo of the Nazi party glory days, of the Hitler youth and Olympic spectacle. This fledgling leader though is Jewish, and he calls for his people to return, not to Israel but to Poland, site of the largest concentration camp exterminations.This tragicomic epic’s immediate analogy is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but Bartana strikes at broader questions about utopian dreams dissolving into dark nationalistic tendencies.

Hornsey Town Hall, N8, Tue to 1 Jul

SS

Frida Kahlo And Diego Rivera, Barnard Castle

The fraught but soulful relationship between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera ? their fights and reconciliations; their public image as well, of course, as their inventive neo-traditional paintings ? became inseparably identified with the struggles of the Mexican revolution. Rarely has great art been so closely aligned with a political fight. This photographic exhibition charts a love story that is rarely lacking in drama: after quarrelling with Rivera, the exiled Leon Trotsky, who had an affair with Kahlo, was assassinated with an ice pick. But, above all the photographs remind us of Kahlo’s dignified beauty through torturous ill health.

Bowes Museum, to 24 Jun

RC

News From Nowhere, Colchester

This show tracks 100 years of artists looking to the future, experimenting with fresh technology and fashioning sci-fi visions. Earlier works include László Moholy-Nagy’s abstract set designs for his montages of an underground city in 1936 film Things To Come, written by HG Wells. The post-apocalyptic musing continues with Roger Hiorns’s recent pulverised aeroplane: a blasted grey landscape of machine dust. Lynn Chadwick’s stainless steel beasts are like armoured monsters, while Lygia Clark’s small-scale “animals”, rendered with aluminium squares and circles, provide a more inviting vision of the metallic and organic.

Firstsite, Sun to 27 Aug

SS

Fiona Rae, Leeds

Fiona Rae’s world is one of uneasy enchantment. Atmospheric spaces are inhabited by a visual vocabulary of ambiguous signs, florid emblems, daubs, spillages and filigree embellishments. While thoroughly painterly, her works emerge from a post-Photoshop world of image samplings and spatial layerings. This show of 17 large works from the last 20 years demonstrates her metamorphic methods as baroque elaborations mutate into geisha cartoons. While courting lyrical pleasantries, Rae always deepens her images with hints of an underlying disorientation and dread of being forever lost in this world of wonders. Her paintings appear spontaneous and have a refreshing affect, but are incredibly painstaking.

Leeds Art Gallery, to 26 Aug

RC

Things That Have Interested Me, London

New work by an intriguing cross-section of 14 young London-based artists is brought together here in the ad-lib style of the Arnold Bennett collection of essays from which the show takes its name. The lineup includes Simon & Tom Bloor, who’ve made a name for themselves in the past few years with projects that pay half-ironic homage to Britain’s unloved, ill-conceived public sculpture and town planning schemes. Dan Coopey’s work explores the latent potential of images out of context, from the bold, bright abstract shapes of a children’s book illustrator to the animations (AKA moving wallpaper) for Dancing On Ice. For their ongoing project, Peles Empire ? collaborative duo Barbara Wolff and Katharina Stoever ? apparently hold a funhouse mirror up to previous eras’ decor in their trippy sculptures, paintings and prints.

Waterside Contemporary, N1, Thu to 14 Jul

SS

Sublime Transactions, Ambleside

It’s 100 years since Mary Louisa Armitt bequeathed her library to the people of Ambleside to help safeguard the town’s rich cultural heritage. Here, 15 artists present work in a centenary celebration, proving the relevance of the English Romantic tradition at a time in which our creative intervention into the natural world is of crucial concern. Coleridge, Wordsworth and the local Dada exile Kurt Schwitters are all paid homage by artists avoiding the cliches of tourist landscape traditions, including David Toop, Riitta Ikonen, Karoline Hjorth and Sir Peter Blake. Unmissable if you are in the Lakes this summer.

The Armitt Museum, to 22 Mar 2013

RC

Eva Mendes Evangeline Lilly Eve Fergie Foxy Brown

Some species emerged unusually early due to the warm March while others have been hit by April deluge, conservationists say

The spring weather has baffled Britain’s butterflies, with some emerging unusually early due to the warm March while others were hit by the April deluge, conservationists said on Friday.

Some spring species emerged several weeks early in March, but the wettest April on record and the continuing rain this month has delayed the appearance of many butterflies.

And wildlife charity Butterfly Conservation is warning that if the wet conditions continue it could affect the breeding success of some species later in the year.

Cold, wet weather makes butterflies less active, reducing feeding and mating.

Among those to put in an early appearance were the small blue butterfly, which was seen on 30 March on the Isle of Wight, one of the earliest dates recorded for the species and several weeks ahead of its usual emergence between mid-April and early May.

The wood white, which usually emerges in late April or May, was seen on 10 April in Surrey, while the threatened pearl-bordered fritillary was also recorded earlier than usual, Butterfly Conservation said.

But as the wet weather took hold, butterflies started to be spotted later than normal, with the common blue and brown argus appearing in early May, rather than being seen in mid-April which they would be in warm years.

Marsh fritillaries and adonis blues both emerged in the final week of April in 2011 but were not seen until the second week of May this year.

Richard Fox, Butterfly Conservation surveys manager, said: “Overall, butterflies have experienced an unusual spring so far – the mild winter and very warm March led to some extremely early emergences, but the cold, wet April delayed the emergence of other species.

“The worry about this April is that the butterflies that did emerge will have poor breeding success due to the bad weather.

“Unless conditions improve in the next few weeks their opportunities to breed will be very limited and, therefore, we may see population crashes later in the year or next spring.”

He added: “Last year we had a hot spring and a poor summer. This year we’re having a poor spring, so let’s hope the summer is better.”

Ashley Scott Ashley Tappin Ashley Tisdale Asia Argento Aubrey ODay

‘It’ll be that smile that keeps Simon warm through the student holidays when he’s alone, smelling Anna’s pillow’

It’s over. Adam and Jane ? the BT couple who lived out their ups, their downs and their amazing phone and internet service from BT in six years of adverts ? are no longer on our TVs. But their son Joe has moved out to university, and is now caught up in an increasingly dark love triangle between himself and flatmates Simon and Anna. They live in a clean and spacious student flat. No one is eating beans from the tin or ironing their clothes using hair straighteners, and Anna makes a cup of tea without smelling the mug first. Something’s not right.

When Anna reveals she’s “a Duran Duran fan” (because every 19-year-old girl can’t get enough of your mum’s favourite band) Simon pitches in: he’s really into Duran Duran too. He’s not, but he can secretly download all of the albums quickly, using their amazing broadband service. Legally, of course: when they’re not singing along to Rio, today’s students are known to be staunch supporters of paying for music through the proper sites. When Anna hears Hungry Like The Wolf playing through Simon’s open door, she smiles at him. That’s a mistake. It’ll be that smile that keeps Simon warm through the student holidays when he’s alone, smelling Anna’s pillow. That smile that makes him stifle a soft gasp when he prises a ball of her hair from her hairbrush or picks Anna’s old toothbrush out of the bin. Simon will treasure that smile. Every note of Girls On Film brings Simon closer to Anna. She just doesn’t know it yet.

See the ad here

Brittany Lee Brittany Murphy Brittany Snow Brittny Gastineau Brody Dalle

Are you an old-school supermarket baguette fan, do you prefer a simple Italian-style toast or have you your own approach to combining cloves and loaves?

“Anyone who says they don’t like garlic bread must be fibbing” declare the authors of retro recipe bible The Prawn Cocktail Years ? and, as usual, I’m in complete agreement. Hot and crisp from the oven, sodden with rich, punchy butter, it’s the pleasure that never, ever palls. Even the plastic-wrapped supermarket version, pallid yet powerful, has its tawdry charms: it seems garlic butter can do no wrong.

That said, not all members of the pungent pantheon are created equal: Nigel Slater’s quite outrageously good parmesan garlic bread has been closest to my heart for some many years now ? and has sustained many, many house parties over the years: a burnt tongue being apparently a small price to pay for seizing the first slice from the steaming foil, especially after a few drinks ? but could there be something even better lurking quietly out there in a pool of delicious grease? The Pandora’s box of possibility finally opened, I can’t stop until I’m satisfied I’ve tasted the best garlic bread has to offer me.

Bread: droves of loaves

Nigel uses a baguette, the classic British choice. Jamie Oliver goes for a garlic pizza in Jamie’s Italy, Nigella has something called a garlic and parsley “hearthbread” in How to be a Domestic Goddess, Giorgio Locatelli gives a recipe for a confit garlic foccacia in Made in Italy, and America’s legendary Barefoot Contessa, Ina Garten, uses ciabatta. So it’s fair to say that there’s a diversity of opinion on the matter of bread.

Having made them all, I’d say the most important thing for garlic bread is the softness of crumb. Although it shouldn’t quite be soggy, it should be up to the job of absorbing obscene amounts of garlic butter. This rules out Jamie’s pizza base, which, as modernity dictates, is thin and crisp: there’s just nowhere for the garlic to go. Although Locatelli doesn’t use garlic butter (of which more later), foccacia doesn’t seem right either: it’s too soft for anything more than olive oil. Nigella’s hearthbread has potential, although as she smears the garlic on top, it doesn’t really penetrate the bread.

Best are Nigel’s baguette and Garten’s ciabatta: the former doing its usual excellent job of turning itself into a buttery, parsley-flecked sponge, and the latter offering a bit more structure, which I traitorously enjoy.

Garlic: a light bulb moment

Next up, there’s the garlic issue. Nigel, my point of reference on all things garlic bread related, uses crushed raw garlic, mashed into butter and baked, and Jamie smashes a couple of cloves with olive oil and drizzles them over the top of the pizza. Elaine McCardel, author of The Italian Dish blog, rubs grilled bread with a cut garlic clove to make something called a fettunta which is surprisingly tasty, but unapologetically harsh: not quite the result I’m after.

Everyone else cooks their garlic before use. Garten drops it into hot olive oil before using it, to slightly neutralise the flavour, while Nigella roasts the garlic until soft before puréeing it and adding it to the top of her hearthbread. This seems to me to miss the point of garlic bread or, at least, the kind of garlic bread I’m seeking: I have no doubt Nigella is a woman who also appreciates the joys of a good old-school baguette. The sweetness of a baked bulb is undeniably delicious, but garlic bread should pack a punch, and this doesn’t. The same goes for Locatelli’s confit garlic, which is simmered in milk and sugar until sticky and almost jammy: it’s lovely, but it doesn’t hit the spot. I’m going to stick with raw garlic, crushed or finely chopped, to release the juices and spread the flavour through the butter or oil as far as possible.

The vehicle

Apart from the fettunta and Giorgio Locatelli’s foccacia, which both deploy garlic in a different form, it’s customary for the garlic to come in a hefty dollop of fat, which is one of the reasons why garlic bread is so very delicious. (This is also the reason that I decide not to try Dan Lepard’s recipe, lovely as it looks: it’s not the kind of garlic bread I seek.) Nigel and Richard Bertinet go for butter. Jamie and Nigella both opt for olive oil, and Garten uses a mixture, spreading the bread generously with butter, then topping it with garlic and herbs in olive oil. Oil, to my taste, simply makes the bread seem greasy: it’s great for dipping, but it doesn’t seem to soak into the bread in the same way as butter ? I’ve probably just got hopelessly rich Anglo-Saxon tastes, but for me, it’s butter all the way.

The marriage

Now we come to the blessed union of the two ingredients. I’ve already dismissed Jamie and Nigella’s method of spreading the garlic paste on top, which not only stops it soaking into the bread, but also, in Nigella’s case, gives it a slightly acrid flavour. Locatelli’s complex folding process won’t work for garlic butter. Bertinet, who’s using thick slices of leftover bread, spreads it on top and bakes “until the butter has melted and the bread is golden”, which is nice, but leads to a lot of leakage (to spill garlic butter on to barren ground is surely a sin) while Nigel, using a whole loaf, cuts it into half slices in the classic fashion, and stuffs each with butter until it squeaks. Garten, presumably for ease because ciabattas are traditionally rather flat, demands that the bread should be sliced laterally which, thanks to the workings of gravity means that the bottom half of each slice is saturated, and the top fluffy and disappointingly innocent of garlic. This should not be a bite of two halves.

Extras

Fortunately, few people seem to have dared to mess with perfection. Nigel adds generous amounts of grated parmesan to his garlic butter, so that “the cheese form[s] thin strings as you tear one piece of bread from the next”. Although not classic, the cheese acts as seasoning, so I think it’s allowable, mostly because leaving it out might mean my friend Ian, a garlic bread maker supreme who once produced 14 Slater loaves in 20 minutes for a Christmas party, never speaks to me again.

Garten uses a half and half mix of oregano and parsley, which I don’t like: the herbs shouldn’t be too assertive here, and oregano doesn’t go with butter in my opinion. Bertinet adds a squeeze of lemon juice, which I really like: while cutting through the richness of the butter would be nothing short of a crime here, a slight tang works brilliantly with the parsley and garlic. He also prefers curly to flat-leaf parsley for garlic bread, but in this case, I can’t really tell the difference. Although be warned, neither it or the lemon will be enough to give you fresh breath afterwards.

Perfect garlic bread

1 ciabatta loaf (Richard Bertinet has an excellent recipe in his book Crust)
100g salted butter, at room temperature
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
Small bunch of whichever parsley you prefer, finely chopped
40g parmesan, grated, plus a little extra for topping
Squeeze of lemon juice

1. Preheat the oven to 220C. Very carefully cut the ciabatta into slices, making sure not to go right through, and put it in the middle of a piece of foil large enough to wrap around it.

2. Beat together the other ingredients, apart from the extra parmesan until well combined, then gently force the butter between the slices (this will be messy, but it’s well worth it). Sprinkle the top of the loaf with the remaining cheese, and seal the foil around the loaf.

3. Bake for about 20 minutes, then open the foil and bake for another five minutes, and devour as soon as it’s cool enough to handle.

Is garlic bread the savoury equivalent of chocolate brownies ? the food everyone likes, or is there someone out there who can resist its charms? Are you an old-school supermarket baguette fan, or do you prefer a simple Italian-style toast? And honestly, is there any such thing as too much garlic?

Chyler Leigh Ciara Cindy Crawford Cindy Taylor Cinthia Moura

Loomus: A visual guide to the interpretation of dog expressions

Brittany Daniel Brittany Lee Brittany Murphy Brittany Snow Brittny Gastineau

Baby sea eagles, baby penguins and owlets are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

Cindy Taylor Cinthia Moura Claudette Ortiz Coco Lee Connie Nielsen

Brazil Fast Food

Brazil Fast Food Corp, the second largest fast-food restaurant chain in Brazil, has announced financial results for the first quarter 2012 ended 31 March 2012.

• System-wide sales totalled R$254.2m, up 15.0% from the first quarter 2011.
• Revenue totalled R$60.5m, up 10.2% from the first quarter 2011.
• Points of sale totalled 891 at 31 March 2012, up from 781 at the end of first quarter 2011.
• Ebitda was R$7.1m, up 7.3% from the first quarter 2011.
• Operating income increased 13.8% year-over-year to R$5.5m.
• Net income was R$3.4m, or R$0.42 per basic and diluted share.

• Financial news, 9 August 2011 9 AUG 2011 | Financial

Yum! Brands

The Yum! Brands Inc board of directors has declared a dividend of $0.285 per share of common stock. The quarterly dividend will be distributed 3 August 2012 to shareholders of record at the close of business on 13 July 2012.

• KFC introduces homegrown canola oil 17 MAY 2012 | Ingredients
• Yum! brings fuel-?efficient cooking and kitchens to schools 17 JAN 2012 | CSR

Prestige Brands

Prestige Brands Holdings Inc has announced record results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year ended 31 March 2012.

Revenues for the fourth fiscal quarter were $134.0m, $37.6m or 39.1% above the prior year comparable quarter’s results of $96.4m. Organic revenues for the fourth fiscal quarter grew $7.2m, or 7.5% over the prior year comparable quarter.

Revenues from the Company’s nine legacy core OTC brands increased $8.2m or 14.0% over the prior year comparable quarter. These brands are Chloraseptic, Clear Eyes, Compound W, Little Remedies, The Doctor’s NightGuard, Efferdent, PediaCare, Dramamine and Luden’s.

Revenues from two months of ownership of the GSK Brands accounted for $30.4m of the increase. The GSK Brands’ acquisition increases the core brand group by five. These brands are Beano, BC and Goody’s, and Debrox in the US, and Gaviscon in Canada.

• Prestige Brands completes purchase of GSK brands 3 APR 2012 | Snacks

Milk Link

Milk Link has announced details of a solid financial and trading performance over the last year. Audited financial highlights for the year ended 31 March 2012 include:

• Group turnover up £42m to £628m (+7.1%).
• Turnover per litre up from 38.6ppl to 41.9ppl (+8.5%).
• An increase in comparable Ebitda of £4.5m to £33.7m (+ 15.4%). It should be noted that the 2010/11 reported Ebitda was £34.4m, which included £5.1m of Member ?levy?. However, from 1 April 2011, the ?levy? ended for the majority of Milk Link Members and therefore the comparative Ebitda was £29.2m.
• Comparable Profit Before Tax up by £4.3m to £14.3m (+42.7%).
• An increase in the Member milk price during the year of an average 2.85ppl. This meant that in comparison to the previous year, Milk Link generated and paid out an additional £33.7m to its Members for their milk.
• An increase in Member Processing Interest Payment relating to the 2011/12 financial year of £2m to £5.95m equating to a 12.8% return on Members? Qualifying Loan balances.
• Cumulative Reserves increased by £3.4m to £13.5m (+34.2%).
• A slight rise in the ratio of third party borrowings to Members? Funds (gearing) from 1.18 to 1.19.
• An increase in Group borrowings of £2.1m to £82m. However, at the same time, capital expenditure increased to £10.0m compared to £5.5m in the prior year.
• Member milk volumes increased year on year by 148m litres up over 14%.

• Milk Link confirms new milk prices 8 MAY 2012 | Dairy
• Milk Link to upgrade sites and £2.4m investment revealed 15 FEB 2012 | Farming

Recent financial news

• Financial digest, 16 May 2012: Coke, Monster, SodaStream
• Financial digest, 10 May 2012: Carlsberg, Symrise, Wilmar
• Financial digest, 12 April 2012: Cargill, Givaudan
• Financial digest, 4 April 2012: Lifeway, Co-op, Fonterra
• Financial digest, 26 March 2012: General Mills, Tingyi, Yum!
• Financial digest, 13 March 2012: Del Monte, McDonald?s
• Financial digest, 8 March 2012: Senomyx, Nespresso, Nichols
• Financial digest, 27 February 2012: Monster, Arla, CCL
• Financial digest, 22 Feb 2012: Campbell?s, Carlsberg, Heinz
• Financial news, 2 February 2012: Unilever, Dairy Crest

• Read more financial news here.

Carol Grow Carrie Underwood Cat Power Catherine Bell Chandra West

For nearly three decades, many studies have confirmed the cranberry?s urinary tract health benefits.

New research provides additional evidence of these benefits while also examining how the cranberry helps bolster immunity and antioxidant support.

With 15 million urinary tract infection (UTI) cases that occur in the US annually, a new study from Jeffrey Blumberg at Tufts University evaluates the cranberry?s role in promoting urinary tract health through compounds known as proanthocyanidins (PACs).

The study confirmed the presence of unmetabolised PACs in the urinary tract after consumption, supporting a wealth of existing ex vivo research that highlights the potential benefits of the compounds found in cranberry juice.

While the benefits of cranberry juice are well-documented, a pilot study conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests Craisins Dried Cranberries can provide the same benefits attributed to the reduction of recurring UTIs in women.

In this study, women consuming one serving of dried cranberries per day for two weeks reported reduced urinary tract infections up to six months after the study. UTIs account for 15% of all community-prescribed antibiotics at a cost of $500m in prescription drug costs each year.

Source: Ocean Spray

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Eva Green Eva Longoria Eva Mendes Evangeline Lilly Eve

Trying to tackle the huge challenge with policies that contradict each other and silly spin makes a tough job unnecessarily harder

No one thinks it will be easy to slash the carbon emissions driving climate change while keeping the lights on and at an affordable price. But trying to tackle the challenge with policies that contradict each other and silly spin makes a tough job unnecessarily harder.

Ed Davey, the energy and climate change secretary, launched a good report on Friday, suggesting the damage wrought on the UK’s economy by spikes in global oil, gas and coal prices could be reduced by over half in 2050 as a result of climate change policies.

“Only last year, the impact of the Arab spring on wholesale gas prices, pushed up UK household bills by 20%,” he said. “Every step the UK takes towards building a low-carbon economy reduces our dependency on fossil fuels, and on volatile global energy prices.”

“The more we can shift to alternative fuels, and use energy efficiently, the more we can ensure that our economy does not become hostage to far-flung events and to the volatility of market forces,” he added. So far, so sensible.

But what about the impact of far-flung events on the UK’s faltering ambition to build new nuclear power stations? Well, that’s a completely different story, apparently. Energy minister Charles Hendry was asked exactly that on Tuesday by MPs.

Being exposed to events abroad, such as the nuclear disaster at Fukushima and the election of nuclear-power-sceptic François Hollande in France, was “inevitable”, said Hendry. “If we want to see nuclear power as part of the energy mix, that’s a challenge we have to take on.”

The MPs on the energy and climate change (ECC) select committee revealed another contradiction on Thursday, when tackling the “carbon reduction committment”, an incentive to increase energy efficiency that chancellor George Osborne turned into £1bn “stealth tax”.

A DECC official told MPs that just because something is cost-effective – like energy efficiency – does not mean people will do it. As Labour ECC member Barry Gardiner pointed out, this apathy is exactly the problem with the flagship Green deal, which aims to make 14m homes cheaper to heat. Cutting grants and instead relying on people to take out loans will lead to a 90% cut in loft insulations, according to the government’s own impact assessment.

Compounding contradictions with spin shifts perceptions from cock-up to conspiracy. Another DECC minister, Greg Barker tweeted on Thursday: “Having listened carefully to industry, we are looking at scope for pushing back a little the next proposed reduction in the solar tariffs.”

Good news after a rocky time for the solar industry? Yes but only up to a point, according to solar industry campaigner Howard Johns: “In reality, Barker had little choice but to announce a delay to the cuts hurriedly on Twitter – the legal deadline to implement them on 1 July expired on Monday.”

And there’s more. Another member of the ECC, Conservative Laura Sandys, greeted a 750,000 drop in the number of fuel poor households published on Thursday with this tweet: “First time numbers have dropped since 2005 – Gov measures starting to pay off!”

Except, as green campaigner Martyn Williams noted, the drop took place under the policies of the previous government. The new government, according to the Association for the Conservation of Energy, fuel poor households will receive 30% less government support under the Green Deal, while grants for home energy efficiency are being halved.

And yet more. As noted again by Williams, Ed Davey told the house of commons on Thursday, that solar panel installations are at August 2011 levels, despite the subsidy having halved since that time. Williams’s graph shows this is only true if you include the spike caused by policy changes in March. Since then, installations have crashed and are flatlining at a third of the August 2011 level.

Overall, I agree with the verdict of Green party MP Caroline Lucas, on the wannabe “greenest government ever”. “It’s more subtle than saying it’s all been terrible, but it’s more tragic, as well, because they have the bits of the jigsaw,” she said recently.

Joined up thinking and resisting the siren call of spin could prevent the tragedy becoming farce and deliver the dramatic change needed. Ministers, the stage is yours.

Garcelle Beauvais Genelle Frenoy Georgianna Robertson Georgina Grenville Gina Carano

The fields are covered with yellow dandelions and txiribita flowers.

Sheep have taken over the landscape.

White plum petals and magnolias paint the sky when we look up. Apple trees are showing the first green buds and I am awaiting anxiously for the flowers to bloom. Will I be here to witness it? Not sure yet, but we scout corners and small villages for them.

Here is a little preview of the things we are savoring. Back soon. Laster arte.

Amanda Swisten Amber Arbucci Amber Brkich Amber Heard Amber Valletta

British Tarantula Society Annual Exhibition, Bilston

If you thought tarantulas came in only one variety ? hairy and horrific ? think again. Categories in this eight-legged expo range from “cuddly” Brachypelmas to tree-creeping Asian Arboreals, and even scorpions get a stab at netting the prestigious Best in Show prize. As well as gawping at tanks of leggy lovelies, arachnophiles can browse books and paraphernalia, enter an art contest, and catch a talk on the sustainability of Cambodia’s street-food trade in spiders.

The Coseley School, Henne Drive, Sun

Colette Bernhardt

Bath Fringe

There are over 170 events taking place on Bath’s fringe this year, taking in burlesque, Afro-funk and even a comic play about wrestling giants Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks. Things kick off on Friday with the Bedlam Fair at Green Park Station, and continue next weekend at Green Park Market and Kingsmead. Look out for the Spiegeltent on The Rec, which hosts acts daily from 1 Jun (including The Destroyers & The Carney Villains), with several daytime shows aimed at children.

Various venues, Fri to 10 Jun

Iain Aitch

Kapow! London

You only have to check the guestlist to realise that two-year-old Kapow! has already established a rep as the UK comics con. Comic-book royalty in attendance includes Frank Quitely, the artist behind what’s considered to be the 21st century’s definitive Superman, plus Warren Ellis, co-creator of early-noughties game-changer The Authority, a superhero team that included a bio-engineered gay Apollo and a drug-addled shaman. Guest-of-honour is Marvel head honcho, chief creative officer Joe Quesada. British comedians swell the ranks too including Jonathan Ross, who recently penned his first comic, Turf, plus Frankie Boyle, Jimmy Carr and Nick Frost. There’ll also be the Stan Lee Awards, plenty of cosplay, plus ? of course ? stand after stand of all things comics-related.

Business Design Centre, N1, Sat, Sun

Skye Sherwin

Out & about

Protest, Power, Struggle and Strife ¡No Pasarán! London, Sat

A political marketplace and forum, taking in screenings, exhibitions, workshops and more.

Rich Mix, E1

Olympic Torch Relay, Nationwide, Sat to 27 Jul

The Olympic flame’s 70-day jaunt begins at Land’s End, meandering via Plymouth, Exeter and Bristol, before fetching up in Cardiff on Friday.

Various venues

Crimefest, Bristol, Thu to 27 May

Crime fiction celebration with PD James, Lee Child and Frederick Forsyth.

Bristol Marriott Royal Hotel

Arts Festival, Dumfries & Galloway, Fri to 5 Jun

Jazz and classical music kick off two weeks of music, theatre, art, comedy and more.

Various venues

Charleston Festival, Firle, Fri to 3 Jun

Joanna Lumley kicks off proceedings on Friday, with Annie Leibovitz, Marcel Theroux, Bonnie Greer and Andrew Motion later in the festival.

Charleston, Lewes

Danica Patrick Daniella Alonso Danneel Harris Deanna Russo Denise Richards

This marks two decades of consistently supplying Cargill customers with the identity-preserved, high oleic canola oil.

Since 1992, high oleic canola oil customers have relied on this contracting program to supply their oil needs.

In 2012, for the 20th consecutive year, Cargill contracted enough high oleic canola production to meet the growing needs of all its customers.

Source: Cargill

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Danica Patrick Daniella Alonso Danneel Harris Deanna Russo Denise Richards

I’m seriously thinking about buying stock in Blue Diamond Almonds. It makes logical sense considering that I love all their products and buy them on a regular basis. Unsweetened Vanilla Almond Breeze is truly an EBF household staple, I love the the Nut Thins and I always have a container of almonds on hand for [...]

Ivana Bozilovic Ivanka Trump Izabella Miko Izabella Scorupco Jaime King

Coveted Palme d’Or likely to go to a screen adaptation, with many of this year’s entrants borrowing from literature

The Cannes festival is, famously, the keeper of the flame of the auteur tradition. The ritual of honouring the overarching vision of a single writer-director is entrenched in its history ? from Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni to Jane Campion and Andrea Arnold. Since the turn of the millennium, only two winners of the Palme d’Or have been literary adaptations: Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, and Laurent Cantet’s The Class. Of the remaining films, only one ? Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley ? was not written by its director.

This year, however, things are different: it is a bookworm’s Cannes, with directors as likely to have had their noses buried in novels as dreaming up original ideas.

All eyes are on Walter Salles’s adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s modern classic On the Road, which premieres on Wednesday. Meanwhile, David Cronenberg’s version of Cosmopolis ? Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel of gleaming surfaces, set in a billionaire’s limo ? is also one of the festival’s most eagerly anticipated films.

There are other literary adaptations, too. Paperboy is Lee Daniels’s take on Pete Dexter’s richly atmospheric novel set in the deep south about two journalists attempting to uncover the truth behind a murder conviction, starring Nicole Kidman. John Hillcoat’s Lawless is a western based on a novel by Matt Bondurant, adapted by Nick Cave and starring Shia LaBoeuf. Finally, Jacques Audiard, whose previous films include Cannes hit A Prophet, has brought to the screen Rust and Bone, based on the tough-guy short-story collection by Craig Davidson.

Is, then, the auteur tradition fading? And does it matter? Nick James, the editor of the cinephile magazine Sight and Sound, is convinced that it does. Cannes, he says, performs a crucial role against the ever-rising tide of literary adaptation ? which he deems “a lesser form of cinema” than the single-vision auteur tradition.

The taste for literary material is, he says, frequently a baldly commercial, rather than artistic, choice. “There is no question that for a long time now Hollywood and a large part of the British film industry have become dependent on literary material,” he said. “It makes the film less of a gamble if a certain number of people already know the material works.”

But, he said, the old rule held good: great novels do not great movies make. The exceptions, he said, are figures such as Polanski, capable of transcending his literary sources, or the Coen brothers, who bound from adaptations (such as No Country for Old Men) to their own material (such as A Serious Man) with unpredictable energy.

For his first cinematic outing, Rufus Norris, associate director at the National Theatre, has chosen a literary adaptation: a reworking of Daniel Clay’s novel Broken, opened the Cannes Critics’ Week sidebar. For Norris, there was never any doubt that he would direct an existing text ? writing is “a craft I don’t have and don’t imagine ever having.”

He added: “The tradition of the auteur is a great Cannes tradition, and a great French tradition ? and indeed in Europe in general the director is seen as all-powerful in a way that he or she is not in Britain.” It is a matter of cultural difference: “The fact is, we had this guy called Shakespeare, and he was quite good. The power of the writer in British culture goes very deep.” Norris is a veteran of adaptations: his first hit was Festen, a stage version of Thomas Vinterberg’s film Festen, which itself premiered in Cannes in 1998.

Leslie Felperin, a critic for Variety, is relaxed about the creeping domination of adaptations. She said: “The greatest directors can completely transform their source material and filter it through their own consciousnesses, creating something entirely new. Some directors need source material almost to kick against. The process of creativity can be very fertile and innovative.” She pointed to Darezhan Omirbaev’s Kazakh reworking of Crime And Punishment, part of this year’s Un Certain Regard lineup at Cannes. “It is set in today’s Alamaty,” she said. “It’s a conversation between the director and Dostoevsky ? in a strange way very faithful to the text ? I certainly don’t agree that literary adaptations are a lesser form of cinema.”

Audiard’s Rust and Bone also brought to bear a fresh vision on its source material: Davidson’s original stories were unravelled and restitched by Audiard and his co-writer, who took characters from separate stories and brought them together in a romance “to add light and sun” to the “harsh, solitary” lives of Davidson’s original. “We weren’t faithful to the letter, but we were faithful in terms of colour, mood, atmosphere,” said Audiard.

Whatever happens over the next exciting and uncertain days at the Cannes festival, one thing is certain: there is a strong chance that this year, the coveted Palme will go to a film-of-the-book.

Ashley Olsen Ashley Scott Ashley Tappin Ashley Tisdale Asia Argento

Do you find the idea of a pub that serves only vegetarian food attractive or off-putting?

Two London pubs ? out of 7,000, the first in the capital ? have just announced that they’re ditching meat from their menus. The idea of a vegetarian pub remains alien to most Brits; one of my favourite boozers tricked me, the Harden brothers and many others when it announced on 1 April this year that it was going veggie for a month. But there are in fact around 16 vegetarian pubs across the UK, several of which are apparently in Glasgow, which has always been a haven for bien-pensant lettuce-eaters.

One of the new places is the Smithfield Tavern, in the middle of the largest meat market in London. (I’ve been there at five in the morning: the punters don’t look like they eat much tofu.) The other is the Coach & Horses in Soho. In some circles, this is one of the city’s more famous boozers, attended by hacks in macs, wasted artists and, until 2006, presided over by Norman “You’re Barred” Balon. Private Eye, whose offices are up the road, still hold their lunches there. Jeffrey Bernard was among the Coach’s more famous and tragic regulars. He never ate anything there and took all his calories from booze, so if nobody eats the new food at least there’s a precedent for it.

I’d presumed the new menus would be a little bit smart and modern, with beetroot and burrata, maybe some Asian-spiced aubergines, nice salads and stuff. So I was a bit surprised to find that the Smithfield is doing jacket potatoes with cheese and curry for under a fiver, and the C&H is flogging veggie sausage, beans and mash at £7.65.

The landlord of both places is called Alastair Choat, a founding member of the Sustainable Restaurant Association, a body that, in its own words, helps “restaurants become more sustainable and diners make more sustainable choices when dining out”. It’s a fine organisation ? anyone who eats out a bit, and who cares about the consequences and corollaries of doing so, does well to take an interest in it.

The Times’s restaurant critic Giles Coren has long included SRA ratings in his reviews, but he was as perplexed by the menu as I was. “That’s not a business I’d want to open myself,” he told me. “Vegetarians aren’t going to travel far for a veggie sausage or baked beans, and punters wandering in are going to be quite surprised by that, then wander out again.” But, he added: “The idea is great. We all eat too much meat, and though we think of a vegetarian restaurant as this dreary, dour place full of people with root-vegetable-dyed hair and rings through their noses sitting down for a bowl of lentils and arguing over the bill, the idea that they’ve now got pubs where they’re getting pissed up and eating tofu is good.”

Over the phone, Choat admitted to me that this is “quite a brave move”. (Which reminds me of Tony Blair saying that whenever he was about to make a stupid decision, the civil servants would euphemise it to him as “courageous”.) The Coach, as Choat puts it, is “a real boozer, a place for people to pick at scotch eggs over their pint. But I was keen to develop my ideas on sustainability and work them into my business. I’m more conscious of how and what I’m eating nowadays, and this is a drive towards making that kind of change.” Surprisingly, Choat isn’t a vegetarian, although he claims not to eat much meat.

It’s true that many gastropubs have been rather meat-heavy in recent years, and turning away from some of that is probably a good idea. But beer and beef have a natural affinity, wine is almost always better with food, and I don’t remember ever fancying a nice salad when I’ve been pissed. Choat may find it a struggle to convince the butchers of Smithfield or whoever drinks in the Coach nowadays that they should embrace sustainability and look forward to homemade veggie pâté on toast. “It doesn’t change the Coach,” he says. “It’s still a boozer, still a talking pub with good food, and that will never change. So come and try it.”

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Lego-enthusiast, avian-admirer and professional tree surgeon Thomas Poulsom has taken inspiration from birds to create this brilliant series of Lego models

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Some time last year, I was approached by fellow blogger Mayssam Samaha of Will Travel For Food to see if I was interested in teaching a class in Montreal where she resides.

It was a crazy time for me as I was in the middle of writing my upcoming book, but I knew it was something I wanted to do in a city I have been eager to visit for a while. She patiently waited for me and today, I am thrilled to announce the workshop that I will teaching late this spring in Montreal.

Two full-day food styling and photography workshops at the SAT’s Lab. Please do check out this space even if you are not planning to attend the class. It’s amazing.

Here are the details:

When: June 16 or June 17, 2012, from 9am to 4pm.

Where: The SAT?s FoodLab, Montreal.

What: A 6-hour food styling and food photography workshop.

Cost: $300 for the 6-hour workshop (includes lunch).

Space is limited to 10 students per workshop.

The workshop will be taught in English.

Registration will open on Monday March 5th at 10am EST. To register, please visit Mayssam’s blog.

Will you join us?

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If you are anything like us, your freezer will always be stocked with logs of frozen cookie dough.

When I ask Jon and Miren what they would like to have for the dessert, I know the answer will be “chunky and chewy chocolate chip cookies with crunchy salt on top”

They take after C. and me.

So I thought I’d leave you with our favorite recipe for chunky chocolate chip cookies. The trick? Light muscovado sugar and fleur de sel.

I also shared the recipe with Joanna yesterday.

And I ask you the same question, are you a crispy and chewy chocolate chip cookie kind of person?

Have a great weekend!

Gluten-Free Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

makes 2 dozen cookies

8 tablespoons (110 g) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup (100 g) packed light muscovado or light brown sugar
1/4 cup (50 g) natural cane sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg, at room temperature
1 cup (140 g) brown rice flour
1/2 cup (60 g) amaranth flour
1/4 cup (30 g) tapioca starch
1/2 teaspoon fleur de sel, plus more for topping
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup (170 g) chocolate chunks or chips

In the bowl of a stand mixer, combine the butter, muscovado sugar, natural cane sugar and vanilla extract. Mix with the paddle attachment on medium speed for 2 minutes. Scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl. Add the egg and mix until combined.

In a small bowl, whisk together the brown rice flour, amaranth flour, tapioca starch, fleur de sel, and baking soda. Add the dry ingredients into the butter mixture and mix on medium speed until the dough comes together.

Add the chocolate chunks and mix until thoroughly incorporated.

Scoop the dough onto a piece of parchment paper. With the help of the parchment, roll the dough into a log that is approximately 2 inches in diameter and 12 inches long. Wrap the log with the parchment and refrigerate for 1 hour.

In this time, preheat the oven to 350F (180C). Cut the log into 1/2-inch disks. Place them on baking sheets lined with parchment paper or silicone mats leaving 2 inches in between the cookies.

Sprinkle the tops with a bit of fleur de sel. Bake for 11 to 12 minutes or until edges set and start to turn golden. They might look a bit underdone, but this is fine. They will harden as they cool and slightly under-baking them will keep them chewy and moist. Let the cookies cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes before trying to lift them. Store them in an airtight container for up to 3 days.

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My dad and I snuck out of the house without telling anyone where we were going. He grabbed his camera, I grabbed my camera, and we tippy-toed out the door. We decided we would go explore the little neighborhoods that surround my hometown, Amorebieta, where life seems to stand still.

I rolled down the window, rested my head on my arm, and took in a deep breath of that spring cold air. The landscape seemed almost painted — blue sky and the greenest grass.

I turned my head and noticed a big grin on my dad’s face. “The sheep are out” he said.

And that was it — I knew what I had come for.

Every time I go back home there seems to be a purpose to my visit. It is never clear of what that might be when I first arrive, but as we settle into our routine, a theme always appears — almost as if I had an impeding mission. A void I must fill. With time I have learned that I need soil and dirt in my life.

When I set foot in Basque land, all I want to do is run for the hills. And so I did, and there they were — the sheep and the newborn lambs that were taking over the landscape and feeding on this painted-like grass. It was a beautiful thing.

That morning my dad and I drove to San Migel, only a couple of miles from where I went to school.

“They make really good sheep’s milk cheese in this house” he said. My heart skipped a beat and I quickly asked him to stop. “Then we must get some milk from them!” I replied in a rush.

I had been thinking about mamia for days, almost to the point of an obsession. I think you might have noticed from all the references I have made to it lately. Mamia is almost a cheese-like product. A curd made with ewe’s milk and rennet. Simple yes, but when the milk is fresh, it can be the most delightful, naturally sweet, and creamy dessert. Ask any Basque and you shall see. I have tried to recreate it in the US to no avail. It is all about the milk.

We knocked on their door.

The farmhouse is old, almost decrepit, but a family still lives there raising sheep and making cheese just like generations passed. I love that – such a romantic notion, isn’t it?

A tall, rosy-cheeked man came to the door. He greeted my dad with the cordiality of an old customer. He was paused and spoke Basque with a gentle voice. Such a contrast to my hyper excitement, of one who only gets to savor these moments once a year. “This is a daily affair for him” I thought to myself.

When we asked about the milk, he explained they had run out. “You have to come before eleven o’clock in the morning or it will all be gone”.

“Even with the 600 sheep you have?” I asked surprised.

“Yes, the milk we don’t use for making cheese is sold in a matter of a couple of hours. Chefs and cooks alike come early” he explained.

We thanked him and decided to return the next morning for more. This time we would bring Jon and Miren along.

They were in for a treat.

The next morning after breakfast, we returned to the farm for the coveted sheep’s milk. He was not kidding. We were greeted by a line of people waiting to get their share of the freshly-milked goodness — almost like a pilgrimage, I thought.

While my dad waited, I steered the kids towards the barn. It was cold and too early for the sheep to be out. There they lied, close to one another, mothers with their newborns. What a sight that was. As we later learned, three of them had just been born a couple of hours earlier. Bloody umbilical cords still hanging and covered in amniotic fluid.

I held one of them in my arms. “Most people are afraid of them” said the matriarch of the house. I shook my head. Not me. I love sheep- always have. Jon and Miren gathered around me unsure of what they were witnessing, but they quickly warmed up to the newborn lamb.

We watched them make some cheese that morning and took a stroll around the neighborhood. The apple trees were not yet blooming but it was definitely spring in the Basque Country.

Back at my parents’, my mom gently simmered the raw milk. It smelled like my childhood.

We had mamia for dessert when both my brothers and their families came over for lunch. Drizzled with raw honey and walnuts is how I like it.

“I think I will make a tart with it” I said to my mom. As it turns-out, our schedules didn’t allow it, but when I returned back to the US, I made a custard tart inspired by that day. Sheep’s milk yogurt, raw honey, vanilla bean, and a bit of lemon make the creamiest tart.

The days that followed were spent taking walks, hiking to Santuario de la Virgen de Oro, spending time with friends, cooking with my mom, and visiting my uncle Javi’s sheep and his fruitful garden. His plum and peach trees were already blooming and his citrus trees plentiful.

It was anchovy season for Basque fishermen and we indulged everyday. Quickly fried in garlic-infused olive oil, they are such a treat that I miss living away. It was a pleasure to see Jon and Miren enjoy fish as much as I do- such a staple in Basque cuisine.

“Arraine (fish)” Miren would say when asked what she wanted for lunch. Made us smile.

Marinated anchovies, salad of shaved carrots and fennel with sorrel and watercress. rabbit stew, pea and potato soup… all foods of spring.

We had amazing spring weather during our entire trip, which is not to be taken lightly because spring can be quite unpredictable in the Basque Country. Just a few days before we arrived, snow had covered some of the nearby mountains.

“The trees will start blooming soon then” I exclaimed with optimism.

First plum and cherry trees, then apples will follow.

On a sunny Saturday morning, we drove to the valley of Etxauri. This is fertile land where endless rows of cherry trees paint the landscape. The blooms are to be admired from afar and up close. Fluffy, white petals that almost look like snow.

Wheat grass surrounds the cherry trees. Soft and tall. I had forgotten how soft the grass in the Basque Country is. The kids hid in the fields and ran free.

That afternoon we visited Urdiain, a small but beautiful town where we used to spend our summer holidays when we were kids. We walked around the grove where we used to set up camp and the hundred-year old oak trees where we played.

There were trips to the beach of Laga with salmon and pea shoot tarts and a stop for ice cream on the way home.

During these visits to see my parents, we rarely eat out. We cook at home with the abundant fresh ingredients available and restaurants are saved for special occasions.

This time however, I was thrilled to join my aunt Aran (I was named after her, yes) for a farm to table lunch at Boroa. I will share that day on another post but I came back home completely inspired by that meal of tiny shelled favas, a perfectly poached egg and shaved truffle. Simple yes? But perfectly executed.

Inspired by that dish, I made a spring panzanella salad with English peas, soft-cooked quail eggs, and chive blossoms in a lemon and chive vinaigrette.

It was perfect.

And I leave you with these images and these recipes that made our time away special.

“I missed the sheep” said Miren when we returned to Florida.

“Me too, me too” I replied.

I really did.

Sheep’s Milk Yogurt and Honey Tart

makes a 9-inch tart

Tart crust

2/3 cup (90 g) superfine brown rice flour
1/4 cup (35 g) millet flour
1/4 cup (25 g) almond flour
3 tablespoons cornstarch
1 tablespoon natural cane sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons (110 g) cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
3 to 4 tablespoons ice water

Combine the first six ingredients in the food processor. Pulse to aerate. Add the butter and pulse until it is the size of peas. Add 3 tablespoons of ice water and pulse until it comes together. It will not form a ball. Press the dough between your fingers to see if it comes together. Add more ice water if needed.

Transfer dough to a cold surface. Knead a couple of times, form into a disk, wrap it in plastic wrap, and flatten it. Refrigerate the dough for an hour.

Dust your cold surface with some superfine brown rice flour. Roll your dough to 1/8-inch thickness. If it cracks, pinch it back together. If it’s too cold it tends to crack so you can let it come to temperature for a few minutes.

Fill your 9-inch tart pan with the dough and cut off excess. Refrigerate the tart dough for 30 minutes.

Filling

1/4 cup (50 g) natural cane sugar
Zest of 1 lemon, finely grated
3 eggs
3 tablespoons cornstarch
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise and seeds scraped
1 cup (250 ml) sheep’s milk yogurt or mamia
1/2 cup (125 ml) heavy cream
1 tablespoon raw honey

Preheat oven to 350F (180C).

In a bowl, rub the sugar and lemon zest together to release the lemon oils. Add the eggs and whisk until combined. Add the cornstarch and vanilla seeds and whisk until lump free. Add the yogurt, heavy cream, and honey and whisk until smooth.

Dock the bottom of the tart dough. Pour the yogurt mixture into the tart and bake for 45 minutes or until the edges start to turn golden brown and the center is set.

Let the tart cool for a few minutes before cutting. Serve warm or at room temperature.

English Pea, Quail Egg and Chive Blossom Panzanella

If you don’t have chive blossoms, you can simply use some finely chopped chives or very thinly sliced red onion. It is all about getting the onion flavor in the salad.

serves 4 to 6

1 pound (450 g) shelled English peas
12 quail eggs, at room temperature
1/3 cup (85 ml) olive oil
1/2 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
Juice 1 lemon
2 tablespoons finely chopped chives
1 tablespoon lemon thyme leaves
Salt
Black pepper
4 or 5 slices of multigrain gluten-free bread, toasted and broken into pieces
4 chive blossoms
1 ounce Idiazabal or Manchego cheese, shaved

In a medium sauce pan, bring water to a boil over high heat. Season with a generous amount of salt. Add the shelled peas and cook them for 4 to 5 minutes depending on the size until they are al dente. We don’t want them mushy. Immediately, remove them from the boiling water with a slotted spoon and submerge them in a bowl of ice water and let them cool. Drain them well and reserve.

Continue to boil the water in the pan. Gently add the quail eggs being careful not to crack them. Reduce heat to medium so that water continues to boil but not too rapidly. Cook the eggs for 2 minutes. Immediately remove them from the boiling water and submerge them in a bowl of ice water until they cool. Peel them and reserve.

In a large bowl, whisk together the olive oil, lemon zest, lemon juice, chives, thyme leaves, salt, and pepper. Add the blanched peas, bread, and chive blossoms. Toss the salad so that the bread is coated in the dressing. Let the salad rest for 10 minutes. Top with the quail eggs and shaved cheese. Serve immediately.

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The idea that you can follow a recipe to the letter and produce impeccable results is a recent one; the problem is, it’s nonsense. Have you busted any kitchen myths?

Just as a novel tells a story (“Oh dear yes”, EM Forster complained), so a cookbook has recipes. And just as some novelists, such as Forster, have felt that a story is a regrettable element of fiction, so some cookery authors feel that recipes are regrettable elements of food writing.

In most cookbooks up to Elizabeth David’s, recipes were somewhat perfunctory. You sometimes hear complaints that recipes of David’s haven’t worked; but that is because she assumed, I think, that readers would bring their own techniques to bear on them. I believe that she would have been surprised if readers took her words as precise, infallible instructions. Only since then have we taken on the idea that a recipe, should, if precisely followed, offer a route to culinary perfection.

Cooks know that such a wish is an illusion. Take a simple tomato sauce, for example. You chop or crush some garlic. You cook it for a while in some oil, before tipping in a tin of tomatoes, with some salt and perhaps a little sugar. You simmer it. What could be simpler? However, the recipe told you to cook the garlic over a medium heat, which caused it to sizzle furiously and brown. The sauce has simmered for 10 minutes, as the recipe specified, but is still very liquid ? and your pasta is ready and drained.

At every stage in this process, the experienced cook makes decisions, and will probably have raised and lowered the heat under the pan several times. A recipe that attempted to describe precisely what influenced these decisions would be long and boring. It can give hints, such as “Fry the garlic gently, until it releases its aroma”, or, “Simmer the sauce until thick”, but that is about it.

People who try to follow recipes to the letter ? and there are many of them ? get very frustrated when dishes do not work as the recipes promise. Unfortunately, every kitchen is different: oven and hob temperatures vary (my gas mark 6 may differ from yours by 30 degrees or more), equipment varies, humidity varies, the quality of water varies. A set of instructions to accommodate all these inconsistencies cannot be devised. This may be one reason why surveys have suggested that most people cook only one or two recipes from each cookbook they own.

My first idea was to write a book called Cooking without Recipes ? a title that has appeared on two books since the first edition of mine came out. I tried writing it, giving general, explanatory accounts of how dishes worked rather than lists of ingredients and instructions. It was, for the reason I gave above, stupefyingly pedantic and dull.

Like Forster, I bit the bullet: I gave recipes, but all the while pointed out that these were templates rather than the last words on any dish; and, for those who wanted to read them, I followed the instructions with “why you do it” sections, offering some simple kitchen science. It seemed to me that for most home cooks, an understanding of how dishes work is more important than a set of instructions. You don’t need recipes for most of what you put on the table from day to day.

I know: when you bake a cake, it’s helpful to have a list of ingredients and precise guidelines. But here particularly, you need to know what is happening as you mix the ingredients and cook them. I’m not a skilled baker, I admit; but at least I know what has gone wrong when the centre of my cake caves in.

Along the way, I hope I’ve dispelled a few myths ? though I must admit that they’re not ones that careful readers of Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking will entertain. Do you need to soak and fast-boil dried beans ? and can you put salt in their cooking water? Do you rinse rice to wash away the starch? Or that old favourite, do you “seal” meat? And of course, do you salt aubergines?

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I’m on vacation for a couple of weeks and away from our kitchen. So I will be posting a few recipes from the archives, like this lemon poppyseed muffin recipe, originally posted in 2007. Hope everyone is having a fabulous Easter! ~Elise

I love lemon poppy seed muffins. This recipe is based on the same Cook’s Illustrated master muffin recipe on which I based our blueberry and lemon ginger muffins. The balance of flour, leavening, eggs and yogurt results in a light and fluffy muffin. The important things to remember with making these muffins is to make sure your baking powder is no older than 6 months (it may not work if older), and to not over-mix the batter.

Continue reading “Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins” »

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Fill the grid so that every row, every column and every 3×3 box contains the numbers 1 to 9.

For a helping hand call our solutions line on 09068 338 228. Calls cost 60p per minute at all times. Service supplied by ATS.

Buy the next issue of the Guardian or subscribe to our Digital Edition to see the completed puzzle.

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Children held in small, stuffy rooms at airport for hours, often sharing space with adults they are not related to, watchdog finds

The UK Border Agency is detaining children in “degrading and disgraceful” conditions at Heathrow, according to an official watchdog.

The Heathrow independent monitoring board (IMB) says children of all ages are being detained at the airport for immigration purposes almost every day, and are sometimes kept overnight. They are held in rooms that are small, stuffy and have no natural light. There is no access to the open air, no sleeping accommodation and only hand basins for washing. They often share space with unrelated adults and can be held in these conditions for many hours.

The annual report of the watchdog, which visits and monitors UKBA’s short-term holding facilities at Heathrow, says the units at each terminal are no more than waiting rooms with rows of seats and little else. There are separate rooms for children, with cots, toys and children’s books, but these are very small. The worst at terminal 3 is just nine square metres, with the result that children use the main rooms.

The IMB says suitable accommodation for families with children needs to be provided. “Until this can be done, UKBA should make arrangements for any families held at the airport to be detained at a nearby hotel or other suitable space and for transport to be available promptly,” it says.

Nearly 15,000 people were detained by immigration officials at Heathrow for short periods in 2011, with nearly 3,000 of them held for more than 12 hours. Separate figures for children are not given, but one child is recorded as having spent 31 hours and 50 minutes detained at Heathrow before a social worker arrived on 20 December 2011.

“The conditions under which children are being held, and detainees have to endure overnight, are degrading and disgraceful,” says the IMB’s annual report. “The detention of children continues, despite the government saying that it would end the detention of children for immigration purposes. The IMB recognises that children cannot always be admitted to the country straight away and are sometimes held for their own protection. It recommends that non-custodial, child-friendly accommodation is provided at Heathrow for families with children as a matter of urgency.” It adds that the UKBA has failed to deliver improvements to the accommodation, despite promises in response to previous IMB reports.

The private security company Reliance took over running the Heathrow holding rooms in May last year. The IMB says detainees have been well cared for by Reliance staff, but transport to and from Heathrow is not well organised and detainees face long waits to be taken from the airport to immigration detention centres.

A border force spokesperson said: “We share the independent monitoring board’s concerns about the quality of the accommodation provided by BAA [the airport operator]. We have raised this with them on numerous occasions in the past and will continue to do so to ensure those held at the border have proper facilities to meet their and our needs.

“The report rightly recognises we are handling cases efficiently and professionally and that it identifies improvements in the way passengers, including children, are treated by staff. We will respond to the report fully in due course.”

The rooms at Heathrow were built to UKBA specifications, the IMB says.

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Witty it may be, but Bansky’s art is nothing to aspire to. The Australian plumbers who destroyed his work have created something infinitely more useful to humanity

Good news from Australia! While fitting out a cafe in Melbourne, builders have managed to run two pipes precisely through the middle of a Banksy. Where once there was a rat with a parachute and a briefcase, there are now two plastic elbow-joints and a bit of a mess. By creating something of lasting value for humanity, the plumbing is a clear improvement.

Because Banksy is easily Britain’s most overrated artist ? cynicism’s Vettriano. In its banality and self-importance, his work towers over all contemporaries. A policeman snorting coke, a helicopter gunship with a pink bow on top, and this week, on Wood Green High Road, the appearance of a child labourer making bunting: this stuff insults us all, vapid consumer drones that we are, by presuming that its insights will be news. One of the triumphs of the Cultural Olympiad, which showcases British art, is that Banksy appears to have no role in it.

Clearly it’s the subterfuge around his work that has made him famous and revered. (There is to be a candlelit vigil in Melbourne, for goodness sake.) This fame has made the pieces valuable, and the value seems to have deluded many people into considering them profound. Not Banksy himself, however: he was deluded from the beginning. “I like to think,” he says in his book Wall and Piece (RRP £20), “that I have the guts to stand up anonymously in a western democracy and call for things that no one else believes in ? like peace and justice and freedom.” Yes indeed, I bet he likes to think that frequently.

There certainly is some wit and chutzpah in his work, and he is a fairly polished illustrator. But what should be the right amount of reverence for that? Other graffiti artists have judged it fairly well, by eventually obliterating the sweeping maid in Chalk Farm Road and the hitchhiking Charles Manson in Archway, among many others. Also, accidents keep happening. In Melbourne alone, three Banksies have been destroyed in the past two years.

To be clear, Banksy’s work is not wholly unenjoyable ? and Big Macs don’t taste terrible either ? but if he is starting to inspire people then their sights are being set about a mile too low. The whole point of graffiti is to be transitory and disposable, so let’s hear it for the planet’s cleaners, builders and vandals who, recognising instantly the uninterestingness of Banksy’s art, dispose of it.

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Children held in small, stuffy rooms at airport for hours, often sharing space with adults they are not related to, watchdog finds

The UK Border Agency is detaining children in “degrading and disgraceful” conditions at Heathrow, according to an official watchdog.

The Heathrow independent monitoring board (IMB) says children of all ages are being detained at the airport for immigration purposes almost every day, and are sometimes kept overnight. They are held in rooms that are small, stuffy and have no natural light. There is no access to the open air, no sleeping accommodation and only hand basins for washing. They often share space with unrelated adults and can be held in these conditions for many hours.

The annual report of the watchdog, which visits and monitors UKBA’s short-term holding facilities at Heathrow, says the units at each terminal are no more than waiting rooms with rows of seats and little else. There are separate rooms for children, with cots, toys and children’s books, but these are very small. The worst at terminal 3 is just nine square metres, with the result that children use the main rooms.

The IMB says suitable accommodation for families with children needs to be provided. “Until this can be done, UKBA should make arrangements for any families held at the airport to be detained at a nearby hotel or other suitable space and for transport to be available promptly,” it says.

Nearly 15,000 people were detained by immigration officials at Heathrow for short periods in 2011, with nearly 3,000 of them held for more than 12 hours. Separate figures for children are not given, but one child is recorded as having spent 31 hours and 50 minutes detained at Heathrow before a social worker arrived on 20 December 2011.

“The conditions under which children are being held, and detainees have to endure overnight, are degrading and disgraceful,” says the IMB’s annual report. “The detention of children continues, despite the government saying that it would end the detention of children for immigration purposes. The IMB recognises that children cannot always be admitted to the country straight away and are sometimes held for their own protection. It recommends that non-custodial, child-friendly accommodation is provided at Heathrow for families with children as a matter of urgency.” It adds that the UKBA has failed to deliver improvements to the accommodation, despite promises in response to previous IMB reports.

The private security company Reliance took over running the Heathrow holding rooms in May last year. The IMB says detainees have been well cared for by Reliance staff, but transport to and from Heathrow is not well organised and detainees face long waits to be taken from the airport to immigration detention centres.

A border force spokesperson said: “We share the independent monitoring board’s concerns about the quality of the accommodation provided by BAA [the airport operator]. We have raised this with them on numerous occasions in the past and will continue to do so to ensure those held at the border have proper facilities to meet their and our needs.

“The report rightly recognises we are handling cases efficiently and professionally and that it identifies improvements in the way passengers, including children, are treated by staff. We will respond to the report fully in due course.”

The rooms at Heathrow were built to UKBA specifications, the IMB says.

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BioGaia signed three different agreements, one with Next Force, giving Next Force exclusive sales rights for BioGaia’s oral health products in the Czech Republic, one with Ivodent, giving Ivodent exclusive sales rights in South Africa, and one with Oral Company, giving Oral Company exclusive sales rights in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.

In all countries, the products will be sold under the BioGaia brand and the launch is planned to take place during 2012.

The company in the Czech Republic, Next Force, is a specialised pharmaceutical company that is part of the Pears Health Cyber group.

Source: BioGaia

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The official release date for my upcoming book approaches.

October 23. Less than six months away.

It has felt intangible until now. Until the day we traveled to Vermont to shoot the book trailer.

The book has such a seasonal component that I really wanted the trailer to reflect that mood. I wanted the colors to be rich, deep, and the light to have amazing contrast of dark and bright.

As you know, I am desperately in love with Vermont and the house on the hill, so I asked Nadia if we could come shoot at her house. She graciously accepted and welcomed us with open arms.

You should have seen the look on Jon’s and Miren’s faces when they found out they were going to go visit auntie. For days all I heard was “how many days until we go to Nadia’s?”. Every morning. Every afternoon. I knew they would feel at ease on the hill and that would make things a lot smoother for all of us while we were working.

I envisioned us collecting eggs like we did last summer and autumn. Cooking and taking walks down to the pond where the apples trees had started blooming.

I was incredibly lucky to have Ryan Marshall join me for this project, especially since he has been so busy lately. He arrived from another assignment in California with little time to prepare, but he got it right from the beginning. He captured the moodiness and sense of comfort I wanted to convey and he was patient with me and the kids.

Above are some of the behind the scenes images that Nadia captured. I love them.

Nadia’s house has this magical light. The light that is let in through the trees. The light that reflects on wood. The light of hiding places. Magical, indeed.

I cooked, styled, photographed, and reviewed some of the pages from my book.

It was cold in Vermont. Green landscape with wintery shivers.

Bundled up we played outside and were tremendously lucky to visit the gardens at Tasha Tudor’s family estate. The family invited us to visit the gardens although they do not officially open until summer. They also kindly asked us not to photograph the estate as they wanted to keep a low profile and maintain their privacy. But I must say, it took my breath away. Naturally beautiful without too much manicuring… a bit of Vermont wilderness, the lifestyle of times past…

I must visit in the summer one more time.

We even had a picnic under the blooming apple trees. Pear, swiss chard, and gruyere tart. Also scallop, beet, fennel and apple salad in jars, and for dessert, candied apple clafoutis.

All from my book.

I cannot wait for you to see the book trailer.

I hope you are as excited as I am.

Thank you Nadia and Ryan for being so wonderful.

Vignettes 11 and 12 are copyright of Nadia Dole. Used with author’s permission.

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Hello friends,

Today is a big day for me — the day I can share with you a little bit of what I have been working on for the last 18 months. I am so excited to be able to share some images from inside the book…

“Small Plates and Sweet Treats: My Family’s Journey To Gluten-Free Cooking”

Lots of labor and lots of love have gone into the making of this book and I hope you enjoy this little sneak peek.

The official release date is October 23, 2012.

There are 120 naturally gluten-free recipes inside the book. Recipes and stories inspired by my childhood in the Basque Country, motherhood, and living as an ex-pat. The book is divided by seasons, as I like to cook in our everyday life, and within each chapter you will find a section for small plates and another for sweet treats.

Small plates as an homage to the raciones and pintxos we eat in the Basque Country when we share with friends — just like I share with you.

I am also excited to let you know that the book is now AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER from the following sellers: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Indie Bound.

It is also available for PREORDER IN EUROPE through Amazon UK and Amazon France.

Let me know what you think. I’d really love to hear your thoughts… It feels great to share.

And soon, I will share some recipes from inside the book.

I’m thrilled.

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Plans aimed at preserving the maritime character of the French coastal landmark have divided politicians and shopkeepers

In preparation for the tourist season, two dray horses and their drivers go back and forth along the causeway to Mont Saint-Michel. It is a practice run and the cart is carrying two large water-tanks, instead of live passengers.

Since the end of last month visitors ? who number 2.4 million annually ? are forbidden to use their own cars to reach the mount. Now, the only way to cross the almost 2km causeway is on foot or by motorised or horse-drawn shuttle.

Ever since a project was launched in 1995 to restore the mount’s “maritime character”, there have been delays, controversies and quarrels between local councillors on the board of the public-private partnership (PPP) and central government. The Socialist (PS) leader of the Basse-Normandie regional council and chair of the PPP heading the redevelopment project, Laurent Beauvais, finds the setbacks an irritant.

Most of these mishaps have been due to the sensitive nature of the operation, a mixture of caution because of the site’s international renown ? the preparatory studies alone took 10 years ? and the vigilance of those who have a stake in the mount, its immediate surroundings and its religious significance. Coach companies had to be placated, discussions with cyclists held and local shopkeepers unhappy about the changes to the area had to be mollified. “I understand our past difficulties,” Beauvais says. “Governance with several parties is complicated and this great project is loaded with symbols, passion and religious fervour.”

The outstanding controversy centres on the new causeway that will connect with a bridge to the mount. This will allow emergency access almost all year round. Both Les Amis du Mont Saint-Michel and the PPP are against the scheme. “What’s the point in demolishing the existing causeway then building such an eyesore, a mass of concrete which will wreck the view with its parapet,” says Henry Decaëns, a lecturer-guide and chair of the Friends organisation. He has called for a study into the use of amphibious vehicles to be made.

And the problems extend beyond the immediate vicinity of the mount. At the beginning of April the prefect of Basse-Normandie announced that plans to build a wind farm at Argouges, 22 km away, had been shelved. There were fears it could have marred the view and upset Unesco ? the mount is a world heritage site. An exclusion zone, between 20km and 40km around the rock, is being set up.

However, after six years’ work costing ?200m ($260m), the restoration has come to fruition. The 600,000 vehicles that used to clutter the foot of the ramparts now have to park on dry land. Even cycles will be banned from the causeway in high season.

“I’m sure people won’t mind walking. After all pilgrims have been coming to the mount on foot for 1,300 years,” says François-Xavier de Beaulaincourt, the manager of the PPP. He is clearly anxious about how visitors will react. However, according to Beauvais, all the changes can be reversed.

Mont Saint-Michel bay is silting up. Had nothing been done, it would have filled in completely by 2040. So once the new causeway and bridge are built, the sea will once again flow freely, for most of the year. At present the mount is only completely cut off during the highest tides. The old dam on the river Couesnon, which contributed to the build-up of sediment, has been replaced with one fitted with special gates that allow sediment to be flushed out to sea.

Further upstream 12km of channels are due to excavated to create a natural reservoir for the dam, thus increasing the force of the stream passing through. Work on this part of the project was held up by the presence of the common parsley frog (Pelodytes punctatus), a protected species which had settled there.

In all some 52 environmental directives apply to the mount and its surroundings, and many of them have changed in the course of the project. But De Beaulaincourt is adamant that all the work will be finished by the start of the 2015 season.

This story originally pappeared in Le Monde

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Peter Hain has stepped down from the shadow cabinet to launch a campaign to build the Severn barrage. But what would its impact be on the environment? Leo Hickman, with your help, investigates. Post your views below, email leo.hickman@guardian.co.uk or tweet @LeoHickman

9.24am: Peter Hain, the shadow Welsh secretary, quit front-bench politics yesterday to focus on launching a campaign to build a tidal barrage across the Severn estuary. In a statement on his website, Hain said he hoped “to help secure Wales the biggest infrastructure project it has ever seen”:

This will require a private Bill, but I hope the Government will back it…[The Barrage] will generate at least 5% of the UK’s entire electricity needs, at a time when the future of nuclear power is in doubt. Nuclear power stations like Wylfa are coming to the end of their lives ? that’s happening right across Britain…So what is going to fill this gap? And what is going to stop the lights going off? The Severn Barrage is one of the projects, probably the key project that stops that happening. The power it can generate is equivalent to about three nuclear power stations.

But, in September 2010, the coalition ruled out any public funding for the estimated £20bn project. There has been talk of smaller, privately funded barrages, but, to date, nothing concrete has emerged. The latest plan to be discussed is a barrage from Lavernock Point near Cardiff across to Brean Down near Weston-super-Mare in Somerset. Last December, the Department of Energy and Climate Change said it was an “interesting proposition”.

However, there are environmental factors to consider beyond any low-carbon electricity that the barrage might generate. The tidal estuary is a treasured, protected habitat for birds and marine wildlife. What impact would a barrage have of the area’s flora and fauna?

What are your views? If quoting figures to support your points, please provide a link to the source. I will also be inviting various interested parties to join the debate, too. And later on today, I will return with my own verdict.

9.40am: Peter Hain has sent me this fuller explanation for why he is so keen to see a tidal barrage built across the Severn estuary:

The Cardiff-Weston Severn barrage is the single most important low carbon, renewable energy project in Europe and should be backed by all those serious about tackling climate change. It would generate the equivalent of several nuclear power stations, and contribute over 5% of Britain’s entire electricity requirements. It would harness the enormous tidal power of the Severn estuary which has the second highest tidal range in the world.

Tidal energy generation has a considerable advantage over other renewable energy technologies, because tides are predictable and constant. Whereas wind and solar are intermittent, tidal power is continuous. The project backers, Corlan Hafren, have engaged with the RSPB and other environmentalists to address their concerns. Turbine design has been reconfigured to be fish-friendly and the ebb and flow mechanism to be used will enable the Severn estuary above the barrage to be maintained at a much more stable level rather than the massive rise and fall which makes it so harsh for the Severn’s fragile ecosystems. Research suggests that a Barrage would also reinvigorate the environment and protect declining species such as the Dunlin, an iconic bird in the Severn which has experienced a catastrophic fall in numbers.

Not only will existing ecosystems be protected, but a study of La Rance Barrage in France suggests that there would be a significant increase in faunal abundance and biodiversity. The barrage would slow down the fearsome Severn tide, introducing more light and oxygen and therefore improving the water quality, attracting more fish which will support greater and more diverse birdlife.

There would also be significant economic benefits ? exactly the kind of green jobs and investment environmentalists have long been demanding. At the peak of construction the barrage would create 35,000 jobs distributed over the UK with about half in South Wales. Well over 10,000 permanent jobs would be created around the estuary. There will be huge new opportunities for new leisure activities such as water sports, fishing and bird watching on both sides of the Severn estuary.

Additionally, the Cardiff Weston barrage would also act as a storm surge barrier protecting people’s homes and assets that are under threat from rising sea levels and increasingly volatile weather. It will produce electricity for generations to come, with a life expectancy of 150 years as a tried and tested technology. La Rance has been reliably generating tidal power for nearly forty years and has a long and profitable life ahead.

Potential developers have made clear that they do not need any public money. If they have the active backing of the government, especially through the planning process, and for a private parliamentary bill, they are confident of raising the £30bn plus funding necessary to build it. In short, the barrage is a unique opportunity to produce green energy and tackle climate change; create employment; safeguard peoples’ homes from rising water levels and protect and promote indigenous wildlife and biodiversity.

9.56am: Iolo ap Dafydd, BBC Wales’s environment correspondent, has put together this four-minute video report which gives a good flavour of the range of views and emotions generated by the Severn barrage proposal.

10.39am: Thanks to ergolargo below the line who points to a paper published in the journal Environmental Impact Assessment Review last year. Its authors examined the “environmental interactions of tidal and wave energy generation devices” and came to the following conclusion:

The principle environmental effects produced from the operation of a tidal barrage are the changed tidal regime and its impact on bird communities and benthic habitat availability. The impacts on bird feeding habitat can be mitigated by the provision of new intertidal areas/lagoons which provide feeding grounds during the high water period landward of the barrage, and through the use of a dual cycle generation regime or the substitution of the barrage by a tidal fence. The latter options both give a lower energy yield. If the site was on a fish migration route (salmonids, eels, shad) appropriate provision would need to be provided by means of fish passes etc. The impacts on benthic habitats are not easily mitigated; a certain degree of loss of the regional habitat pool is inevitable.

11.52am: Canada’s Bay of Fundy, like the Severn estuary, has one of the world’s highest tidal ranges. It too has long been the focus of those seeking to build a barrage. A small 20MW barrage across the mouth of the Annapolis River has been in place since the 1980s. There have been a couple of incidents over the years of whales getting trapped in the sluices, but environmental damage caused by silting seems to be the principle concern of a larger scale barrage across the whole bay. The Save Our Severn campaign (seemingly inactive since the government said in 2010 that it would not giving public funding to a barrage) made much of the research of Dr Graham Daborn, a researcher at the Acadia Centre for Estuarine Research in Canada, into the effects of silting. But in a 2008 study, Daborn wrote that much still has to be learned:

Our experience in the Bay of Fundy system, the Miramichi (Canada), the Humber and Severn Estuaries (UK) and the work of colleagues in the Netherlands and around the world shows that the fine sediments that dominate suspensions in the water column of macrotidal estuaries do not behave in any way like non-cohesive sediments (e.g. sands) that engineers have traditionally modelled. Their settlement rate depends upon: particle size, salinity of the water, temperature, the mineralogy, the organic content, and the presence and activity of biological factors such as bacteria and phytoplankton. Once settled on the bottom, these sediments continue to display entirely unique properties…

In order to understand this behaviour we need to know in detail: sediment concentrations, sediment type (mineralogy and grain size), organic content, current velocities, shear velocities, turbulence, wave height and period, diatom concentrations and growth rates, invertebrate types and densities , and important vertebrates such as fish and birds that have major effects on benthic invertebrates. None of this information seems to have been available to or acquired by the consultants that prepared the CER. Consequently, I suggest that it is impossible at this time to make any judgement beyond pure guesswork about the effect of the barrages, the channel and the filling/discharging operations that would be involved in building this project.

11.56am: I have received this response from Martin Harper, the RSPB‘s conservation director:

A two-year study by Decc (pdf) concluded that the strategic case for government support of a c£30 billion barrage had not been made. The 2010 statement confirmed that the government would not return to this unless or until the strategic case changed and not within the life of this Parliament.
We welcome the opportunity for constructive dialogue with both Peter Hain and with potential developers, and we welcome the up-front consideration being given to reducing or avoiding the environmental impacts of a barrage scheme.
However, we do not recognise Peter Hain’s interpretation of our position. The RSPB has been clear, and the Decc study confirmed, that a conventional, high-head barrage would effectively destroy the estuary, and that the scale of the effects of a lower-head barrage on the estuary, on birds, fish, and flood risk are still unclear and would need to be carefully assessed.
We don’t believe that a post-barrage estuary would support greater wildlife or potential for bird life than it does at present, and to date no details of the turbine design have been made available, preventing us from having a view on the likely impacts on fish.
Until details of the resulting proposal are made available, it is wrong to suggest that environmental objections have been overcome.

12.03pm: And this just in from Gareth Clubb, director of Friends of the Earth Cymru:

We have yet to see the specific proposals for a Severn barrage that Peter Hain is campaigning for, but we have real concerns about the potential impact of a massive concrete structure on an internationally important wildlife habitat.
We agree that we need to invest in clean British energy, including tidal power, to reduce our nation’s dependence on dirty and expensive fossil fuels, create jobs and tackle climate change.
But there are alternative ways to capture tidal energy that could cause less damage – and could also provide clean energy sooner than the 20 years it will take to build a barrage.

12.33pm: I have been trying, so far without joy, to reach someone from the Coral Hafren consortium to get hold of more details about their proposed barrage between Lavernock Point and Brean Down. Its website is a simple holding page without contact details or further information. (Interestingly, a search at Companies House shows that one of Coral Hafren Ltd’s directors in John Gummer – now Lord Deben – the former Conservative environment secretary of state.)

However, this recent article in the Weston, Worle and Somerset Mercury carries some comments by Roger Falconer, the Halcrow professor of water management at Cardiff University. Halcrow is said to be part of the Coral Hafren consortium. From the article:

[Falconer] said: “The Severn Estuary barrage would last at least 125 years. My team has been working to get as much power as possible with a two-way generator, which will produce power on an out-going tide and in-coming tide, that way the flood risk is reduced.”
Dr Falconer said the barrage could reduce up to 14,000 inter-tidal habitats but could also produce clearer water.
He said: “It will not be crystal clear, but it will be a lot better.
“There will be more light penetration which will help break down the bacteria in the sediment and encourage more sealife.”
Dr Falconer added: “We are talking about a dramatic change. The barrage will have a lasting impact and could bring in excess of 50,000 jobs for the whole area, which will mostly be in the Weston and Cardiff region.
“It will act as a catalyst for jobs for Wales and the South West and there is the possibility of road or rail links between Weston and Cardiff.”

If I receive more details from anyone connected to Coral Hafren I will post them below.

1.15pm: Here are the thoughts of Alun James, policy officer of WWF Cymru:

In 2010, the government’s feasibility study into Severn Tidal Power found that a Cardiff-Weston barrage that used high-head turbines would result in loss of more than half the intertidal habitat for birds, the possible local extinction of some fish species, water quality problems upstream, and increased tidal heights as far away as the east coast of Ireland. But there was the tantalising prospect that emerging technologies – such as low-head fish-friendly turbines – could reduce the worst impacts. Let’s see these technologies progressed and tested before considering any new scheme.

2.04pm: A spokeswoman at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has sent me the following statement:

DECC’s thinking on a Severn barrage is set out in the feasibility study report we published in late 2010. It concluded that there isn’t a good case for a publicly-funded energy scheme in the Severn at this point compared to the other options for delivering secure and low carbon electricity. It didn’t rule out a privately financed barrage, though, and we are aware of a number of possible schemes.
Corlan Hafren approached us late last year with a draft outline business case for a Severn barrage project and officials have met the consortium to discuss it and the next steps to enable us to assess whether the benefits in terms of economic growth and renewable energy justify the costs and the environmental consequences for the Severn estuary.
Government is open to working with viable and environmentally responsible proposals that offer energy consumers good value for the subsidy costs they would pay as part of electricity bills. A public subsidy for a Severn Barrage would still be needed even if the capital costs were privately funded.

2.44pm: Beyond choosing whether to build a barrage or not, the key decision is selecting which type of technology to adopt. Do you use barrages or lagoons? A combination of both? Or do you instead go for a series of smaller tidal stream generators? Pulse Tidal based in Sheffield is one company currently trying to research and develop the latter. Earlier this month, it was given permission to establish a tidal energy test facility off the coast at Lynmouth, north Devon.

Last December, BBC Humberside produced this video report about how some of these technologies are now being tested on the Hull estuary.

In 2009, the Guardian produced this interactive graphic showing the five different projects – including barrages and lagoons – that were being considered at that time.

3.41pm: Here are the thoughts of Dr Douglas Parr, Greenpeace‘s chief scientist and policy director:

We support tidal power, including tidal range in the Severn. However, there are a variety of ways of delivering tidal range power of which a barrage is only one and it is not clear that it is the best. Looking at the range of renewable energy options available to UK the barrage seems to be a poor choice. Previous feasibility studies have shown it is expensive, damaging to globally significant habitat and not scalable – in other word, once you’ve done a barrage in the Severn, that’s a lot of the resource used, whereas wind/solar/geothermal/tidal stream can be replicated in many places. For example, construction of a major offshore wind farm, skills, learning, infrastructure and viable company models can be used to produce further offshore wind capacity. This option is not available for the Severn Barrage. So Greenpeace currently believes a proposal for a barrage is a poor use of public funds, time and political effort compared with other options such as scaling up offshore wind, or speeding wave and tidal stream technologies to market. Some of which could be used to look at other possible options for use of the large renewable potential in the River Severn tidal range.
Regarding wildlife impacts, Greenpeace recognises that we will need both large quantity and variety of renewable energy ? many forms of renewable energy have some impact on wildlife so we need to look at each proposition on its own merits. We understand that a barrage would be very damaging to rare inter-tidal habitats, which again emphasises that this is not a priority for Government time or support.

5.41pm: Simon Brenman of the South West Wildlife Trusts has sent me this comment:

The Wildlife Trusts recognise the huge potential that the Severn estuary has as a source of energy. However, it also provides vital habitat for a vast number of birds, supports juvenile fish species, and is the fourth largest expanse of mud and sand flats in the UK. A barrage has the potential to destroy a large proportion of the estuary’s internationally recognised wildlife and habitats, which is why ehe Wildlife Trusts are opposed to the full barrage schemes. We need renewables, but not at the expense of our wildlife. They must be sited in the right place using the right technology. When the proposals were being considered in 2010, three more innovative options known as the Severn Embryonic Technologies Scheme were looked at, which would have the lowest impact on the environment. The Wildlife Trusts still think that these and similar ideas need further research to establish whether these technologies could allow the power of the Severn estuary to be harnessed.

6.15pm:

My verdict

As has already been said by a number of commentators and readers, we really need more details about the proposed barrage that Peter Hain is arguing for before a meaningful assessment can be made about whether it deserves our support. But I’m pleased the wider subject of using the Severn estuary to generate electricity appears to be back on the table. It seems foolish to rule out this unique source of renewable energy, especially if the burden on the taxpayer can be minimised, as the Corlan Hafren consortium seems to be promising. But, again, let’s await the details.

My own preference would be to see a network of tidal stream generators positioned throughout the estuary, rather than one monolithic structure straddling the six miles between Cardiff and Weston. The environmental risks associated with the later seem too severe when alternatives appear to be available. Greenpeace’s Doug Parr makes a sensible point that developing tidal stream generators also means that the technology can be much more readily replicated and exported. The timescales involved with getting tidal stream generators on-stream also seem much shorter than waiting at least a decade before a large barrage starts generating electricity. But at least Peter Hain’s intervention might kick-start this debate once more, which, as I’ve stated, is to be welcomed.

9.15am: Here’s Julian Boss of the Institute for Sustainability:

If the country spent £20bn on energy efficiency in our oldest and least energy efficient homes, schools, hospitals, offices, factories etc then we can begin to reduce the required size of generating capacity and can look at the energy mix more carefully. We must reduce the demand first, then flatten the demand curve to give the most sustainable target for generation.
The tidal barrage has been examined again and again and each time a new minister comes along who needs to find out for themselves why a barrage is the wrong solution. Tidal stream turbines or tidal reef design (as recommended by RSPB in 2008) can capture tidal energy with far less impact on the extensive ecosystems which are centred on the Severn Estuary.
Without an electricity storage solution any tidal barrage will currently generate power for about half the time that the UK demand will require it due to the tidal times and range being inconveniently non-aligned to the UK publics energy use habits.

Update: Julian Boss has asked me to point out this is a personal view and does not represent the official view of the Institute for Sustainability.

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Plans aimed at preserving the maritime character of the French coastal landmark have divided politicians and shopkeepers

In preparation for the tourist season, two dray horses and their drivers go back and forth along the causeway to Mont Saint-Michel. It is a practice run and the cart is carrying two large water-tanks, instead of live passengers.

Since the end of last month visitors ? who number 2.4 million annually ? are forbidden to use their own cars to reach the mount. Now, the only way to cross the almost 2km causeway is on foot or by motorised or horse-drawn shuttle.

Ever since a project was launched in 1995 to restore the mount’s “maritime character”, there have been delays, controversies and quarrels between local councillors on the board of the public-private partnership (PPP) and central government. The Socialist (PS) leader of the Basse-Normandie regional council and chair of the PPP heading the redevelopment project, Laurent Beauvais, finds the setbacks an irritant.

Most of these mishaps have been due to the sensitive nature of the operation, a mixture of caution because of the site’s international renown ? the preparatory studies alone took 10 years ? and the vigilance of those who have a stake in the mount, its immediate surroundings and its religious significance. Coach companies had to be placated, discussions with cyclists held and local shopkeepers unhappy about the changes to the area had to be mollified. “I understand our past difficulties,” Beauvais says. “Governance with several parties is complicated and this great project is loaded with symbols, passion and religious fervour.”

The outstanding controversy centres on the new causeway that will connect with a bridge to the mount. This will allow emergency access almost all year round. Both Les Amis du Mont Saint-Michel and the PPP are against the scheme. “What’s the point in demolishing the existing causeway then building such an eyesore, a mass of concrete which will wreck the view with its parapet,” says Henry Decaëns, a lecturer-guide and chair of the Friends organisation. He has called for a study into the use of amphibious vehicles to be made.

And the problems extend beyond the immediate vicinity of the mount. At the beginning of April the prefect of Basse-Normandie announced that plans to build a wind farm at Argouges, 22 km away, had been shelved. There were fears it could have marred the view and upset Unesco ? the mount is a world heritage site. An exclusion zone, between 20km and 40km around the rock, is being set up.

However, after six years’ work costing ?200m ($260m), the restoration has come to fruition. The 600,000 vehicles that used to clutter the foot of the ramparts now have to park on dry land. Even cycles will be banned from the causeway in high season.

“I’m sure people won’t mind walking. After all pilgrims have been coming to the mount on foot for 1,300 years,” says François-Xavier de Beaulaincourt, the manager of the PPP. He is clearly anxious about how visitors will react. However, according to Beauvais, all the changes can be reversed.

Mont Saint-Michel bay is silting up. Had nothing been done, it would have filled in completely by 2040. So once the new causeway and bridge are built, the sea will once again flow freely, for most of the year. At present the mount is only completely cut off during the highest tides. The old dam on the river Couesnon, which contributed to the build-up of sediment, has been replaced with one fitted with special gates that allow sediment to be flushed out to sea.

Further upstream 12km of channels are due to excavated to create a natural reservoir for the dam, thus increasing the force of the stream passing through. Work on this part of the project was held up by the presence of the common parsley frog (Pelodytes punctatus), a protected species which had settled there.

In all some 52 environmental directives apply to the mount and its surroundings, and many of them have changed in the course of the project. But De Beaulaincourt is adamant that all the work will be finished by the start of the 2015 season.

This story originally pappeared in Le Monde

Donna Feldman Drea de Matteo Drew Barrymore Ehrinn Cummings Elena Lyons

Has anyone frozen sausage gravy for biscuits and gravy?  I wasn't sure if it would be weird because of the milk.  My friend wants to have a big breakfast one day at Sasquatch music festival when we go and so I thought I would see if anyone has done this.  I don't think it would be too hard to just do it there but obviously it would be easier to do it beforehand.  Thanks!

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One-to-one care during labour and birth part of government strategy to tackle condition that affects 10-15% of mothers

Mothers will receive one-to-one care from a named midwife during labour and birth as part of government plans to combat postnatal depression.

Women who have a miscarriage or stillbirth and parents who are forced to cope with the death of a baby will also be offered increased support from the NHS.

Under the plans, health workers will be given enhanced training so they can spot the early signs of postnatal depression.

The move was welcomed by the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) and parenting forums. Cathy Warwick, chief executive of the RCM, said the pledges were “very good news” for women and midwives.

“These are positive plans from the government targeting areas of maternity care that are under-prioritised and under-resourced,” she said.

“The impact of a miscarriage or a stillbirth can be devastating for the woman and her family and postnatal depression can be a crippling and sometimes fatal illness. Early detection and treatment is crucial.

“It is also excellent to see an intention to ensure that long-standing NHS commitments, such as one-to-one care in labour and choice about where and how women give birth, become a reality for all women.”

According to the RCM, 5,000 more midwives would be needed to deliver the care proposed.

Justine Roberts, co-founder of Mumsnet, welcomed the renewed support but said a sustained effort was needed to ensure mothers benefited from the changes.

“Sadly there are many experiences shared on Mumsnet of women not getting the best care when they need it,” she said.

“The announcement that services provided during miscarriage are to be monitored is a real advance towards identifying best and worst practice and therefore towards improving the care received.”

Sally Russell, co-founder of Netmums, also welcomed plans to address postnatal depression – a common condition that is often kept hidden.

“Most mums and dads find it difficult to admit they are suffering and yet it can be a blight on their lives,” she said. “Having better support from local services could make a big difference and we’re delighted that the government has identified this as a priority.”

Alongside beefed-up training for health visitors ? who provide services for expectant and new parents after birth ? the government has pledged to improve maternity care by ensuring women have one named midwife to oversee their care during pregnancy and after they have their baby, making sure every women has one-to-one midwife care and giving parents-to-be the choice over where and how they give birth.

The NHS will also be judged on how well it looks after parents who have miscarried, suffered a stillbirth or cot death, with patients asked to rate their care.

According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, 10-15% of women who have a baby suffer from postnatal depression.

Several celebrities, including actor Gwyneth Paltrow, have spoken of their experience of the condition, which usually starts within a few months of birth. Around one in three women experience symptoms in pregnancy, which then continue. Treatment options depend on the severity of the depression, but include medication and counselling.

The health secretary, Andrew Lansley, said: “We have listened to the concerns of women about their experiences of maternity care, which is why we are putting in place a ‘named midwife’ policy to ensure consistency of care.

“Not least, we will focus on the quality of care given to mothers-to-be and measure women’s experience of their maternity care for the first time.”

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Sihanoukville is on the Gulf of Thailand approximately 200km from the Cambodian capita. It is the country?s primary commercial port and is also enjoying growing tourism.

The new plant will be sized to accommodate multiple can lines and have an initial annual production capacity of 725 million two-piece 33cl aluminum cans.

The facility is expected to be operational in the third quarter of 2013 and will be Crown?s second beverage can plant in Cambodia including its two line operation in Phnom Penh.

Crown currently operates seven beverage can plants in Southeast Asia. The company has one plant each in Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand as well three plants in Vietnam (one in Hanoi and two in Ho Chi Minh City).

Earlier this year the Company announced plans to build a new beverage can plant in Danang, Vietnam which is expected to begin commercial production in second quarter of 2013.

Source: Crown Holdings

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? Click here for step by step directions
? Click here for our interactive map of all the walks

Distance 7.7 miles (12.4km)
Classification Moderate
Duration 3 hours 30 minutes
Begins White Horse Hill car park
OS grid reference SU293866

Walk in a nutshell
A long, bracing trek around a beautiful part of central England that is alive with ancient mystery. Some of the route follows the Ridgeway, considered to be Britain’s oldest road. At the beginning you pass by the Uffington White Horse, a prehistoric chalk figure in the hillside whose true significance will probably never be known. There’s also a Neolithic burial mound and an iron age hill fort before you reach Ashdown House, a 17th?century mansion. The paths are mostly hard, or through fields, with a couple of moderate slopes as well as one notably steep hill.

Why it’s special
One of England’s outstanding ancient sites, the 3,000-year-old White Horse has found its way into many stories and poems, including GK Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse and, perhaps now most famously, Terry Pratchett’s A Hat Full of Sky. That book’s heroine, Tiffany Aching, grew up near a similar horse and wears a necklace depicting it. “‘Taint what a horse looks like,” she recalls her father telling her. “It’s what a horse be.” Pratchett lives close to the real one, and once you’ve seen it for yourself it’s easy to understand why it should appear in his work.

Keep your eyes peeled for
Wayland’s Smithy is a stone age long barrow and chamber tomb, probably built in two stages between 3700 and 3400BC. An archaeological investigation of the older part revealed one crouched buried figure and the scattered bones of 14 others, from which the flesh and organs had been removed before burial. In comparison, the 17th-century Ashdown House seems positively modern. It was built by the first Earl of Craven, supposedly to offer refuge from the plague for Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, with whom he was in love. Elizabeth died before seeing it, however, and the earl lived unmarried into his 80s. Uffington “Castle” near the horse, of course, is not a castle, but an iron age earthwork.

Recover afterwards
There are several excellent pubs to choose between nearby. The White Horse at Woolstone is an old and beautiful inn that serves excellent upmarket pub food. Alternatively, the Blowing Stone Inn, less than 2 miles south-east of the horse, has a similar restaurant menu, and also does sandwiches. As does the Fox and Hounds, a humbler but no less inviting establishment in Uffington.

If it’s tipping down
The Vale and Downland Museum explains the story behind the White Horse in great depth, as well as many of the area’s other tales, varying from the reign of King Alfred the Great to the development of Formula 1.

How to get there
Swindon is the nearest station to the start of the walk, but it still isn’t very close. Your best bet would be a 47, 47a or X47 bus, all of which run a limited service on Saturdays from Swindon to Uffington, and a weekday service to Ashbury, where you should alight at the Rose and Crown hotel.

1 Leave the main car park by the gate nearest to the disabled bays and cross the field towards the White Horse. Head  for the furthest gate on the left, cross the road, and follow the path to the White Horse, which is signposted.

2 Head up the hill passing Uffington Castle on your right, before reaching the Ridgeway. Turn right and continue along the route to Wayland’s smithy, which is on your right.

3 Continue on from Wayland’s Smithy for 250m. At the crossroads take the path to the left passing Odstone barn. Carry on until you reach the tree line. Turn right and follow the path until you  reach the road. Cross over and carry on until you reach the grassy avenue running through Ashdown estate.

4 Leave the footpath and walk along the large avenue towards Ashdown House. Feel free to detour and explore the woodland paths leading off the main avenue. When you near the house, head back on to the main avenue and follow the sign to the car park.

5 Continue onwards, crossing the road and climbing up Kingstone Down keeping to the fence line. At the top, head towards Weathercock Hill for a rewarding view of the house. From here, with the house in front of you, go to the right and return to the path in the corner of the field marked by a stile.

6 Follow this path across the field. You will see Uffington Castle in the distance. Stay on the same path until you reach a small wood.

7 Turn left here and follow the path until the Ridgeway.

8 Turn right and retrace your steps back to the car park. You can also turn left at the first road junction to get back tothe car park.

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My dad and I snuck out of the house without telling anyone where we were going. He grabbed his camera, I grabbed my camera, and we tippy-toed out the door. We decided we would go explore the little neighborhoods that surround my hometown, Amorebieta, where life seems to stand still.

I rolled down the window, rested my head on my arm, and took in a deep breath of that spring cold air. The landscape seemed almost painted — blue sky and the greenest grass.

I turned my head and noticed a big grin on my dad’s face. “The sheep are out” he said.

And that was it — I knew what I had come for.

Every time I go back home there seems to be a purpose to my visit. It is never clear of what that might be when I first arrive, but as we settle into our routine, a theme always appears — almost as if I had an impeding mission. A void I must fill. With time I have learned that I need soil and dirt in my life.

When I set foot in Basque land, all I want to do is run for the hills. And so I did, and there they were — the sheep and the newborn lambs that were taking over the landscape and feeding on this painted-like grass. It was a beautiful thing.

That morning my dad and I drove to San Migel, only a couple of miles from where I went to school.

“They make really good sheep’s milk cheese in this house” he said. My heart skipped a beat and I quickly asked him to stop. “Then we must get some milk from them!” I replied in a rush.

I had been thinking about mamia for days, almost to the point of an obsession. I think you might have noticed from all the references I have made to it lately. Mamia is almost a cheese-like product. A curd made with ewe’s milk and rennet. Simple yes, but when the milk is fresh, it can be the most delightful, naturally sweet, and creamy dessert. Ask any Basque and you shall see. I have tried to recreate it in the US to no avail. It is all about the milk.

We knocked on their door.

The farmhouse is old, almost decrepit, but a family still lives there raising sheep and making cheese just like generations passed. I love that – such a romantic notion, isn’t it?

A tall, rosy-cheeked man came to the door. He greeted my dad with the cordiality of an old customer. He was paused and spoke Basque with a gentle voice. Such a contrast to my hyper excitement, of one who only gets to savor these moments once a year. “This is a daily affair for him” I thought to myself.

When we asked about the milk, he explained they had run out. “You have to come before eleven o’clock in the morning or it will all be gone”.

“Even with the 600 sheep you have?” I asked surprised.

“Yes, the milk we don’t use for making cheese is sold in a matter of a couple of hours. Chefs and cooks alike come early” he explained.

We thanked him and decided to return the next morning for more. This time we would bring Jon and Miren along.

They were in for a treat.

The next morning after breakfast, we returned to the farm for the coveted sheep’s milk. He was not kidding. We were greeted by a line of people waiting to get their share of the freshly-milked goodness — almost like a pilgrimage, I thought.

While my dad waited, I steered the kids towards the barn. It was cold and too early for the sheep to be out. There they lied, close to one another, mothers with their newborns. What a sight that was. As we later learned, three of them had just been born a couple of hours earlier. Bloody umbilical cords still hanging and covered in amniotic fluid.

I held one of them in my arms. “Most people are afraid of them” said the matriarch of the house. I shook my head. Not me. I love sheep- always have. Jon and Miren gathered around me unsure of what they were witnessing, but they quickly warmed up to the newborn lamb.

We watched them make some cheese that morning and took a stroll around the neighborhood. The apple trees were not yet blooming but it was definitely spring in the Basque Country.

Back at my parents’, my mom gently simmered the raw milk. It smelled like my childhood.

We had mamia for dessert when both my brothers and their families came over for lunch. Drizzled with raw honey and walnuts is how I like it.

“I think I will make a tart with it” I said to my mom. As it turns-out, our schedules didn’t allow it, but when I returned back to the US, I made a custard tart inspired by that day. Sheep’s milk yogurt, raw honey, vanilla bean, and a bit of lemon make the creamiest tart.

The days that followed were spent taking walks, hiking to Santuario de la Virgen de Oro, spending time with friends, cooking with my mom, and visiting my uncle Javi’s sheep and his fruitful garden. His plum and peach trees were already blooming and his citrus trees plentiful.

It was anchovy season for Basque fishermen and we indulged everyday. Quickly fried in garlic-infused olive oil, they are such a treat that I miss living away. It was a pleasure to see Jon and Miren enjoy fish as much as I do- such a staple in Basque cuisine.

“Arraine (fish)” Miren would say when asked what she wanted for lunch. Made us smile.

Marinated anchovies, salad of shaved carrots and fennel with sorrel and watercress. rabbit stew, pea and potato soup… all foods of spring.

We had amazing spring weather during our entire trip, which is not to be taken lightly because spring can be quite unpredictable in the Basque Country. Just a few days before we arrived, snow had covered some of the nearby mountains.

“The trees will start blooming soon then” I exclaimed with optimism.

First plum and cherry trees, then apples will follow.

On a sunny Saturday morning, we drove to the valley of Etxauri. This is fertile land where endless rows of cherry trees paint the landscape. The blooms are to be admired from afar and up close. Fluffy, white petals that almost look like snow.

Wheat grass surrounds the cherry trees. Soft and tall. I had forgotten how soft the grass in the Basque Country is. The kids hid in the fields and ran free.

That afternoon we visited Urdiain, a small but beautiful town where we used to spend our summer holidays when we were kids. We walked around the grove where we used to set up camp and the hundred-year old oak trees where we played.

There were trips to the beach of Laga with salmon and pea shoot tarts and a stop for ice cream on the way home.

During these visits to see my parents, we rarely eat out. We cook at home with the abundant fresh ingredients available and restaurants are saved for special occasions.

This time however, I was thrilled to join my aunt Aran (I was named after her, yes) for a farm to table lunch at Boroa. I will share that day on another post but I came back home completely inspired by that meal of tiny shelled favas, a perfectly poached egg and shaved truffle. Simple yes? But perfectly executed.

Inspired by that dish, I made a spring panzanella salad with English peas, soft-cooked quail eggs, and chive blossoms in a lemon and chive vinaigrette.

It was perfect.

And I leave you with these images and these recipes that made our time away special.

“I missed the sheep” said Miren when we returned to Florida.

“Me too, me too” I replied.

I really did.

Sheep’s Milk Yogurt and Honey Tart

makes a 9-inch tart

Tart crust

2/3 cup (90 g) superfine brown rice flour
1/4 cup (35 g) millet flour
1/4 cup (25 g) almond flour
3 tablespoons cornstarch
1 tablespoon natural cane sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons (110 g) cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
3 to 4 tablespoons ice water

Combine the first six ingredients in the food processor. Pulse to aerate. Add the butter and pulse until it is the size of peas. Add 3 tablespoons of ice water and pulse until it comes together. It will not form a ball. Press the dough between your fingers to see if it comes together. Add more ice water if needed.

Transfer dough to a cold surface. Knead a couple of times, form into a disk, wrap it in plastic wrap, and flatten it. Refrigerate the dough for an hour.

Dust your cold surface with some superfine brown rice flour. Roll your dough to 1/8-inch thickness. If it cracks, pinch it back together. If it’s too cold it tends to crack so you can let it come to temperature for a few minutes.

Fill your 9-inch tart pan with the dough and cut off excess. Refrigerate the tart dough for 30 minutes.

Filling

1/4 cup (50 g) natural cane sugar
Zest of 1 lemon, finely grated
3 eggs
3 tablespoons cornstarch
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise and seeds scraped
1 cup (250 ml) sheep’s milk yogurt or mamia
1/2 cup (125 ml) heavy cream
1 tablespoon raw honey

Preheat oven to 350F (180C).

In a bowl, rub the sugar and lemon zest together to release the lemon oils. Add the eggs and whisk until combined. Add the cornstarch and vanilla seeds and whisk until lump free. Add the yogurt, heavy cream, and honey and whisk until smooth.

Dock the bottom of the tart dough. Pour the yogurt mixture into the tart and bake for 45 minutes or until the edges start to turn golden brown and the center is set.

Let the tart cool for a few minutes before cutting. Serve warm or at room temperature.

English Pea, Quail Egg and Chive Blossom Panzanella

If you don’t have chive blossoms, you can simply use some finely chopped chives or very thinly sliced red onion. It is all about getting the onion flavor in the salad.

serves 4 to 6

1 pound (450 g) shelled English peas
12 quail eggs, at room temperature
1/3 cup (85 ml) olive oil
1/2 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
Juice 1 lemon
2 tablespoons finely chopped chives
1 tablespoon lemon thyme leaves
Salt
Black pepper
4 or 5 slices of multigrain gluten-free bread, toasted and broken into pieces
4 chive blossoms
1 ounce Idiazabal or Manchego cheese, shaved

In a medium sauce pan, bring water to a boil over high heat. Season with a generous amount of salt. Add the shelled peas and cook them for 4 to 5 minutes depending on the size until they are al dente. We don’t want them mushy. Immediately, remove them from the boiling water with a slotted spoon and submerge them in a bowl of ice water and let them cool. Drain them well and reserve.

Continue to boil the water in the pan. Gently add the quail eggs being careful not to crack them. Reduce heat to medium so that water continues to boil but not too rapidly. Cook the eggs for 2 minutes. Immediately remove them from the boiling water and submerge them in a bowl of ice water until they cool. Peel them and reserve.

In a large bowl, whisk together the olive oil, lemon zest, lemon juice, chives, thyme leaves, salt, and pepper. Add the blanched peas, bread, and chive blossoms. Toss the salad so that the bread is coated in the dressing. Let the salad rest for 10 minutes. Top with the quail eggs and shaved cheese. Serve immediately.

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David Cameron should speak about environment, he says in letter revealing frustration over UK’s lack of low carbon strategy

The government should do more to help green industries boost economic growth, stop the UK falling behind international rivals, and avoid losing its global leadership on the environment, William Hague has told cabinet colleagues, in a private letter seen by the Guardian.

The foreign secretary also warns in his letter to ministers that unless Britain takes stronger leadership on the green economy there is no hope of securing an international agreement on climate change.

Hague’s letter comes at a sensitive time for the government as it faces criticism for not doing enough to stimulate growth. The country has officially entered a double-dip recession with two consecutive quarters of negative growth.

David Cameron and George Osborne are also under pressure from environmental groups and some business leaders for failing to live up to their promise to be the “greenest government ever” as they appear to have watered down their ambition in the face of opposition from Tory rightwingers, worried about extra regulation and angry about wind farms.

Nowhere in the letter does Hague overtly criticise the government’s programme, and he is supportive of many elements of it, but the letter appears to betray a frustration that more could be done, particularly if senior government ministers were to be more vocal in their support of the green economy.

Hague told the Sunday Telegraph that business leaders should “work harder” instead of complaining about the government. But his letter appears to suggest that by giving more support to the low carbon production and consumption the government could do more to stimulate growth, pointing to the success of economies which have done so, particularly China and Germany.

The letter says the strategy would have five benefits: reducing exposure to volatile energy prices; revitalising manufacturing based in low carbon sectors; modernising infrastructure; reducing utility bills by cutting energy use, and it would have “a particular appeal for the under 30s”.

“I believe we should reframe our response to climate change as an imperative for growth rather than merely being a way of being green or meeting environmental commitments,” says Hague. “The low carbon economy is at the leading edge of a structural shift now taking place globally ? we need to stay abreast of this, given our need for an export-led recovery and for inward investment in modern infrastructure and advanced manufacturing.”

Hague cites the successes of the coalition government’s green investment bank, electricity market reform and the green deal, but urges a “stronger political emphasis” on the sector. “We could get more mileage from this without additional commitment of expenditure or fiscal risk,” adds the letter, which was written in March but only emerged on Tuesday.

As well as helping the UK’s economy, “greater emphasis in our core narrative on low carbon growth” would help the UK’s “commercial diplomacy” with countries interested in investing in and trading with the UK, and in its role in international climate negotiations.

“We will not secure a binding agreement in 2015 unless the idea of low carbon growth becomes dominant across the major economies before then,” says Hague. “We can leverage this. But our diplomacy will only succeed if it is rooted in our own domestic narrative.”

Hague sets out a strategy, which starts by urging the prime minister to make a special speech on the subject and using the UK’s presidency of the G8 next year to push the message strongly. Just weeks later, an event which had been billed as a keynote speech on the environment by the PM was downgraded by officials, who insisted he was only making “comments”.

Other suggestions include a wider push for market growth by lowering barriers to trade and investment in low carbon goods and services, a more focused push by the EU on helping low carbon innovation and infrastructure investment, and pressing the EU to liberalise energy markets to speed up energy saving and other new technology.

At least two cabinet colleagues have responded to Hague’s letter: Ed Davey, the energy and climate secretary, and Vince Cable, the business secretary. Both Liberal Democrats appear to sound a more cautious note than the foreign secretary, insisting that any push on the low carbon economy must “fairly represent the costs involved alongside the benefits” in order to be “credible”.

Cable also warns that without an international accord on cutting emissions ? something currently overseen by the United Nations ? “we need to watch the impact of our climate policies on UK competitiveness more broadly”.

The Foreign Office said it did not comment on leaked documents.

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Various venues, Brighton

Looking wearily at the vast queues that stretch from the venues where the bigger artists are performing, and the grim-faced bouncers operating a one-in, one-out system, it’s hard not to feel that The Great Escape is more appropriately named than its organisers realise. Frankly, the best chance you’ve got of getting in to see Grimes, Toy, Django Django or the Mystery Jets is by making like Charles Bronson and Dickie Attenborough and fashioning a makeshift tunnel.

Anyone who actually manages to gain access to see Django Django can tell you what the fuss is about: their dense, reverb-laden, harmony-drenched psychedelia sounds fantastic live, and a second, marginally less oversubscribed show on Friday turns out to be one of the weekend’s highlights. The shows in the daytime are less mobbed and offer up intriguing choices: on Thursday, you could find both the hazy psychedelia of Porcelain Raft and College’s lush, 80s teen-movie-soundtrack electronics gamely attempting to transcend the surroundings of a pub’s upstairs room in the middle of the afternoon.

Meanwhile, the sense that you’ve ventured appealingly off-piste is palpable when watching Tokyo’s Tripple Nippples: three female vocalists in facepaint and body-stockings adorned with the kind of crudely drawn penises that usually appear on posters in the London Underground. The music is fittingly berserk, lurching from something vaguely analogous to electronic chart pop to something vaguely analogous to South Africa’s shangaan electro. Considerably less eye-popping is the spectacle presented by Jam City, from the post-dubstep label Night Slugs. In the grand tradition of live dance music, it’s a non-descript bloke frowning at a computer, but what’s coming out of his laptop is incredible: a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of electronics, disembodied R&B samples, rhythms that clatter and lurch unexpectedly. At a festival where one heavily-tipped name, Savages, turn out to sound remarkably like an 80s goth band ? albeit a good 80s goth band ? there’s something bracing about hearing music that could only really have been made in 2012.

You get the same sensation off AlunaGeorge‘s impressively inventive and expansive take on pop R&B, with frontwoman Aluna Francis so obviously a star in waiting ? and Kwes, a singer-songwriter whose music never settles. One minute his rich voice is backed by laidback electric piano flecked soul, the next by hammering, distorted beats. Elsewhere, the increasingly frantic search for a big, new guitar band throws up Palma Violets ? glowering atmospherics with definite hint of Wu Lyf in the pained vocals ? and California’s Haim, who, live at least, sound no more like their advance billing of folk-meets-R&B than they do the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band, but they clearly have decent songs to spare.

Rating: 4/5

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Interactive map: Search our map for a National Trust walking route in your area

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Harpenden seems an unlikely setting for a battle over global farming. But threats to disrupt tests on GM crops are causing a stir in the town

For a town that faces being overrun by activists this month, Harpenden was in a surprisingly calm mood last week. Windows in the prosperous Hertfordshire town were unboarded, while sandbags were noticeable by their absence. Townsfolk were also displaying a distinct insouciance to pledges by green activists to hold a day of protest there and trash a field of GM crops at the town’s Rothamsted research station.

Most locals had heard of the activists’ threat, but few approved of the call to destroy an agricultural experiment which scientists say could have profound consequences for food production and environmental protection.

“I live close to the site and the presence of GM crops there does not worry me a bit,” said Pauline Cheema. “It strikes me this is a carefully controlled experiment that should be allowed to continue.”

In the local Oxfam shop, Claire was equally supportive. “Activists say pollen from GM crops in the field pose a threat to the environment. If so, surely the worst thing you could do is break down the fences and release the stuff inside. It makes no sense.”

Even biologist John Pickett ? who has played a key role in creating the GM wheat at the centre of the controversy ? was putting on a brave face, although he has been working on the now threatened project for 25 years. “Our wheat is the vanguard of a new generation of crops that will use natural signalling systems to protect crops. It will get used one day, if not in wheat in Britain then in other crops in other countries.”

The wheat devised by the team at Rothamsted ? the world’s longest-running agricultural research centre ? is unusual because it is the first crop to be designed to mimic insect signalling systems in order to protect crops, in this case against aphids.

Pickett, an ebullient and unexpectedly cheerful figure in a black leather jacket and striped shirt, describes it as a second-generation, eco-friendly GM crop. It will not be patented and it will not be owned by any private companies, he added.

“Aphids cause more than £100m of damage to crops in this country,” he said. “However, instead of killing them off with insecticides, which wash off the soil into rivers and streams and cause pollution, we have persuaded the wheat to emit a chemical called E-beta-farnasene, which is emitted by aphids when they are threatened. It tells other aphids to fly away. It also attracts aphid predators such as ladybirds and wasps.”

The chemical therefore delivers a double whammy. It scares off aphids and attracts predators that will kill off the aphids that didn’t heed the first warning. However, the chemical ? which smells of Granny Smith apples, according to Pickett ? quickly dissipates when sprayed on crops, limiting its effectiveness.

“We had to get the wheat to manufacture the chemical,” he added. After years of research, his team succeeded in creating a GM variety that did this by inserting into the wheat’s DNA a gene that makes organisms manufacture E-beta-farnasene.

“It worked perfectly in the laboratory,” added Pickett. “Aphid numbers dropped, predator numbers rose and wheat yields increased. After that we had to show it worked in the wild and could withstand hailstorms and the like.” So they sought approval from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to hold outdoor trials. Permission was granted ? to the outrage of activists.

The centre’s wheat was “a clear risk to British farming”, claimed the group Take the Flour Back, set up to block the trials. “We don’t need to boost wheat production in this country,” said Nicola Gomez, a member. “Its production is perfectly satisfactory and does not need boosting by planting genetically modified crops.”

The group also says the crops threaten Rothamsted’s existing trials of standard crops which could be “polluted” with GM wheat pollen. It argues the centre’s research methodology is outdated and questions claims that GM crops use fewer pesticides than normal plants. In fact, they need more, says the group. Hence its decision to launch a day of action on 27 May which is described on its website as “a nice day out, with picnics, music? and a decontamination”.

The prospect of this “decontamination” so dismayed Rothamsted scientists that they issued an appeal for the group to halt its action and called for it to debate the issues with researchers in public.

“We have made that offer several times now, but we are still waiting for a reply,” said Professor Maurice Maloney, Rothamsted’s director. “To judge from the rhetoric, they are going to go ahead and try to trash the field. And if they are absolutely determined, it will be hard to stop them. Yet there is no risk of pollen escaping, and even if it did it could do no harm to wild plants. Yet we face the destruction of a technology that could not just help wheat production in Britain but boost yields of crops elsewhere in the world.”

Certainly, the wheat trial site is exposed. Legislation stipulates its exact map reference has to be published. In addition, a 2.5-metre mesh fence has been erected around it, in part to keep animals from disturbing the crops within. You wouldn’t mistake this for an average inner-city allotment. Yet urban allotments have far better chances of remaining intact and of not being vandalised than Rothamsted’s GM crop trial, despite its global importance. The irony is not lost on Maloney: “I sometimes feel we are heading back into the dark ages.”

Ciara Cindy Crawford Cindy Taylor Cinthia Moura Claudette Ortiz

What’s the attraction of a miniature hamburger meal painstakingly assembled entirely from packets of dried ingredients?

The packet came, with its unmistakeably Japanese garishness, its jarring colours, fonts, slashes and squiggles. Inside it lay the Kracie Happy Kitchen powdered hamburger meal: a new and unsettling miniature. Six foil sachets filled with powders, some plastic cutlery and plastic tubs. You open the box, slice along dotted lines, cut out the plastic tubs, get some water, mix the powders separately, spread stuff, microwave stuff, and gradually assemble a fast food lunch, or what such a lunch might look like if it was designed by an alien working to a five-year-old’s drawing of a Happy Meal.

I was in Japan recently for the first time, and experienced one of the most refined and elegant cuisines in the world. But much of it isn’t half strange. This is the country where someone ? or, more likely, a group of people ? decided that the best image with which to decorate a packet of Doritos was two men in wetsuits kicking each other in the balls.

This is the land of tinned bread, 80 different KitKat flavours, octopus ball crisps, candied squid on sticks, food that moves, and cuboid watermelons.

There’s a lot of rote and ritual around food, and there’s a love of small things ? tiny fish eggs, little bowls of ozony sea-stuff. People obsess over presentation. And you can see these aspects in the powdered hamburger. Assembling it took me the best part of an hour. I couldn’t read the instructions, so I copied a YouTube video.

“It tastes just like real hamburger”, a web comment had promised. I must demur. You start with the fries, whose powder was once conceivably related to a potato. You moisten this, mash it up, compress it to the ridged floor of one of the plastic tubs, microwave it for 30 seconds, then flop it out and cut it into slices. It smelled convincingly of stale chip shop fat and soggy tuber, and was the least offensive component by some way.

The “burger” was next. Though the meal contains pork and chicken derivatives, but no beef, when I stirred the wet powder the smell was horribly and insistently beefy, as if someone had moved an abattoir into a chemical weapons factory and set them both on fire. The colour was a spot-on Soreen brown, and even the texture under my plastic shovel reminded me of the gristly, white-flecked pulp of cheap hamburger. Into the pots went the pale bread powder and the floppy, granular cheese. When I took these three out of the microwave, I retched freely.

The painstaking assembly was fraught with creeping existential terror. When I’d finished, and fizzed the cola powder in the water, I took a photo. I stood back and contemplated. I gave the burger a tentative nibble.

I guess it’s fun, this sort of thing, and I’m sure some children ? if their parents could stand it ? might enjoy assembling the weird little packets. But you have to wonder at the strangeness of it all. Why go to such incredible effort (working out the precise makeup of the powders with endless testing, planning every stage meticulously, packaging it all in the most sensible way, pricing it keenly) to create such a revolting product? I don’t know the answer; I spat the food out immediately. The powdered hamburger is not even close to being as delicious as McDonald’s, but it does remind me of the chain in one way ? the food looks nothing like the picture.

Isla Fisher Ivana Bozilovic Ivanka Trump Izabella Miko Izabella Scorupco

? Click here for step by step directions
? Click here for our interactive map of all the walks

Distance 8 miles (13km)
Classification Moderate
Duration 3 hours 30 minutes
Begins Wordsworth House
OS grid reference NY118306

Walk in a nutshell
A bracing stroll around the peaceful countryside of the Lake District where William and Dorothy Wordsworth grew up. You begin in Cockermouth, at the house where they were born and lived, before continuing through the fells, past a beautifully preserved Norman church, and then back down across the fields. A pair of good boots are essential for this walk as there is a prolonged upward stretch on Watch Hill towards the beginning.

Why it’s special
The main museum of William Wordsworth’s life and work is near Dove Cottage in Grasmere, but he spent his formative first eight years around here. Cockermouth’s Wordsworth House has been preserved and planned superbly as a visitor experience, especially for children. All the furniture comes either from the 1770s or is a replica of that style, there’s food made from Georgian recipes that you can taste, and there are regular talks and poetry readings as well as dressing-up sessions. Even the paint on the walls is based on samples found in the deeper layers. How lucky that the building was not demolished in 1937 to make space for a bus station. The house is open every day, except Fridays, from March to October.

Keep your eyes peeled for
All Saints church in Cockermouth was a far plainer building when William and Dorothy were baptised there, and when their father John was buried in the churchyard. That building burned down in 1750, the year that Wordsworth (pictured left) died, and was then replaced with a splendid example of Victorian gothic architecture. Another church, St Michael and All Angels’ in Isel, is much older, dating from 1130, and has a beautiful chancel arch.

Recover afterwards
You’ve got plenty of options when it comes to refreshments. There is a lovely cafe at Wordsworth House, serving tea, cakes, soup and light snacks every day except Fridays. For something more substantial, you’ll find that Cockermouth is particularly rich in pubs. For real ales and traditional food try the Castle Bar, the Tithe Barn, or the Bitter End, which also brews its own beer on the premises.

If it’s tipping down
Continuing the ale theme, you could take a tour around the Jennings brewery (jenningsbrewery.co.uk/tours) in Cockermouth, where you can watch how the traditional brewing process works from grain to glass. Tours start at 11am and 2pm most days, but check details in advance. If all else fails, there’s always the multi-screen cinema a few miles down the road in Workington’s main shopping centre ?

How to get there
Workington station is 8 miles away, Maryport is 6.5 miles. Buses between Penrith and Workington stop at Cockermouth.

1 From Wordsworth House turn left along tree-lined Main Street. At the end, turn right on to Market Place and follow this road out of town. (If you wish to visit All Saints church, where Wordsworth was baptised, turn right into Market Street as you join Market Place and head uphill, passing the town hall on your right to the church. Stroll through the atmospheric graveyard. Turn left when you emerge on to Kirkgate to return to Market Place and, turning right, resume the walk route).

2 Shortly after passing Wyndham Hall caravan park, cross the road and go through the gate signed for Isel bridge. Follow the grassy track up Watch Hill.

3 At the top go through the gate into Hill’s Wood and keep to the track on the left-hand side.

4 Follow this down to the road and carry on. A little further on take the left turn downhill to cross Isel bridge over the river Derwent. Go left at the fork. You will soon see a sign on the left for St Michael and All Angels’ church.

5 After the church, continue up the hill, passing Isel Hall. The road crosses a small bridge and winds up into woodland. Turn left into Gill Wood at the fingerpost for Redmain. At the path junction ? signposted Derwent Bank ? carry on to cross a sleeper bridge.

6 Cross a succession of fields and stiles, climbing slightly all the while. A final stile takes you back on to the road. Turn left to pass through the pretty hamlet of Redmain.

7 Turn left again at the sign for Redmain Lodge and follow the track through a gate to return to the fields.

8 Keeping the modest hump of Park Hill and the woods on your left, continue over several more stiles to the A595.

9 Turn left along the verge for half a mile until, just beyond Wood Hall Farm, a fingerpost on the left points you back into the fields.

10 Head downhill over more stiles until you rejoin the road on the northern edge of Cockermouth. Turn right to Wakefield Road car park, cross the footbridge and go right at Main Street to return to your start point.

Georgianna Robertson Georgina Grenville Gina Carano Gina Gershon Gina Philips

The most southerly point in Cornwall, Lizard Point is famous for its exotic plants and stone. But where are the choughs?

Early on a chilly spring morning, there are at least a hundred herring gulls wheeling above Lizard Point, the southernmost tip of Cornwall. Occasionally, one will loosen its bowels in my direction. Feeling exposed, I wander down a concrete ramp towards a shingle beach. Pausing by the disused lifeboat station, I see dozens of the things perched along the clifftops. They are even more menacing in silhouette, and it’s impossible not to think of Daphne du Maurier’s story The Birds, in which humankind faces a feathered apocalypse. That was set in Cornwall too.

All in all, then, it’s a relief when my lift arrives. I’m hoping to encounter a lot of wildlife on the Lizard peninsula, but ideally it will be less evil-eyed and razor-beaked. The good news is that Justin, the man from the National Trust, has brought his jack russell with him. If necessary, we can throw him to the gulls while we make our escape.

We begin our seven-mile stroll a couple of miles north-west of Lizard Point, among the white and yellow blooms of blackthorn and gorse. The downs are attractive enough, in a bleak sort of way, but within minutes things get more postcardy, as we gaze down into Kynance Cove, with its turquoise water, sandy beach and jumble of islets and rocks. The big green one turns out to be Asparagus Island, named for the plant that grows on its slopes. The big difference between wild asparagus and its cultivated cousin, Justin says, is that the former’s spears grow flat to the ground. The way the wind is whistling around us, you can understand why.

Heading down towards the beach, he explains why the peninsula is so popular with nature lovers. This is where you’ll find Britain’s biggest outcrop of serpentine, a rock of many colours said to resemble snakeskin. Not only is it beautiful, but it supports a range of alkali-loving plants. At least, I think that’s what’s going on. I am neither a geologist nor, like Justin, a botanist.

Which is a shame, because if I was, I would rarely go hungry. As we descend the rocky path, Justin points out half a dozen edible plants, from spinach-like sea beet to peppery rock samphire and three-cornered leek.

All too soon we clamber back out of the cove and head south among the pinks and blues of thrift and spring squill. The sea is to our right and far below us. “This is a great place for basking sharks,” Justin says above Pentreath beach, before admitting it’s too early in the year for them. But we can make out shoals of fish, scales flashing in the sun. Are these bass? Mackerel? Pollack? Neither Justin, nor photographer James, nor James’s girlfriend Rosie, who has come along for the walk, can decide. A century or so ago we might have been looking at pilchards. The coastal path was used by “huers”, the spotters whose job it was to steer fishermen towards their prey.

What about us, though? What can we still hope to see? Choughs, says Justin. This red-beaked, red-legged crow is not just Cornwall’s “national” bird, but a living symbol of the Lizard’s specialness. It vanished from Cornwall (and England) in the 1970s and only returned in 2001. Volunteers now guard the handful of nests. Where might we find them? Back at Lizard Point, hidden among the man-eating gulls.

First, though, we must say hello to some Shetland ponies. We meet Hamish and her (yes, Hamish is a she) three friends just south of Caerthillian Cove. There are 11 ponies in all on the National Trust land, brought here from Exmoor to graze the clifftops and encourage the insects on which the choughs feed. “They’re lawn mowers!” says Rosie, as Justin breaks up some of their dung to show us what they’ve been eating.

At Lizard Point the gulls have mostly gone. But where are the choughs? I get excited about some unusually approachable crows with grey necks, before discovering that these are actually jackdaws. But then there they are ? a pair of choughs, distinguishing themselves by their splayed primary feathers.

Fifteen seconds of acrobatics, and they vanish below the cliff edge. Never mind, though ? we still have four or five miles to go. There’s more to see.

Gretha Cavazzoni Gwen Stefani Halle Berry Hayden Panettiere Haylie Duff

With the warming weather, our lemons are practically falling of the trees. Here’s a lovely way to use them, homemade limoncello from guest contributor Garrett McCord. Enjoy! ~Elise

Limoncello is a traditional digestif (a drink served after the meal to theoretically aid in digestion, but also an excuse for another nip) served throughout Southern Italy, particularly in the area surrounding the Gulf of Naples. It’s produced by infusing a strong alcohol with the zest of plenty of lemons and then adding sugar, resulting in a sweet, floral, and citrusy spirit. It’s a bright and memorable end to a genial meal with friends and family. While there are many producers who have been making it for years, many families make their own. And why not? It’s so easy to do!

Continue reading “Crema di Limoncello” »

Esther Cañadas Eva Green Eva Longoria Eva Mendes Evangeline Lilly

I have been waiting to tell you about this for quite some time and so finally, here we are…

Stephanie, Nadia, and I are happy to announce the 2012 food styling and photography workshop in Dordogne, France!

Last year’s workshop was such an amazing experience. We have been overwhelmed with the positive response and emails from readers who wanted us to repeat it.

This is a hands-on workshop where we will learn about my philosophy on food styling and composition, how to tell a story through props, the basics of photography, and understanding and manipulating light, all in the beautiful surroundings of the Perigord region of France. There will be visits to local farmers? markets, gardens, and the beautiful walnut groves the region is known for. It will be 4 days of cooking, tasting, styling, photographing, and visual storytelling. The workshop will take place from September 23-27, 2012, and be limited to just 8 people.

The workshop includes 4 days of cooking, styling and photographing food in a beautiful manoir nestled up against a stone cliff overlooking a lazy river. The cost is $2,240/person (for a shared room) and $2,740/person (private room) and covers 4 nights accommodations in a luxurious bed and breakfast, 4 gourmet breakfasts, 4 lunches, 1 dinner, transportation during workshop hours, 3 days of full instruction, and 1 day of sightseeing in the area.

We are happy to announce that registration will be open on Thursday, January 26th at 1 p.m. EST (10am PST). This is how registration will take place:

1. Right at 1:00 p.m. EST a post will go live indicating an email address where you’ll need to send your intent to register. Please make sure you are online at this time if you are interested in attending this workshop as we are operating on a first-come-first-serve basis.

2. Once you hear back from us via email, you will be required to sign a liability form and return it to us via fax, email, etc.

3. Once payment is made and requested forms are signed, your spot will be secure. At this time you’ll receive an email from us confirming the good news. If you are not able to secure your spot at this time, we will be sure to add your contact information to a waiting list.

4. A detailed itinerary will be issued to the 8 participants via email within 48 hours of registration.

Please know that our last workshop sold out in the first 10 minutes of opening registration, so if you are interested, please make sure to send us an email as quickly as possible.

You can read about our 2011 workshop on our students’ blogs:

Jennifer wrote about it here, here, and here.

Kimberly wrote about here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Lorna wrote about it here, here, and here.

Olivia wrote about it here.

Romina wrote about it here, here, here, and here.

Sanda wrote about it here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Thank you and we hope to see you in France!

Deanna Russo Denise Richards Desiree Dymond Diane Kruger Dido

I don’t know if I really need to sell this to you, but just in case: this is gooey butter cake + strawberry shortcake, so basically, it’s perfect.

My fear is that you?re going to immediately deem it too sweet for your taste, so let me address that first: this dessert has the perfect balance of sweet cake, tangy berries, and freshly whipped cream that, without sugar added, lends a rich background bitterness. In short, it?s quite a savvy combination and not cloying in the least. I actually expected the Gooey Butter Cake itself to be too syrupy sweet for me, but was pleasantly surprised at its flavor.

Essentially, this cake is a beautiful, simple harbinger of summer.

Gooey Butter Strawberry Shortcake Recipe by: Willow Bird Baking, adapted from one provided to St. Louis Today by Fred and Audrey Heimburger of Heimburger Bakery. Yield: would easily serve 4-6 people Crust Ingredients: 1 cup cake flour 3 tablespoons granulated sugar 1/3 cup butter, softened Filling Ingredients: 1 1/4 cups granulated sugar 3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter, softened 1 egg 1 cup all-purpose flour 2/3 cup evaporated milk 1/4 cup light corn syrup 1 teaspoon vanilla icing sugar Toppings Ingredients: 1 pound strawberries, quartered 2 cups heavy whipping cream Directions: NOTE: If you don’t have a skillet, I believe you can bake this in a greased 9-inch square baking dish (I’d use a glass one if you have it, and check it early and often. Remove when there’s some jiggle left.) Let us know how it goes if you try it this way for all the other skilletless people! Make the crust: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Whisk together cake flour and sugar in a medium bowl. Cut in the butter with a pastry cutter or two knives until the mixture resembles fine crumbs and starts to cling together. Press the mixture into the bottom (this step is a lot harder than it sounds, but be patient and use the back of a spoon to help spread/press the mixture down. I also stuck mine in the fridge for a bit to make the butter less sticky) and up the sides of a 10-inch cast iron skillet. Make the filling: Cream together the butter and sugar until fluffy and pale yellow (about 2-3 minutes). Mix in the egg until just combined. Alternate adding the flour and evaporated milk, mixing after each addition. Mix in the corn syrup and vanilla. Pour the filling into the crust and sprinkle the top with icing sugar (I forgot to do this, and did it afterwards. Oops). Bake and assemble the cake: Bake for 25 to 35 minutes or until cake is nearly set (mine was probably ready around 30). Some jiggle is fine — do not overcook! It’ll finish setting up as it cools. Let it cool in pan for 2 hours. In the meantime, beat heavy cream to stiff peaks. Pile heaps of fresh strawberries into the center of your cooled, set gooey butter cake, top with a mountain of freshly whipped cream, and serve.

To read my list of very important summer plans, read more the gooeyness and strawberryness of this cake, and see more photos, please head over to Willow Bird Baking!

x-posted to food_porn, cooking, picturing_food, and bakebakebake

Daisy Fuentes Dania Ramirez Danica Patrick Daniella Alonso Danneel Harris

The idea that you can follow a recipe to the letter and produce impeccable results is a recent one; the problem is, it’s nonsense. Have you busted any kitchen myths?

Just as a novel tells a story (“Oh dear yes”, EM Forster complained), so a cookbook has recipes. And just as some novelists, such as Forster, have felt that a story is a regrettable element of fiction, so some cookery authors feel that recipes are regrettable elements of food writing.

In most cookbooks up to Elizabeth David’s, recipes were somewhat perfunctory. You sometimes hear complaints that recipes of David’s haven’t worked; but that is because she assumed, I think, that readers would bring their own techniques to bear on them. I believe that she would have been surprised if readers took her words as precise, infallible instructions. Only since then have we taken on the idea that a recipe, should, if precisely followed, offer a route to culinary perfection.

Cooks know that such a wish is an illusion. Take a simple tomato sauce, for example. You chop or crush some garlic. You cook it for a while in some oil, before tipping in a tin of tomatoes, with some salt and perhaps a little sugar. You simmer it. What could be simpler? However, the recipe told you to cook the garlic over a medium heat, which caused it to sizzle furiously and brown. The sauce has simmered for 10 minutes, as the recipe specified, but is still very liquid ? and your pasta is ready and drained.

At every stage in this process, the experienced cook makes decisions, and will probably have raised and lowered the heat under the pan several times. A recipe that attempted to describe precisely what influenced these decisions would be long and boring. It can give hints, such as “Fry the garlic gently, until it releases its aroma”, or, “Simmer the sauce until thick”, but that is about it.

People who try to follow recipes to the letter ? and there are many of them ? get very frustrated when dishes do not work as the recipes promise. Unfortunately, every kitchen is different: oven and hob temperatures vary (my gas mark 6 may differ from yours by 30 degrees or more), equipment varies, humidity varies, the quality of water varies. A set of instructions to accommodate all these inconsistencies cannot be devised. This may be one reason why surveys have suggested that most people cook only one or two recipes from each cookbook they own.

My first idea was to write a book called Cooking without Recipes ? a title that has appeared on two books since the first edition of mine came out. I tried writing it, giving general, explanatory accounts of how dishes worked rather than lists of ingredients and instructions. It was, for the reason I gave above, stupefyingly pedantic and dull.

Like Forster, I bit the bullet: I gave recipes, but all the while pointed out that these were templates rather than the last words on any dish; and, for those who wanted to read them, I followed the instructions with “why you do it” sections, offering some simple kitchen science. It seemed to me that for most home cooks, an understanding of how dishes work is more important than a set of instructions. You don’t need recipes for most of what you put on the table from day to day.

I know: when you bake a cake, it’s helpful to have a list of ingredients and precise guidelines. But here particularly, you need to know what is happening as you mix the ingredients and cook them. I’m not a skilled baker, I admit; but at least I know what has gone wrong when the centre of my cake caves in.

Along the way, I hope I’ve dispelled a few myths ? though I must admit that they’re not ones that careful readers of Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking will entertain. Do you need to soak and fast-boil dried beans ? and can you put salt in their cooking water? Do you rinse rice to wash away the starch? Or that old favourite, do you “seal” meat? And of course, do you salt aubergines?

Emilie de Ravin Emma Heming Emma Stone Emma Watson Emmanuelle Chriqui

Jennifer Morrison Jennifer ODell Jennifer Scholle Jennifer Sky Jenny McCarthy

? Click here for step by step directions
? Click here for our interactive map of all the walks

Distance 4 miles (6.4km)
Classification Easy
Duration 2 hours
Begins Portstewart Strand visitor centre
OS grid reference C813368

Walk in a nutshell
A meandering, looping route along a stretch of County Derry’s fabled northern coastline. Walk first through age-old dunes, generously dusted with tufts of pale green grasses, then down to the soft terrain of the Bann estuary, where the path follows the river’s edge and returns to the wide, golden beach. Sand dunes, being sand dunes, can be quite heavy going while you’re on them. Good boots and strong legs will help, but buggies and wheelchairs are impossible.

Why it’s special
The 6,000-year-old dune ecosystem is teeming with wildlife, certain to delight any child with a keen eye and a gentle step. There are rabbits to be spotted nibbling at the marram grass, and a multicoloured carpet of bird’s-foot trefoil, wild pansy and thyme to explore, aflutter with butterflies and bees. In the estuary there are wintering waders and wildfowl feeding on the mudflats, as well as a host of migratory species passing through in the spring and autumn.

Keep your eyes peeled for
Rare wild orchids can be spotted here during the summer months. Look out for pyramidal orchids with their slender, unbranched stems crowned with a tall stack of petals like mini Marge Simpsons dressed in pink, and bee orchids that sport large, pale pink or white sepals on either side of the velvety labellum in the centre, brownish red with yellow markings ? hence the name.

Recover afterwards
The Portstewart Strand visitor centre offers ice-cream and soft drinks, hot drinks and sweets aplenty, while Morelli’s , slightly further afield on the promenade in Portstewart, offers a taste of old-fashioned seaside fun. This gelato parlour has been serving sundaes since 1927.

If it’s tipping down
The many galleries and cultural venues in Portstewart will provide for beauty of a different kind ? head to Flowerfields Art Centre for exhibitions by local artists, gigs and art classes.

How to get there
The Ulsterbus 140 runs between Coleraine and the Portstewart promenade. From here it’s a 20-minute walk to Portstewart Strand visitor centre.

1 Start your walk at the visitor centre and make your way to lifebuoy station 10; approximately one mile from the visitor centre.

2 Climb the sand ladder at lifebuoy 10 to leave the beach behind. Soon you will enjoy the tranquillity of the dunes.

3 The path here splits into two. Choose the one on the right. This leads you through the kissing gate inside a fenced area, where cattle can be found grazing from September to March. White waymarker posts will guide you across the river Bann estuary.

4 Turn right when you come to the river Bann. You are now walking through an area of salt marsh. Be aware that cattle can graze on the salt marsh also.

5 Follow the path through the salt marsh and you will come to a kissing gate leading to Crab Bay. Walk along the shore, keeping the river on your left and dunes on your right.

6 The path brings you back to the beach at lifebuoy 14. From here it’s about two miles back to the visitor centre.

Aubrey ODay Audrina Patridge Autumn Reeser Avril Lavigne Bali Rodriguez

Allendale, Northumberland: These chubby birds have a marvellous ability to move against the river flow to spot their prey

Living near the river East Allen, I am lucky to watch dippers all year round. These dapper birds, so emblematic of northern fast-flowing rivers, fly low above the surface, their call slicing through the noise of water. Their favourite food, caddisfly larvae, is plentiful among the boulders, and they are able to scavenge underwater, equally at home in the water as in the air.

With the river now in spate, it’s easier pickings in the side stream, though even that is a churning, powerful force that tumbles stones in its path with alarming, grinding sounds. I am watching a dipper feeding from its base: a dark triangular rock jutting above the lime green of opposite-leaved saxifrage. A series of quick, restless bobs, then the chubby bird slips into the murk, reappearing every now and then with a beak bristling with food. Protected by its white eyelid, the dipper is able to forage in the opaque, heaving stream. I marvel at this sturdy bird’s ability to move against the flow and to spot its prey as it repeatedly slips into the turbid waters.

Such floods alter the streambed, etch scallop shapes out of the high bank and bring down slabs of turf from the field. Some plants, though, are well adapted to these dramatic changes. The matted white roots of water mint hold firm and golden marsh marigolds exert a suction force in the mud.

The resilient evergreen woodrush is firmly rooted in the silted margins. It carpets the woods around the East Allen, its strappy leaves delicately edged in white hairs. Thanks to the buildup of leaf mould and mosses, it is able to grow over rocks creating lush tussocks of greenery. Here by the stream’s edge, its tough rhizomes, fast in the silt, help to stabilise the bank at times of spate like today. It will re-emerge, its leaves flattened by the direction of the flow, when the water subsides.

Carla Campbell Carla Gugino Carmen Electra Carol Grow Carrie Underwood

During its brief season the Alphonso mango becomes something of a national obsession in India

As anyone who’s tasted an Alphonso mango knows, its short season, from now until the end of June, is a major cause for celebration. Often making an appearance on “1,000 things to eat before you die”-type lists, this Indian variety has become more and more popular in the UK.

It’s easy to see why. Alphonso’s voluptuous shape and sunshine-yellow skin reveals succulent saffron-coloured flesh that’s smooth and buttery: imagine a cross between peach, nectarine, apricot and melon with notes of honey and citrus. But better.

Alphonso has captured the imagination of chefs like Richard Corrigan, Yotam Ottolenghi, Vivek Singh and Peter Gordon. You’ll find it on the dessert and cocktail menus of an increasing number of restaurants and bars around the country. London’s Cinnamon Club make mango and cardamom crème brulee. The Milsom group in Suffolk and Essex favour panna cotta, cheesecake and sweet salsas. Chef Dev Biswal of The Ambrette in Rye and Margate slices them thin, “almost the thickness of a carpaccio” and serves them with ice cream made from the pulp. Chocolatier Paul A Young has been selling limited edition “Alphonso mango and Bloomsbury prairie fire chilli” truffles and this year’s MasterChef winner Shelina Permalloo, who became renowned for her love of mangoes, always uses Alphonsos.

Alphonso is named after Afonso de Albuquerque, a nobleman and military expert who helped establish the Portuguese colony in India. It was the Portuguese who introduced grafting on mango trees to produce extraordinary varieties like Alphonso. The fruit was then introduced to the Konkan region in Maharashtra, Gujarat and parts of south India.

Of the thousands of cultivars of mango in India, there are several different varieties of Alphonso. The best and most expensive are grown on the small Natwarlal plantation in Ratnagiri, and are hand-harvested. It is this variety that’s most widely exported. The fruit was shipped to London for the Queen’s coronation in 1953 from Mumbai’s legendary Crawford Market, renowned for its Alphonso stalls in season, which is when our own love affair with it must have begun.

A national obsession in India on a par with Bollywood and cricket, the start of the mango season signals the beginning of summer and makes headlines. Newspapers give continuous updates on prices and availability. It’s customary to send boxes of Alphonso mangoes to friends, colleagues and bosses as a mark of love and respect; and many courier companies in India even offer a separate mango delivery service.

Many Indians eat little more than the fruit for breakfast, lunch and dinner during its short season. In Mumbai, top restaurants put on mango festivals, and street vendors sell freshly squeezed mango juice. Indians celebrate with “mango parties”, using the fruit in dishes such as pakoras, curries, mango leather, drinks like lassi and falooda, sweetmeats like barfi and desserts such as shrikhand.

Perhaps the most popular way of eating Alphonso is pulped, thickened with milk or cream, into which puris (deep-fried discs of puffed bread) are dunked. They are often available in large supermarkets and excellent online retailers like Natoora, but are cheaper from Asian greengrocers.

Spring brings many delicious things to eat – rhubarb, asparagus, wild garlic and the first broad beans. For me though, nothing beats the Alphonso mango.

Emmanuelle Chriqui Emmanuelle Vaugier Emmy Rossum Erica Leerhsen Erika Christensen

Yesterday I got the rare chance to visit a decent Asian grocer. And I bought a few packets of ddeok and a 2kg tub of gochujang (red pepper paste).
So I made ddeokbokki with noodles this afternoon.

On the spiciness scale, it fell somewhere between Dear-god-it-burns-I-don’t-think-I’ll-survive-this-go-on-without-me and Completely Inedible.

I want to add something to dilute the strength of the chilli. I thought about just adding more water and less gochujang, but that will make the sauce quite watery; I’d like to avoid affecting the consistency (and flavour) of the ddeokbokki sauce as much as possible.
So what can I add ?
Ketchup ? A tomato-based pasta-type sauce ?
Any suggestions ?

Emmy Rossum Erica Leerhsen Erika Christensen Estella Warren Esther Cañadas

Nick Duerden recalls his first ? and best ? school trip to a farm run by writer Michael Morpurgo and his wife, Clare, who have given thousands of inner-city children a taste of nature since the 1970s

I was 10 and it was my first school trip ? my first time away from home. It was to Nethercott farm in Devon, where, our teachers promised us with a certain sinister relish that we would be working as farmers for a full week. We were city children, urban ones, with at least some of the attributes that such a term implies. We lived on council estates, mostly, and many of us had never seen animals that weren’t cats and dogs (and, out by the bins, rats), much less such wide-open spaces. We had no idea, consequently, what working as farmers would really entail. But, with the misplaced confidence typical of all 10-year-olds, we reckoned it would be a doddle. Bring it on.

My mother, though raised in Milan, was born in the former Yugoslavia, in a tiny village where all anyone did was toil the land. We visited once, a year before my farm trip, and stayed with distant relatives. I remember stout women with moustaches and muscles, who found much mirth in my ignorance about what a hoe was and quite how to use it, and thought me sweet when I refused to wring our imminent dinner’s neck ? an unsuspecting chicken ? much less pluck it afterwards.

It was my mother who, a year later, insisted that a trip to a working farm would do me the world of good. Initially, I didn’t want to go. I thought I’d hate it. And I dreaded being apart from the television for quite so long. “Nonsense,” she said. “You’ll love it.”

Nethercott, a couple of hours away ? but a million miles from Peckham ? was beautiful and enormous. Nature, of the kind we had only seen on TV, was everywhere: trees, hills. More trees. A rumour, at night, of bats. And there was so much to do. In the mornings, we had to feed the hens and pigs. We had to milk the cows and groom the horses. After lunch, we had to clear the fields of stones (they were big fields), sweep the stables, build bonfires and plant trees. This was backbreaking labour. I remember being woken before dawn to watch lambs being born, and I had so much fun and was so consistently stimulated that I didn’t miss home once.

Most evenings, after supper, we would gather in the grand front room around the open fire, while our host, a farmer called Michael, would read to us, his wife Clare by his side. This Michael was a writer, too, it seemed, and he would read to us from his works in progress. Among these, in 1979, was a manuscript called War Horse. I would like to say that I listened keenly to this future classic, but Joe Jennings was busy whispering in my ear throughout and I was too busy attempting to make pre-adolescent eyes at Hazel Harper to pay it much attention. Fool.

I would go on many more school trips, but the years have done their best to obscure the finer details of most of them. It is my visit to the farm that I remember most vividly and the one that now, as a father, I would most like my daughters to go on, should the opportunity arise.

It might well do for, a generation on, Nethercott still thrives, providing inner-city children with a wealth of rich, rural memories. When I speak to Clare Morpurgo about it now, she tells me that all is pretty much today as it was then, except that they had to get rid of the pigs after the foot-and-mouth scare, and there is no longer an open fire in the grand front room.

“Health and safety,” she says. “It’s a wood-burning stove these days.” Farms for City Children was dreamed up by Clare and Michael Morpurgo in the mid-1970s. Back then, the thirtysomething husband-and-wife team were teachers, but both were stymied, says Michael, by far too much staff-room politics, their ideas all too often ignored. One such idea was to offer children with an absence of nature in their lives the chance to experience it at close hand. “We were very idealistic about it,” says Michael, “and convinced that such experiences were the right of every child.”

They did little to further their dream until Clare was left a legacy by her father, the publisher founder of Penguin, Allen Lane. They invested in an old country house with land in the tiny Devonshire village of Iddesleigh, and started to spread the word among schools. There were, initially, many deaf ears, and the Inner London Education Authority was suspicious. While they could comprehend the appeal of, say, an adventure holiday ? climbing, kayaking, and the like ? the notion of a working holiday for kids simply didn’t compute. What sort of child would want that?

“That was the whole point of it, though: the intensity,” Michael says. “But they weren’t convinced.” This shouldn’t have surprised them, he suggests. “We were, after all, two rather fresh-faced, silver-spooned people. We must have seemed rather patronising.”

But their conviction won out, and in 1976 Nethercott opened its doors to a single school, from Birmingham. A year later, nine signed up and by 1979, Nethercott was welcoming children from around the country for most of the year.

After the inherited money ran out, Farms for City Children became a registered charity (raising £350,000 a year), and over the next three decades would open another two farms, Wick Court in Gloucestershire, and Treginnis Isaf in Pembrokeshire (they are scouting locations in the north-east of England for a fourth). Every year, more than 3,000 new schoolchildren arrive, bringing with them wellies and much anticipation.

Liz Owens is the charity’s chairwoman. A former headmistress, her last post was at the Charles Dickens primary school in Borough, south-east London. “It was failing when I joined, and failing miserably,” Liz recalls. “I’d met Michael [Morpurgo] years earlier, and he told me about the farms then, which I thought such a good idea. I was adamant about signing our school up to it.”

During her eight years as head there in the mid-1990s, she organised successive trips to Wick Court. When she retired, the Charles Dickens was one of the 10 most improved schools in the country. To this she attributes, at least in part, their annual farm trips.

“A lot of our children came from very difficult family situations, and were subsumed in all sorts of troubles that often required of them to grow up quickly,” she says. “Being away from home permitted them to simply be children and, in every case, they absolutely loved it. They came out of their shells ? they came alive.”

The Morpurgos are no longer quite so hands-on, but Michael, who is now one of the world’s bestselling children’s authors, believes the farms initiative is his greatest achievement. “It was always just so fascinating, and rewarding, to watch the children react to it all,” he says.

“Many, for example, had never experienced proper darkness before, so walking down to milk the cows on a winter’s night was for them a daunting process. Working in cold conditions, too, and often in discomfort, with sacks over their shoulders to feed the sheep when the snow was driving into their faces ? these situations tested the children, but they wanted to be tested. They loved it,” he says.

I certainly did. Nethercott farm was my first school trip, and also my best. It taught me so much. It taught me that there is little to compare to witnessing a newborn lamb take its first unsteady steps. It taught me that I was emphatically not ? and am still not today ? cut out for physical work. And it taught me that cleaning out the dairy with a stiff broom while all around you the cows continue to shit with careless abandon is a punishment that no 10-year-old boy can quickly recover from.

When I recount this to Clare Morpurgo now, she laughs. “Oh, we tried to make cleaning out the cow poo fun,” she says. “Didn’t we succeed?”

She and her husband may have succeeded in many things, I tell her, but in this, I’m afraid, no, they didn’t.

? For more information, visit farmsforcitychildren.org

Alexis Bledel Ali Campoverdi Ali Larter Alice Dodd Alicia Keys

Flights Of Fancy, Knutsford

The summertime scattering of sculpture around the grounds of historic mansions can often compromise the integrity of both the art and the landscape. To add greater coherence, each Tatton Park Biennial is given a theme; this year, dreams of flying. Local historical relevance is cited, such as the proximity of Jodrell Bank and Manchester Airport. The artists invited, including Hilary Jack, Tessa Farmer, Olivier Grossetête and the deadpan romantics Juneau Projects need a degree of ironic thrust to make the project take off, but so it variably does with performances in the disused fuselage of a commercial aeroplane, a space-flight simulator in a camper van, a human-scale nest in a 100-year old sycamore, and an uncrossable footbridge suspended by helium balloons above a lake (poetic metaphor: the bridge flies, you end up in the drink).

Tatton Park, to 30 Sep

Robert Clark

Jerwood Encounters: Assembly, London

Collaboration is the watchword in this show driven by digital technology. Jenny Hogarth and Kim Coleman will be making an installation from their video blog: a cacophonous mixture of footage including grids of windows on gleaming skyscrapers, the liquorice stripe of escalators, mosaic flooring and rainbows. The Hut Project is a trio of young London-based artists known for tongue-in-cheek works. Here, they’ve teamed up with a dance company to create a new show inspired by a fragment of a previous work. Turning his part of the gallery into a meeting place, Charlie Woolley continues the sharing spirit of his radio show, which has so far involved comedians, musicians, playwrights and art pundits online with the artist.

Jerwood Space, SE1, to 24 Jun

Skye Sherwin

Derby Soap Opera, Derby

If, on the face of it, the Italian artist Marinella Senatore’s Derby Soap Opera might sound like a community arts project, in reality it’s much more ambitious. As part of “one of the world’s largest mass participation film projects” every citizen of Derby is invited to take part as actors, costume designers, lighting technicians, composers, makeup artists and co-directors. The script so far appears to involve a 1980s reunion party set in a school whose attic is haunted by the children’s memories. While the outcome will be a 40-minute film, it is perhaps more the publically accessible creative process that’s the real interactive artwork. Senatore stages exercises in collective memory, using fictional film as a communal self-reflection.

QUAD, to 8 Jul

RC

Norwich & Norfolk Festival

This year’s event will be something of a treasure hunt with artists in the city’s nooks and crannies. Work by the high priest of video art, Bill Viola, is in a derelict industrial site and a forgotten crypt. Belgian collective Time Circus mix carnivalesque performance and camping with their treehouse in the woods. Meanwhile Gregor Hylla’s brilliantly hued paintings should balance Yelena Popova’s bleached-out abstractions in an old office block.

Various venues, to 26 May

SS

Eric Bainbridge, Walsall

Eric Bainbridge’s art is one of disjointed fragments and thematic absurdities. His sculptures are painstakingly balanced geometric abstractions, but the 40 small-scale collages shown here have a cheekier sense of fun, being sourced from glossy magazines. Bainbridge scissors his scrapbook fragments into suggestive blobs, glueing them back together like film stills from some semi-porn animation. Yet the series never descends into prurient sniggering or fake-surreal wackiness. It’s all contagiously charming.

New Art Gallery, to 21 Jul

RC

Topophobia, Exeter

This group show takes a dark view of our sense of place. The obsessive detail of Anne Eggebert’s pencil drawings of Google Earth images, for instance, taps into a growing culture of control and surveillance. More chilling perhaps is the feeling of isolation: a world of look, don’t touch that’s mirrored in Marja Helander’s mysterious landscapes. Distance and absence is key to Louise K Wilson’s work, too: her recordings in forbidden places such as old nuclear weapons labs try to capture the sound of fear. It’s not all angst, though. Polly Gould’s watercolours reflected in mirrored globes create landscapes you could hold in your hand.

Spacex, to 7 Jul

SS

Liliane Tomasko, Dublin

Talk about subtle: Liliane Tomasko’s sensitively applied oil paintings appear like pictures of not much. Her subjects are as insubstantial as they come and pictured from once-removed perspectives. Paper bags are piled up and photographed with a Polaroid camera. Featureless corners of rooms are similarly recorded and serve as her source material: the paint goes on to the linen in soft-focus daubs and the colours are muted. The titles give little away: The Melting, Blue Pulse. Yet although we may not know why the artist is so fascinated by such banalities, we are drawn in. Still-life has after all always been about making magic of the mundane.

Kerlin Gallery, to 26 May

RC

Ross Chisholm, London

In his earlier paintings, Ross Chisholm closed in on two kinds of Britishness. At one end of the spectrum, he conjured the elegantly poised, bewigged and corseted women of 18th-century society portraiture; at the other, he reproduced vintage snaps of 20th-century Brits at play, walking the dog, or posing in holiday shorts. These figures, realised with the finesse of old masters, were under attack from riotous elements, from explosions of abstract squiggles to spiky geometric shapes and gas clouds of pigment. Chisholm threatened his subjects with the very chaos and decay the perfectly preserved image of a portrait serves to hide, while bringing to life painting’s dance between control and chance. His latest works plunge further into abstraction: thickly daubed streaks of pigment hint at distorted, cartoonish features. It’s a mix of the comic and the sinister that’s more George Condo than Joshua Reynolds.

IBID PROJECTS, N1, to 23 Jun

SS

Haylie Duff Heidi Klum Heidi Montag Hilarie Burton Hilary Duff

Scientists create a mixture of detritus and waste matter, which is hoped will reproduce larvae’s natural diet

Marine biologists are racing to solve a unique problem which is crucial to their efforts to save the world’s wild eel populations from catastrophic collapse: recreating a food called “marine snow”.

In one of the least-understood global conservation crises, spawning rates for the world’s three major eel populations have crashed in the last three decades by as much as 99%, raising fears they could become extinct across the far east, Europe and north America.

Biologists in Japan, where eels are an iconic part of the country’s cuisine and culture, are on the brink of farming eels from birth to fork on an industrial scale for the first time, potentially in the same way as salmon is farmed worldwide.

That breakthrough ? being sought too by scientists in Korea and the United States ? could dramatically relieve pressure on wild eel populations, and greatly increase the prospects of rebuilding their stocks worldwide.

Yet the goal of producing wholly captive farmed eels, using larvae produced in captivity rather than wild-caught baby eels, is being thwarted by a very significant obstacle: reproducing the larvae’s unique natural diet, which is known to scientists as “marine snow”.

That foodstuff, which is essential to an eel’s growth cycle as they develop and mature from larvae to glass eels, is a mixture of marine detritus, organic waste matter suspended in diffuse clouds, which is proving extremely hard to reproduce on an industrial scale.

Eels are being farmed commercially around the world but only by using baby eels trapped in the wild, adding even greater pressure to the last surviving wild populations. In the UK, young eel or elver numbers are now at 5% of their levels in the 1980s.

Scientists have considered the most unlikely ingredients to help create that peculiar food, including the yolk from shark’s eggs. To exacerbate the feeding problem, eels stay in a larval stage for three to four months, compared with only a few days for cod, and are extremely sensitive at that stage.

Prof Katsumi Tsukamoto, a pioneer in eel conservation in the Pacific who was first discover the Pacific eels spawning grounds, told marine scientists in Edinburgh this week that this obstacle meant it cost ?1,000 (£803) to produce a single captive seedling in the laboratory; their goal is to get that cost down to ?1.

Speaking after a keynote address to the World Fisheries Congress, Tsukamoto, from the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute at Tokyo University, said the focus on devising a wholly self-sufficient domestic eel farming programme, while very expensive, was being driven by the need to preserve remaining wild eels.

“We’re now trying to establish a special strain, completely cut off from wild stocks,” he said. “We want to improve the many different characteristics, for example growth rate, metamorphosis rates and disease resistance. It’s a process of domestication, like sheep, pigs, cows or horses.”

Pressure to produce wholly captive eels is being driven by the continuing heavy demand from consumers: eels are the main ingredient in kabayaki, one of three most culturally important styles of Japanese cuisine along with sushi and tempura.

David Righton, from the Cefas marine laboratory in Lowestoft, and a leading figure in the Eeliad project on saving the European eel, said the quest to find a substitute food stuff is one of the most competitive areas in eel conservation.

“Whoever gets there first has made a tremendous discovery; you’re recovering a cultural tradition. Whoever does this is culturally important as well as becoming very rich,” Righton said.

Ana Ivanovi Ana Paula Lemes Ananda Lewis Angela Marcello Angelina Jolie

Do you ever have those moments where suddenly lunch becomes the most important event in your life?

Surely, I spend most of my days planning, cooking, and photographing food, but this was different.

I was running around town a few days ago taking care of household matters, such as changing the oil of my car, when I was overcome by this urge to run home and make myself a nice lunch. Not a quick salad like most days when I have to run, but something else. I needed some quinoa and sweet potato cakes in my life.

I had not been planning on styling or shooting anything that day, but I had to return home. I left half of my checklist unfinished and came into the kitchen to tend to this pressing matter – lunch.

This is how these quinoa and sweet potato cakes came about, which took no more than half an hour to make I must add. I enjoyed every morsel and had leftovers for Jon and Miren when they arrived home from school.

How about you? Did you have to drop everything to run to the kitchen to cook that one recipe? Would love to hear.

Quinoa and Sweet Potato Cakes

makes 8 cakes

1/2 cup (90 g) quinoa, rinsed
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for frying
1 small yellow onion, diced
1 garlic clove, minced
1 cup (150 g) grated sweet potato
1/4 teaspoon coriander
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
2 eggs
1/3 cup (50 g) gluten-free, panko-style breadcrumbs (make them by drying gluten-free bread slices in the oven and chopping them in food processor)
1/3 cup finely grated parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley
1 tablespoon finely chopped chives
Greens, radishes, green onions, as garnish

Bring 1 cup (250 ml) of water to a boil in a small saucepan over high heat. Add quinoa and 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Stir, reduce heat to medium low, cover with a lid, and cook for 20 minutes until quinoa has absorbed all the water and it’s tender. Set aside to cool.

Heat a medium saute pan over medium high heat. Add the olive oil and cook the onions and garlic for 3 minutes. Add the grated sweet potato, 1/4 teaspoon salt, coriander, and black pepper, and cook for another 3 minutes. Set aside to cool slightly.

In a bowl, whisk together the eggs, breadcrumbs, parmesan cheese, parsley, and chives. Add the cooled quinoa and sweet potato mixture. Stir to combine.

Heat a large saute pan over medium high heat. Add enough olive oil to cover the bottom os the pan. Spoon 1/4 cup of the mixture and shape it into a round cake. Add enough cakes to the pan without overcrowding it. Cook for 3 minutes on each side or until golden. Finish frying all the cakes. Drain them on paper towels if needed.

Serve the cakes while warm with a green salad with radishes and chopped green onions.

Jennifer Morrison Jennifer ODell Jennifer Scholle Jennifer Sky Jenny McCarthy

Ginger wine takes a while to ferment, so start some now and it’ll be there to warm you up come winter

Well I was going to encourage you all into the countryside to collect hawthorn blossom, or may blossom as it is properly called, to make a floral wine. Unfortunately, this May seems to be under the impression that it is October and blossom collecting is out of the question. Something warming is more in order, so I am going with ginger wine.

The Zingiberaceae is a large family with well over a thousand species, though only a few are cultivated, and I have long wondered if there is a native British equivalent to the familiar root. According to the experts, galingale, Cyperus longus, a sedge found in marshy areas in the southern half of England, is the nearest thing that this country has to offer. It is not closely related to ginger, excepting that it is a monocot.

I uprooted a couple of plants in Dorset a few years ago, scratched, sniffed and nibbled. It is aromatic but lacks the punchy nature of root ginger which is packed with those lovely, spicy gingerols. As it is the root that is used, there is another problem with this plant in the dread form of the Wildlife and Countryside Act which forbids the uprooting of plants without the landowner’s permission. I am going to stick with good old root ginger.

Ginger wine is a rather old-fashioned drink and my grandmother, born in the 1880s, enjoyed a long affection for the stuff. The history of ginger wine predates even her, with an Elizabethan reference to it costing a penny-farthing a bottle and recipes appearing at the beginning of the 18th century. It might cost a bit more to make now, but not much. I made a batch in December so it is not really ready yet, but nevertheless it tastes good, if still a little cloudy. And the flavour? No surprises here; it’s gingery.

Ginger wine

About 5 inches / 12cm root ginger
5 litres of water
1.4kg sugar
Zest and juice of 4 lemons
500g raisins, chopped or squashed by putting in a carrier bag and pounding, or a 200ml can of white grape juice concentrate
1 sachet of white wine yeast
Yeast nutrient

Peel and finely slice the ginger, place in a plastic fermenting bucket, add the lemon zest and the raisins, then pour over 2½ litres of boiling water. Cover and leave for 24 hours.

Add 2.5 litres of boiled and cooled water, the sugar, lemon juice and yeast nutrient and stir until the sugar is dissolved, then the yeast (follow the instructions on the packet). Cover and leave to ferment for three or four days then transfer into a demijohn using a sterilised sieve and funnel. Fit a bubble trap and allow to ferment for a couple of months. Rack-off into a fresh demijohn and leave until clear, then bottle.

Jennifer Gimenez Jennifer Love Hewitt Jennifer Morrison Jennifer ODell Jennifer Scholle

What’s hot, and what’s not

Going up

Jigsaw men’s coats Honestly, some of the best we’ve seen for autumn. From Harris tweed to crimson wool, there’s a classic overcoat remix here to suit all ages.

Veep New HBO comedy by the master of the political lol-umentary, Armando Iannucci. With Julia Louis-Dreyfus starring. And we have to wait until June to see this? Sob.

The seafoam hem The only way to do asymmetry in 2012. See Stella’s Nesbitt dress. The high street will be on to this look soon, surely.

Jessica Hynes Siobhan in Twenty Twelve rivals Edina Monsoon as the best PR on TV ever.

Beyoncé’s flat shoe wardrobe Thongs, leopard slippers and hi-tops. Don’t go back to the heels, Bey, this is so much better.

Going down

Blue or green Extra gum Do keep UP. Raspberry and Lemon Smints bring the Jonathan Saunders SS 12 colour combination to your Sophie Hulme bag. Strawberry Extra is the bare minimum of handbag jazziness.

Long summer hems and heels It never, ever works. Trust us.

Retro pine-tree air fresheners Plug-in car atomisers are a thing now. See posh perfumier Illuminum.

Making bloody marys Sidestep the celery shopping with a shot of spicy-tomato-flavour Bloodshot vodka instead. Bloody mary in espresso-quick form.

Janet Jackson January Jones Jennie Finch Jennifer Aniston Jennifer Gareis

A third Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park is to open at Universal Studios’ Osaka site in 2014

Harry Potter is heading off to Japan following the announcement that a new theme park attraction based on JK Rowling’s famous boy wizard is to open at Universal Studios’ Osaka site in 2014.

This Japanese attraction will be the third of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme parks. The first was opened in 2010 as a section of Universal’s Islands of Adventure site at its resort in Orlando, Florida; a second, at Universal Studios park in Hollywood, California, is under construction and looks set to open in 2016. Hogwarts Castle will sit at the apex of each attraction, and visitors can also dine at the Three Broomsticks pub, pick up a wand at Ollivander’s store or snack on sweets from Hogsmead’s famous Honeyduke’s sweet shop.

Demand is likely to be high at the new Japanese Potter park. The seven films in the series have grossed more than $893m in Japan and been seen in cinemas by more than 78 million people.

“I was delighted to experience and enjoy the attention to detail, creativity and superb craft that went into the first Wizarding World in Orlando,” said Rowling. “I am equally delighted that the same level of expertise and enjoyment will translate to the new park in Japan.”

So far there is no sign that the Wizarding World franchise is likely to arrive in Britain, where the Potter stories are ostensibly set, but the UK does have Warner Bros’ The Making of Harry Potter in Leavesden, Hertfordshire, which opened in March and features sets used to film scenes in the Hogwarts Great Hall, Dumbledore’s Office, Diagon Alley, the Ministry of Magic and Gryffindor Common Room among other attractions.

America Ferrera Amerie Amy Cobb Amy Smart Ana Beatriz Barros

Jonathan Jones takes a trip up the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower in the Olympic village in Stratford, east London, and speaks to the artist Anish Kapoor and engineer Cecil Balmond about the £22.7m structure

Cindy Taylor Cinthia Moura Claudette Ortiz Coco Lee Connie Nielsen

How does it work, which countries are leading technological developments, and what is the future for CCS?

What is carbon capture and storage?

The technology is designed to prevent the carbon dioxide exhaust from the burning of coal and gas from entering the atmosphere and driving further climate change. It does this by either stripping the CO2 from the smokestacks of conventional power stations, or by burning the fuel in special ways to produce exhausts of pure CO2. The greenhouse gas then is buried under the ground, usually in exhausted oil and gas reservoirs.

Do we need it?

Almost all experts say yes. CCS can provide 20% of the carbon cuts needed by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). That requires 3,000 CCS plants. The IEA also predicts that 70% of the energy used between now and 2050 will come from fossil fuels, emphasising the importance of CCS. Without it, renewables, energy efficiency and nuclear power would have to significantly overshoot their already challenging targets.

How is the CO2 captured?

There are three approaches being tested for power stations.

Post-combustion CCS: This is the most common technology chosen for power plants. CO2 is absorbed from the exhaust of a power station by dissolving it in a liquid which is later heated to release the gas for storage. Solvents include chilled ammonia and amines but researchers are looking for more efficient ones. Post-combustion has the advantage that it can be retrofitted to some existing power stations, which will generate much of the world’s CO2 for decades to come. However, the concentration of CO2 is only about 15% from coal-fired power stations and only 4% from gas stations, meaning scrubbing it from exhausts currently uses about 25% of the plant’s energy, making it expensive. This would also rule out older coal plants, which already run at just 35% efficiency. The leading large-scale post-combustion CCS plant is the $1.5bn Boundary Dam project, run by Sask Power in Canada and due to enter service in 2014.

Pre-combustion CCS: This technology uses a controlled amount of oxygen to turn coal or natural gas into “syngas”, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The syngas is then reacted with steam to produce CO2 and hydrogen, and the latter is burned to generate power. The advantage here is that the energy penalty ? the power used for separating out the CO2 ? is much lower, perhaps just 11% and has no thermodynamic minimum, unlike post-combustion CCS. The downside is that it cannot be retrofitted. But it is seen as a good option for new plants. The leading large-scale pre-combustion CCS plant is the $2.7bn Kemper County gas project in Mississippi, due to start operating in 2014.

Oxyfuel-combustion CCS: Here fossil fuels are burned in pure oxygen, given an exhaust stream of water and CO2, which are easily separated again cutting the energy penalty. An added advantage is that because the nitrogen present is air is missing, no NOx pollutants are formed, reducing scrubbing costs. But this technology can only be used in new plants and an air-separation unit has to be built to provide the oxygen. This approach is being used for a proposed new plant at the Drax coal-fired power station in the UK, currently the nation’s biggest polluter.

What happens to the CO2?

Most big projects to date have got off the ground because of the need for large quantities of CO2 to drive out the last drops of oil and gas from exhausted reservoirs, a process called enhanced oil recovery (EOR). A few planned projects intend to use such reservoirs for storage but without driving out oil and gas. The last major geological storage option is in deep saline acquifers: Norway’s Sleipner project has buried a million tonnes of CO2 a year in such a acquifer since 1996, without problems. Many existing CCS plants, such as Sleipner, strip unwanted CO2 from natural gas as it is drilled from reservoirs, but fitting CCS to the plants where the gas is burned is seen as the key goal in terms of global warming. One Chinese CCS plant uses the CO2 for fizzy drinks.

Which countries are leaders in CCS technology?

The US has the most big projects, due to the huge market for EOR and because former President George W Bush “wanted to do something for coal” in the early 2000s. Barack Obama’s stimulus bill of 2009 added $3bn to the state money being put into CCS in the US. Canada and Australia, both big fossil fuel producers, also have major plants. Europe has no large plants operating or in construction, but has more than 20 in planning, with the UK the leader with six. Norway has the largest CCS test facility in the world at Mongstad. China leads in Asia, but that continent remains behind the rest of the world.

Will thousands of CCS plants be built in coming decades?

Despite each step of carbon capture and storage being well understood, the combined technology remains relatively expensive, with costs estimated between $50 and $100 a tonne of CO2. The value placed on CO2 at present is far below that range, meaning that for CCS to flourish the carbon price needs to rise or CCS costs need to fall: in reality, both have to happen. The building of more plants will lead to technology improvements and cut costs, but depend heavily on state funding for now. International climate negotiations may push up carbon prices, but have been moving at a slow pace in recent years. The EOR market is too small and regional to support a global CCS industry. Another issue is whether people living near onshore CO2 burial sites will accept the technology ? they did not in the Netherlands ? although many such sites are under seas, or in remote areas.

Is a revolutionary breakthrough possible?

Most research is on refining the efficiency of existing technologies, but experts say a completely new, super-efficient CO2 solvent is possible in theory. Other experimental technologies are being examined, such as chemical looping, where a metal oxide provides the oxygen to burn the fuel and is then easily regenerated. In the more distant future, the US department of energy is examing whether giant stacks of efficient fuel cells could be run on hydrogen produced by pre-combustion CCS.

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Dear friends… we are back from our trip to the Basque Country. I already miss it very much.

It has taken me days to recover this time – must be age?

I was looking through the thousands of photos I took (yes, nearly 2,000) and wondering if there was a theme behind them all. I will show you soon. I think you will clearly see it.

But in the meantime I leave you with photos of a recipe I made inspired by a spring-filled dish my aunt and I ate at Boroa a few days ago. Cannot wait to share more.

I missed you.

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The ex-international footballer, will be seen on the sides of thousands of buses from tomorrow under the headline ?you know what?s good for you?.

The adverts, which also appear in press and online, aim to show the British public the health benefits of consuming low fat milk.

With funding for the campaign set to come to an end in October 2012 and only one further burst of advertising planned for September, Jones could well be the penultimate star to sport the milk moustache.

Sandy Wilkie, chairman of the Milk Marketing Forum, said: ?Vinnie is the perfect ambassador for low fat milk ? he?s fit, healthy and is a national treasure. And just like the ?white stuff?, Vinnie has been around for a few years, but continues to re-invent himself and keep us all smiling.?

Vinnie?s involvement in the ?make mine Milk? campaign sees him front a series of online videos as the internet?s most unlikely agony uncle. Covering topics such as dealing with relationship break-ups and healthy eating, ?Vinnie?s Advice Corner? is hosted on the ?make mine Milk? Facebook page, along with the ?Vinnie?s Weekender? competition to win a VIP break for two.

Jones said: ?As a footballer I used to look after myself, but even since I retired from professional sport, I?ve always tried to stay in shape.

“Particularly if I?m in training for a film, I need to stay lean and not eat any crap ? that?s why I love milk so much ? it tastes great and it?s good for you. I eat a lot of cereal and drink a lot of tea, though it?s hard to find a decent cuppa in LA.?

Source: Milk Marketing Forum

Related articles

• Kelly Osbourne becomes the new face of ?make mine Milk? 20 FEB 2012 | Dairy
• Alexis Jordan joins Make Mine Milk campaign 4 JUL 2011 | Health

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We’re looking for the best budget eats in that top North Yorkshire day-trip destination, Harrogate. Scrutinise our top 10, then have your twopenneth here

Another month, another budget eats 10. This time out, the Guardian Travel series – a national hunt for the best places to eat for under £10-a-head – is in Harrogate, Yorkshire, home to Bettys Tea Rooms (which, perhaps taking my life in my hands, I didn’t include) and, thankfully, much more besides.

On the Bettys front, it is a much-loved institution, and like many iconic venues, it trades – as far as I am concerned – on former glories, on a simulacrum of inter-war tea room gentility, rather than actual quality food. It is not bad exactly, but historically I have eaten steadfastly OK food there at prices (that’ll be £6.50 to £7.95 for an open sandwich, please) which made my eyes water. And that is after queuing as well. It doesn’t warrant the hassle or expenditure. This, I realise, will be heresy to many. Judging by the packed tables, I am in a minority of one. But there you go.

Anyway, onwards. One interesting micro-scene within Harrogate is that strata of reasonably-to-actually-quite good restaurants – some of them Michelin and Good Food Guide listed, no less – which nonetheless have to battle hard for lunchtime trade, leading to some great bargains for the astute visitor. Sasso and Quantro both made my 10, but, for me, it was the slightly more hidden away Mirabelle which was most impressive.

Elsewhere, Weeton’s delivered on its promise, after a fashion; Bean & Bud was fantastic; Graveley’s was solid; the Blue Nile an interesting Egyptian hidden gem; Charley’s a reminder of why everyone used to get so excited about cupcakes; and Fat Badger, despite its ludicrous design affectations, turned out to be a decent all-day cheap eats option.

The only clanger I dropped was getting a takeaway from Sukhothai, the Leeds’ branch of which has a very good reputation. My massaman curry was swimming in oil and delivered very little in flavour. Was this a one-off? Do you rate it? Or, when it comes to affordable east Asian food, would you point people to the lunch deal at Orchid? It looks good, but, sadly, I didn’t have time to squeeze it in.

Perhaps you’re a fan of food at the Old Bell Tavern, Caffe Rosso, Cattlemen’s Association, Indulge, lunch at Bed or Bib & Tucker? If so, now’s the time to have your say and make their case. And while we’re in the area, feel free to give us a steer outside the town centre. Is Dougie’s worth a drive out, does Cafe Masala serve Harrogate’s best curry, would you divert to Fodder on your way in or out of town?

What’s haute in Harrogate and what’s not?

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A breezy British-Asian comedy about Bolton-based newlyweds who have to stay with his parents when their honeymoon is cancelled

East Is East writer Ayub Khan-Din teams up with Calendar Girls director Nigel Cole for this breezy British-Asian comedy. Bolton-based newlyweds Atul (Reece Ritchie) and Vina (Amara Karan) can’t wait to get their hands on each other, but, forced to stay put due to a cancelled honeymoon, the pair struggle to consummate their marriage in Atul’s cramped family home. While Ritchie and Karan offer up charming performances, their characters could use more depth: the romantic complications feel sudden without much psychological insight. Prepare to shed a tear when a more involving story about Atul’s mother, Lopa (Meera Syal), comes to fruition.

Rating: 4/5

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Václav Klaus condemns thinktank’s campaign but says he will still proceed with his keynote speech at the forthcoming conference

Václav Klaus, the Czech president and prominent climate sceptic, has condemned a controversial billboard campaign used by a rightwing US thinktank to advertise the forthcoming conference at which he is scheduled to give the keynote speech. However, his spokesman said Klaus will not join other speakers who have pulled out in protest and says he still intends to proceed with the engagement.

Last week, the Heartland Institute, a thinktank based in Chicago that promotes climate scepticism, withdrew an advertising campaign that compared people concerned about climate change with mass murderers and terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, Charles Manson and Ted Kaczynski. Despite later removing a billboard which appeared over an Illinois expressway featuring a picture of Kaczynski with the caption: “I still believe in global warming. Do you?”, the group refused to apologise for the campaign, instead describing it as an “experiment”.

Klaus, who is scheduled to give the keynote speech at the Chicago Hilton on 21 May, has previously appeared at the thinktank’s annual conference for climate sceptics, as well as given keynotes for similar climate sceptic groups such as Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation in the UK and the Institute of Public Affairs in Australia.

Klaus’s spokesman told the Guardian: “President Klaus is principally against non-serious, aggressive and provocative billboard campaigns of the kind the Heartland Institute used recently.” Asked if Klaus would now be pulling out, his spokesman said: “Mr president will attend this conference.”

Ross McKitrick, a Canadian economist, and Donna Laframboise, a Canadian climate sceptic blogger, have both confirmed that they will no longer speak at the conference in protest at the billboard and Heartland’s continued refusal to apologise.

The controversy has led to a wave of corporate donors publicly stating that they will no longer financially support the thinktank. On Wednesday, the United Services Automobile Association, an insurance and financial services company for US military families, confirmed on its Facebook page it was the latest donor to abandon Heartland. It joined other insurance companies, such as State Farm, and the drinks giant Diageo in cutting ties with the group. The Sierra Club, one of the US’s leading conservation groups, said on Wednesday 20,000 people had backed its call for corporations to pull the plug on Heartland.

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Chapel Fell, Teesdale: Students escape their lecture theatres to take in forensic evidence of bygone ages in the North Pennines

The coaches laboured up the fellside, braked to a halt with a release of compressed air that seemed like a sigh of relief and disgorged 60 Durham University students on to the summit, where they were greeted with the unwelcoming “go-back, go-back” alarm calls of red grouse. For this, the last part of their taught course before they sat exams and graduated, they’d abandoned air-conditioned lecture theatres for the vagaries of the North Pennine climate.

We were lucky: the rain clouds parted, the sun shone and the view down into the valley, where the Tees snaked between Cronkley Fell and Falcon Clints, was as breathtaking as the razor-sharp north wind that scythed across the heather. For the next hour, in the shelter of deep “grips” eroded into the blanket peat, Brian Huntley and Bob Baxter took their students on a journey back through 15,000 years of landscape history, recalling periods when melting glaciers made way for tundra, which in turn gave way to forests that eventually succumbed to human settlers’ fire and axes. The forensic evidence was there for all to see: pine branches protruding from deep in the peat gullies.

Back in the buses, we left this bleak landscape of treacherous emerald pools of bog moss and crumbling banks of lichen-covered heather and wended our way down to Widdybank Fell to investigate an enigma of Teesdale botany: the survival of spring gentians. We feared that cold weather might have delayed their flowering but here they were, uncurling their petals to become stars of searingly intense azure. Botanists still debate how they avoided extinction when their open tundra habitat was drowned in the deep shade of those long-lost forests. Two weeks hence, when the students turn over their exam papers and begin writing, it’s likely that, whatever else they may have forgotten from those long hours in lecture theatres, today’s field trip will linger in their memories.

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Hi friends. This is going to be a quick post because I’m on my lunch break, but I wanted to share with you the workout I did this morning because it was awesome. It’s part of the Tone It Up Drop 10 Challenge featured in the April and May issues of Self Magazine. I’m a [...]

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(F-ire)

British composer and pianist Alex Hutton is an inventive writer of cinematic, folksong-like melodies, and a piano improviser who likes to feel pop-song chords beneath him. He could easily just write through-composed songs, but he likes improvisers of character around him, and his core trio here features bassist Yuri Goloubev and drummer Asaf Sirkis, who more usually partner the pianist John Law. Admirers of Israeli bassist Avishai Cohen will tune into this band’s melodic warmth, their sympathetic fusion of piano with basslines of cello-like elegance, and the fiery urgency of the drums in the opening JJ. Esbjörn Svensson fans will also recognise the organic development of a catchy motif on the grooving Wonder Why. The Legentis Script intensifies glowing french horn and flute parts with tumbling piano and a crackling drum break, and Hutton’s pealing-churchbells motif on the graceful Clouds is typical of his talent for unexpected melodic interjections. It’s the kind of music that speaks to a wide listenership, whether its roots are appreciated or not.

Rating: 3/5

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Culture department’s TV campaign featuring Stephen Fry condemned as ‘absolutely wrong’ for jeopardising foreign travel’s contribution to Britain’s GDP

Jeremy Hunt may have thought spending £5m on a star-studded advertising campaign for British holidays would get a warm welcome from the travel industry. But he may now feel, as Stephen Fry so sagaciously chuckles in the Visit England campaign ads, “it’s just not worth it”.

On Thursday the culture department’s intervention ? a spring TV campaign featuring Fry and other celebrities with the punchline “No passports. No jabs. No visas. No euros” ? was attacked by the head of Thomas Cook as “absolutely wrong” in persuading Britons not to bother travelling abroad.

The chief executive of Thomas Cook’s UK business, Ian Ailles, said that the economic contribution of the outbound tourism sector matched that of the inbound sector, making a huge contribution to GDP as well as to the Treasury’s coffers.

Speaking at a conference of the travel association Abta, he said: “What we ask is that the government doesn’t distort a functioning market with microeconomic meddling.”

Abta unveiled figures on Thursday showing that outbound travel contributes more than £22bn directly to the economy and keeps 620,000 people in full-time work. A report by the Centre for Economics and Business Research also claimed that an additional £31bn of economic activity in the UK could be credited to related pre-trip spending on items such as holiday wardrobes and sun cream.

Mark Tanzer, Abta’s chief executive, said it proved the huge contribution of foreign travel to economic success. He said: “For too long it has been assumed that by going abroad on holiday, money is being taken out of the UK economy. The government must recognise and support outbound travel in its current and future policies to deliver growth to the wider economy.”

Ailles also attacked the “stealth holiday tax” of air passenger duty for dampening demand, adding that despite repeated assurances that the government supports travel and tourism, “the tax only increases”. He added: “I believe the chancellor would rather take the plaudits for lower direct taxation while stealing it in extra indirect taxation, which we take for him.”

The duty, which has united much of the aviation and travel industries in protest, rose by 8% last month. Tanzer said that the industry would be looking to “mobilise customers” to protest against it, and that the point needed to be made that it affected consumers’ own budgets and not just the industry’s.

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Japan agrees to 1tn yen injection for Tepco, hit by compensation claims and decontamination costs after nuclear plant’s meltdown

Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the company at the centre of Japan’s worst-ever nuclear accident, has been saved from collapse after the government in effect nationalised the firm by agreeing to inject 1 trillion yen ($12.5bn) in fresh capital.

Japan’s biggest utility has received at least 3.5tn yen in state support since three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant went into meltdown after being hit by a powerful tsunami on 11 March last year.

The trade and industry minister, Yukio Edano, said the capital injection was needed to ensure the utility company could continue to supply electricity to 45 million people, including residents of Tokyo.

“Without the state funds, [Tepco] cannot provide a stable supply of electricity and pay for compensation and decommissioning costs,” Edano said after approving what amounts to a state takeover of the firm.

The total cost of the disaster, which last weekend led to the closure of the country’s last working nuclear reactor, is estimated at $100bn.

Tepco faces compensation claims totalling 5tn yen from the tens of thousands of people who have been driven from their homes by radiation leaks.

The task of decontaminating the area affected by radiation and decommissioning the plant is expected to take decades.

Under the 10-year restructuring plan, the government will acquire more than half of Tepco’s shares, with the option of increasing its stake to more than two-thirds if the company fails to reach its restructuring targets.

In return for the taxpayer bailout, Tepco plans to reduce costs by 3.7tn yen over the next 10 years and cut a 10th of its workforce. It will also need government approval to increase household electricity bills and restart nuclear reactors that pass stress tests introduced in the wake of the disaster.

The plan has already prompted personnel changes amid criticism of Tepco’s handling of the disaster and evidence that it played down the risk posed by earthquakes and tsunamis.

The current chairman, Tsunehisa Katsumata, will be replaced by Kazuhiko Shimokobe, a lawyer selected by the bailout fund. Naomi Hirose, a Tepco managing director who is overseeing the firm’s response to the accident, has been promoted to president.

“Under the new management, I urge the firm to build a new corporate culture, listen to the victims, to customers and to society, and start actively releasing information,” Edano said.

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China and India may have to make bigger carbon emissions commitments as EU climate chief says Kyoto model is outdated

Old divisions between developed and developing countries in who should lead the fight against climate change should be laid aside, according to ministers from some of the world’s poorest countries and European representatives meeting on Tuesday.

The vexed issue of which countries should bear the greatest responsibility for cutting greenhouse gas emissions has been a sticking point in international negotiations for two decades. Under the original settlement reached in 1992 at the Rio Earth summit, and formalised in the 1997 Kyoto protocol, some rapidly emerging economies such as China were left out of the roster of obligations to curb emissions.

However, China is now the world’s biggest emitter and second biggest economy, prompting many nations to question whether the divisions that were relevant 20 years ago should still apply today.

Ministers from the world’s least developed countries, small island states and a sprinkling of developed and larger developing nations gathered in Brussels for a two-day meeting ahead of global climate change talks in Bonn next week.

Connie Hedegaard, the European climate chief, who was hosting the meeting, said: “Countries have recognised that the old division between developed and developing countries ? there are limits to how useful that is in the 21st century.”

She said countries wanted “something more dynamic” in terms of determining the contributions to emissions reductions made by richer and poorer countries, than the current system, by which “every two decades countries decide on the categorisation”.

Negotiations on a possible new global treaty that would succeed the Kyoto protocol are to resume again this November, after last year’s talks concluded with a resolution to write a new agreement by 2015 that would come into force from 2020.

Interim discussions among the world’s environment ministers will take place later this month in Bonn, Germany, at which some of the parameters for the next three years of talks will set out.

Hedegaard said: “We need to set out a work programme [for drawing up a global agreement] and how to get there.”

In advance of last year’s talks in Durban, South Africa, the EU forged an alliance among the world’s least developed countries, small island states that will be worst affected by climate change, and a variety of developed and developing nations, to push for a new global agreement on emissions to be signed by 2015 and implemented by 2020.

However, China and India held out against such an agreement until the last minutes of the Durban talks, and are understood to be wary of any attempt to move away from the rigid classification of many countries under the Kyoto protocol, under which developing countries are absolved from any legally binding obligation to address their greenhouse gas emissions.

The nations represented at the Brussels meeting were: Australia, Bangladesh, Barbados, Cape Verde, Chile, Colombia, Congo, DRC Congo, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Denmark, Ethiopia, France, Gambia, Germany, Grenada, Kenya, Marshall Islands, Mexico, Nepal, Nauru, Norway, Republic of Korea, Spain, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Switzerland, Qatar, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, United Arab Emirates and the UK, as well as the EU and the UN.

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Dominica leads group of 52 small island developing states aiming for a 45% cut in emissions in the next 18 years

They seldom meet on the cricket or football fields, but the world’s small island developing states are informally competing with each other to be the first to ditch fossil fuels and embrace clean energy.

A new United Nations analysis of the most recent energy plans of 52 low lying poor countries – traditionally heavily dependent on imports of petrol and oil – shows the Caribbean island of Dominica leading the world with plans to become carbon “negative” by 2020. The Maldives is not far behind, hoping to be carbon neutral by 2020. Tuvalu and the Cook islands intend to generate all their electricity from renewables by 2020 and Timor-Leste, the poorest country in Asia, expects to provide solar electricity to all its 100,000 families by 2030.

With Tonga, Samoa, Nauru, Mauritius and many other countries also volunteering to switch to solar, geothermal and wind energy, the collective target of the group of 52 small island developing states is a 45% cut in emissions in the next 18 years – considerably more than the world’s rich countries who between them have pledged 12-18% cuts by 2020.

“We are showing the world leadership,” said Dominican ambassador to the UN, Vince Henderson, at a UN development programme meeting ahead of next week’s reconvened climate talks in Bonn, Germany.

“This is about survival as well as economics. We are spending $220m a year importing fuel so it is in our interests. It is vested interests by the oil, coal and fossil fuel industries that is preventing rich countries meeting their obligations. We are demanding that all countries take their responsibilities.”

“Small island developing states can leap toward the goal of a poverty-free and prosperous future by changing their energy sectors,” said Barbados prime minister, Freundel Stuart. “We can rally the international community with a unified voice, sharing our aspiration to become fully sustainable.”

In a separate development, the world’s 47 least developed countries (LDCs) will propose on Monday what they call a “bold new plan” to help break the deadlock and speed up the UN climate talks. It is expected that the group, which sided with the EU in the final hours of the Durban climate summit last December, will press for a new body to negotiate a second protocol under the UN climate convention as well as accept 75% approval on decisions rather than the complete consensus of all countries.

“Countries agreed to complete negotiations by 2015, but such deadlines have been broken before,” said Pa Ousman Jarju, the chair of the LDC group. “Our countries cannot wait. We are already feeling the effects of climate change, but the time has come for us to be leaders in the international effort to address this global challenge.”

“The creation of a new body to negotiate a second protocol ? represents an overdue acknowledgement by all parties that the climate convention and the Kyoto protocol alone are insufficient to drive action consistent with the ultimate objective of the convention,” said Jarju.

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For some, a doll’s house is no mere plaything but a way to create their fantasy home. Even if that means building a tiny bondage room

A couple of years ago, a catalogue arrived at José Alesón’s workplace by mistake. A collection of doll’s house miniatures. He began flicking through, and an interest that had lain dormant for 15 years was piqued. As a teenager, growing up in Santander in northern Spain, Alesón poured his love of antiques and history into a cabinet of miniatures, an alternative world picked out in mirrors, pianos, sideboards, dining tables, each just a few inches tall. He is now in his early 30s, lives in north London and works as a customer services adviser in a high-street bank, and every spare minute of the past two years has been spent on another project, Victoriana, his Victorian doll’s house. Once he started, “I couldn’t stop,” he says. “I went to fairs in Milan, Andalucia, Madrid, Chicago ? It’s been every Sunday, every morning up until 3am changing things around, or I’ll be in the gym thinking, ‘I need to get this.’”

Alesón is incredibly precise and incredibly friendly. In his immaculate living room, he shows me to the doll’s house in the corner, the place where most people keep their TV. There’s something oddly intimate about being shown inside. It’s so perfect, I burst into startled laughter. Each item has been chosen because it coheres to a specific story Alesón has constructed about the house’s residents.

In the bedroom for housemaid Rose there are tiny postcards tacked to the wall, an album of cigarette cards on the bed and books piled haphazardly beneath. The family are living in the 1910s, and in Lady Alesón’s room, there is a pair of shoes and a bag on the floor, gloves slung on the bed, to give a sense of a woman in a hurry. “In 1912, there were the suffragettes,” he says, “and all these ladies who wanted to be more than just a lady. So Lady Alesón has come into the room, and she’s in a rush, she’s left her handbag on the floor because she’s off for a meeting. Maybe she’s friends with the Pankhursts.”

Lord Alesón is an explorer, a former soldier ? and an extension of Alesón himself. Some of the items bear his initials. There’s a set of whisky glasses and a decanter in the library, which he commissioned a craftsperson to etch towards their base with the tiniest criss-crosses, to mirror the contemporary fashion. Each glass is about half the size of a person’s smallest fingernail.

The miniature house is covered in family portraits. There’s Alesón’s great-great-grandfather, who was a doctor; his grandfather at his first communion; a picture of Alesón himself. But there are no dolls. Like many adult doll’s house collectors, Alesón isn’t keen on them. This way, “if you see pictures of the house, you don’t know if it’s a miniature or not. It’s like a mind trick ? It would be broken by a doll, because a doll is not a real person.”

Does he play with it? “It’s not to play with,” he says. “But you know what, there’s nothing more relaxing than sitting here at night, with the lights off, and all the lights on in the doll’s house, enjoying that moment. I like everything to be in order, and this is a kind of perfection. It’s like you’ve stopped time.”

Alesón isn’t the only person who occasionally resides in a small world. This weekend, thousands will attend the Kensington Dollshouse festival in London, which many consider the best miniatures show in Europe. There are more than 170 exhibitors, showing dogs, birds, suitcases, cotton reels, chairs, chandeliers, plants. Most of the miniatures are a standard 1:12 scale.

The festival is run by former ballet dancer Charlotte Stokoe, who guesses there are about 100,000 UK collectors, served by three monthly miniatures magazines. Makers are often highly specialised. Stokoe met a woman once who made “amazing little matchboxes, which opened, and had all the individual matches. The box must have been half a centimetre big. That was all she made.”

As Halina Pasierbska writes in the book Dolls’ Houses, the first recorded house was made for the duke of Bavaria in 1557-8, as a copy of his residence. In the 16th century and beyond, dolls’ houses became a way to showcase the owner’s wealth, or instruct upper-class girls in household management. These days, the appeal for adult collectors is much more varied and knotty. Partly it comes down to having a space they can control, says Stokoe. “Maybe in their real house they have children running around, leaving rubbish everywhere, not tidying up after themselves. And with a doll’s house they can have it exactly as they want. If they want dirty dishes in the sink, that’s their decision.” Many steer clear of dolls, “because they feel that the house belongs to them,” she says, “and they don’t want strangers in there”. That said, she once heard of someone who had had her family made in miniature, and when her daughter broke her leg, the doll of the daughter had to have a broken leg too.

Dolls’ houses represent a form of wish fulfilment. Alesón knows he’s never going to have a real Victorian house that big, he says; this way he can collect reproduction antiques without taking up too much space. He has also always dreamed of having a very specific time machine, which would allow him to experience being both rich and poor in the same era. In constructing the house, he has imagined and compared the two states.

Sarah Whitlam has also created the kind of home she could never really have. She lives in suburban Chelmsford in Essex, and in the corner of her dining room sits a fantasy castle. She worked on it for seven years. There is a snakeskin kitchen, a cocktail bar, an enormous bathroom with a toilet painted in gold leaf. Whitlam works in hotel management, and the design for the bath ? raised on a plinth covered in stones ? was copied from one in the building where she works.

There are crocodiles on the roof, snails on the wall, a woodpecker and squirrel in the tree outside ? and a tattoo parlour, complete with tiny disclaimer forms. Also, a bondage room. “I wanted a dungeon in the castle really,” says Whitlam, “but there’s nowhere to go underground. There was a spare room though, so I did an upstairs dungeon.” A surprising number of the miniatures she needed were available, she says. A company called Delph makes tattoo guns and ink pots, and she found a woman selling 1:12-scale condoms at a craft centre in Braintree. But she did have to make many of the bondage-room items herself: the swinging bed, mirrored ceiling, handcuffs and whips.

Is this her dream home? “I think it probably would be,” she says. There’s that lovely big bathroom, I offer nervously. “Yep,” she replies patiently. “And it’s got a dungeon.” Whitlam is very welcoming, but she likes being able to shock people with the house, she says, and open their imaginations. In arranging the rooms, she wanted them to look properly lived in. “There are people doing these modern houses that have a coat draped over the back of a chair, and I love that,” she says; the illusion that someone has just left the room, that their presence lingers.

Miniatures do seem to stir up aparitions. For the past few decades, Robert Dawson of The Modelroom has been creating brilliantly detailed models of palaces and townhouses ? Versailles, the Doge’s palace, part of the Vatican City ? projects that can take a year and cost as much as £100,000. They are often commissioned for museums. He started out as a theatre designer, and is a big presence in his small studio. (The holes in the ceiling are a result of him miscalculating the height of the Vatican building.) Miniatures are powerful because they distill a room to its essence, he says, and force people to look very closely, to engage with places in an unexpected and imaginative way.

Dawson has been trying to move towards storytelling in his work, which has taken him down some whimsical roads. One customer asked for a doll’s house based on a fictional character she had created, a 19th-century jewel thief, so they built a house for him, with a revolving fireplace, a library with a fake bookcase, “a grotto with a swan boat which he used to get away. And at the top, in the attic, if you peered through the window, you could see hot air balloons.”

His interest in storytelling has also led him to consider darker projects. Dawson saw a picture a couple of years ago of a warehouse that had been the scene of a massacre. “The bodies had been cleared away, but it was imprinted with this extraordinary human experience. If you could present something that made people engage with what happened in this place, I think that would have a value and maybe transcend the danger of being voyeuristic.” He collected some pictures, “and I was trying to work out what it was about this breeze-block space that conveyed such despair. Was it simply because I knew it? Or was there something fundamental that had been burned on to the walls?”

Dawson says dolls’ houses are sometimes used in therapy, because they offer a safe, neutral territory, and can be closed up at the end of the session. And it’s certainly true that people have deep connections to their dolls’ houses. Fiona (AKA Bea) Broadwood makes affordable ones in a smaller-than-usual scale ? 1:24, 1:48 or even 1:144 ? under the name Petite Properties, and has had extraordinary commissions. One woman wanted to recreate her childhood home and “was very specific about the outdoor toilet she wanted,” says Broadwood. “It had to have specific cracks in the brickwork, because her brothers used to terrorise her with spiders they’d find in those cracks”. Another commissioned a funeral parlour. “It was going to have a little desk and some sample coffins, and some nice chairs for the bereaved.”

Broadwood lives in Lincolnshire, and when she started, almost 10 years ago, the demand was for traditional Georgian and Victorian properties. But with the rise of genealogy, she says, many of her customers are recreating their grandparents’ houses in miniature. She often makes old council houses, some flattened years ago, with just grainy photographs to work from. “You’ve got a door and a window, and somebody stood there in a wrap-around pinny ? I get them to write about the house as well, to be as descriptive as they can.”

The reaction from customers can be emotional. One of Broadwood’s favourite commissions was a terraced house that a customer’s grandparents had lived in. “When the woman collected it, she just erupted in tears, and it took ages to compose herself. I knew I had got it spot on.”

Of course, not all adult collecting tends to darkness. I head to the last remaining specialist shop in London, an unmarked frontage opposite Gospel Oak station in north London, which announces its purpose via the doll’s house in the window. Run by Kristin Baybars, it officially goes by her name too, and is by some measure the most magical shop I have ever visited. Every surface is covered in miniatures: plates of sausages, oysters, scallops, jam tarts. There are tiny jars of pickled onions, perfectly turned wooden chairs, Victorian kitchenware with whisks that revolve, a tiny loom that actually works.

Baybars, a long-haired woman in her late 70s, leads me to some wooden children’s chairs, and we sit with our knees about our ears. The daughter of the poet Ida Affleck Graves and the artist Blair Hughes-Stanton, her interest in miniatures was first stirred as a very small child when she was offered a visit to a flea circus. It fell through at the last minute. “Agony,” she says. “I did see a film of fleas later on, when I was about 40 or 50, but I never did get to see that circus.”

Baybars started making her first doll’s house at 15. She was determined to make hundreds of hand-turned mahogany banisters, but needed a lathe, so roped in three other girls at her school to help her in a dishwashing enterprise to raise the money. It took two years. In the 1950s, she became a toys buyer, and toy-maker, for Heals department store, and she and creative partner Minnie King made the Humpty doll for the TV programme Play School.

Baybars has had her shop for almost four decades. She takes me back through its corridors, filled with dolls’ houses she has collected or made herself. One is filled entirely with miniature dogs and cuts of meat. Another depicts a school room, another a historic dentistry scene. There is a “spooky corner” with a guillotine, gallows and some libertine lady dolls, out on the carouse. The place is both shop and museum, with products from some makers long since dead, whose work she refuses to sell.

I wonder if she ever finish that dolls’ house she started at 15. “No,” she says. It’s still at her family home, and her mother, “almost up to her death, said: ‘Kristin, when are you going to make the kitchen table?’ And I never did. It’s still all laid out on the ground, because I want to do it all.”

April Scott Arielle Kebbel Ashanti Ashlee Simpson Ashley Greene

Without two professors from the capital of South Yorkshire, London’s great event would be a less colourful affair

Please do not think that the Guardian Northerner is going through some sort of floral, life-changing experience, after our last post about the beautiful bluebells of West Yorkshire.

But it is only right to give recognition to the contribution of the University of Sheffield to the coming Olympic Games 2012, via making sure that the wildflower meadows in reclaimed east London flower on time, rather than earlier as they would naturally wish to do.

This small biological miracle is all down to Dr Nigel Dunnett and Professor James Hitchmough who have years of experience of encouraging marigolds, cornflowers and poppies in urban areas. On their doorstep is the wonderful experimental playground of the UK’s premier steel city; among its many horticultural wonders are the fig trees along the river Don, germinated from long-gone workers’ snap boxes, or picnic lunches, which germinated in riverine mud which was warmed by effluent from factories along the banks.

The Games have a quite extraordinary complement of green add-ons, including 6,200 trees, 9,500 shrubs, 63,000 bulbs, 250,000 wetland plants, 766,000 grasses and ferns and 650 bird and bat boxes. Plus the wildflower meadows. But these could have been tricky had Nature been left to herself. The great event is in August, Wild flowers by and large prefer July.

Enter Sheffield’s profs. Dunnett and Hitchmough have chosen cornflowers, marigolds, Californian poppies, tickseed, thyme, marjoram, viper’s bugloss and meadow cranesbill and sown them later than usual to ensure that they are in bloom throughout the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Dunnet says:

We are extremely encouraged and excited by the results from the sowings this year. To achieve this peak performance with a beautiful blend of colours at exactly the right time is no mean feat, and is based on many years of research and practical experience at the University of Sheffield.

And so say all of northern us.

Brooke Burns Busy Philipps Cameron Diaz Cameron Richardson Camilla Belle

Your article on Tehran International Book Fair (A turn-up for the books, 3 May) is a clever mix of criticism and admission that the Islamic Republic of Iran is promoting books and learning, albeit within the confines of the Islamic revolution’s parameters. The article tries to judge Iranian society and culture from the premise of western norms and values, as in the “incongruity” of a book fair in Islamic Iran ? and that, too, in a mosque’s premises; boys and girls using the book fair to meet their friends of the opposite sex; and the crackdown on Iranian writers and publishers in accordance with “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s comments last year about ‘harmful’ books”.

Good propaganda, but it distracts from the Iranian government’s good work to promote learning and books. The Iranians are translating prominent western works in science, philosophy, literature, fiction, history and so on into Farsi on a massive scale. There is nothing western or Islamic about knowledge. One must learn from whatever source. Knowledge is mankind’s common heritage. All new knowledge has depended on previous existing knowledge.

To put the international book fair at Tehran in perspective, note that it has over 2,000 stalls and attracts half a million visitors a day. In comparison, the annual Karachi International Book Fair, has one-tenth the number of stalls and barely attracts one-sixth of the number of visitors. Let’s not try to belittle the effort of the Iranians to bridge the enormous knowledge gap between the Islamic world and the west. In fact, the bridging of this gap has the potential to bring the two together.
SH Zaidi
Karachi, Pakistan

Cristina Dumitru Daisy Fuentes Dania Ramirez Danica Patrick Daniella Alonso

I wanted this winter break to be special for the kids. Although I knew that I would spend much of the time working (I am in the middle of copyediting the manuscript), it was important to me to schedule activities that were both fun and educational. That is when it occurred to me that I should take them to visit a citrus grove. After all, we live in Florida, the land of citrus, no?

I thought of how excited Jon and Miren would be to pick some of their favorite fruit right of the tree and learn a bit more about where we live. I knew they would.

Then, my next question was… “where do we go?”

I didn’t know where to begin my search. I asked around and searched on the internet. How hard could it be to find a citrus grove in the land of mail-order citrus gift-boxes. I called and called, but got nowhere. It seems things have really changed in the last few years in the citrus industry. After the devastating freezes they had in the mid 80s, many small growers lost most of their groves and since then, the industry has become much more industrialized.

“We don’t allow people to walk the groves for liability reasons, but you can visit our packing house” is the answer I heard the most. “But we really want to see the trees and pick the fruit! Why would I want to see a packing facility?” is what I kept repeating.

I got no answers. Until the day I picked up a bag of organic oranges at Whole Foods.

I saw the name Uncle Matt’s under a big sign that said “Local”. Right then and there, I googled them on my phone. I was so excited to find an organic citrus grower not far from where we live. I sent them an email as soon as I got home to see if we could come visit and shortly I received an email back saying “It would be our pleasure!”

Just like that, we planned a trip to visit Uncle Matt’s.

We decided to make a day trip out of it. Invited my friend Karen and Jon’s best friend Daisy along for the ride. C. even took the day off from work to join us.

The kids were beaming. Cool, sunny winters-day.

When we arrived, the entire McLean clan who is the family behind Uncle Matt’s greeted us. Benny McLean, the patriarch, comes from a long line of citrus-growing Floridians. Who else would have such great insight into citrus farming but him. Matt McLean, Benny’s son and CEO of Uncle Matt’s (the business was named after him) explained to us the genesis of it all and the importance of organic practices.

Annemarie and her daughters and nephew joined us as well. Daisy, Jon, and Miren were excited to find new friends and share the experience with them. The McLean children are used to being in the fields and working the land and that is very obvious. They are naturals.

Benny gave us a thorough explanation of how the citrus industry in Florida has evolved. He explained to us how they address the issues of winter freezes, insects, and disease under organic practices. He spoke about the trees’ immune systems and then, just like that, I wanted to cry out of joy. Maybe because my own autoimmune disorders, anytime a doctor, farmer, or individual addresses the importance of strengthening our bodies ability to defend from disease, it gets to me. I get it. Benny’s words resonated.

I loved learning about how wasps are used to fight disease and how wasps live on their property pollenating these tiny white flowers that in conventional farming would be considered weeds and immediately removed.

They have created a harmonious eco-system and we could sense it. There is peace at Uncle Matt’s.

The fruit was outrageously sweet – candy-like and warm from the sun.

We all picked from the trees. The sweetest red navels, Hamlins, honeybells, pink grapefruit, gigantic pommelos, and lemons. The tangelos were still ripening and so were the Valencia oranges. They also grow avocados, blueberries, and peaches. We even spotted some blossoms on the peach trees.

Our kids and the McLean kids bonded over picking fruit.

Such a beautiful sight.

As we were walking around, my mind was spinning thinking about what I was going to make with all this beautiful fruit.

The first thing was a fresh salad. Don’t we all crave citrus salads after all the holidays? I know I do.

Simple lobster and citrus salad with tarragon-oil dressing and spicy radishes.

We played at the farm until nightfall.

The kids were happy from a day in the sun — in nature.

And I was completely inspired by passion and dedication from those who see beyond a mere business and create a healthy and sustainable lifestyle for their family and community.

Back at home, we have been enjoying fresh citrus every morning. A mix of red navel and honeybell is Jon’s favorite. How could it not be right?

Just like candy.

Even though it is winter and yes, it finally got down to the 40s, I still craved sorbet. I made pommelo, hibiscus, and vanilla bean popsicles that we had outside under the sun. It felt good.

Also made vanilla and cardamom natillas with sliced of citrus and ladyfingers using all the leftovers from recipe testing.

So thank you Uncle Matt’s and the McLean family for your time and generosity. We will never forget it.

And to all of you, happy 2012!

Pommelo, Hibiscus, and Vanilla Bean Sorbet

makes 10 pops

3 cups (750 ml) freshly-squeezed pommelo juice
1/2 cup (100 g) natural cane sugar
2 teaspoons dry hibiscus leaves
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise and seeds scraped
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup (60 ml) freshly-squeezed lemon juice

In a small saucepan, heat 1 cup (250 ml) of pomelo juice, sugar, hibiscus, vanilla bean and seeds, and salt over medium high heat until it comes to a boil and sugar has dissolved. Remove pot from heat and let it steep for 10 minutes. Strain it through a fine sieve and let the syrup cool for 10 minutes.

Mix the pommelo syrup with the remaining pommelo juice and lemon juice. Stir and refrigerate for 2 hours.

Churn in your ice cream machine for a few minutes until it starts to freeze and thicken, but not fully frozen. Pour into the popsicle molds, insert a wooden stick, and freeze until solid.

Lobster and Citrus Salad

serves 4

1 (14-ounce or 400 g) lobster tail
1 medium pink grapefruit, peeled and segmented
1 medium hamlin or navel orange, peeled and segmented
1 medium red navel or blood orange, peeled and segmented
4 radishes, thinly sliced
4 green onions, thinly sliced
1 cup (15 g) watercress
2 tablespoons finely chopped pistachios
1/4 cup (60 ml) extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon fresh tarragon leaves
1 tablespoon grapefruit juice
Salt and pepper
Microgreens

Cook the lobster in a pot of salted boiling water for 13 to 15 minutes. Remove and let it cool until you can handle it. Remove flesh from shell and cut into bite size pieces.

In a bowl toss together the lobster pieces, grapefruit, oranges, radishes, green onions, watercress and pistachios.

In a mortar and pestle, bruise the tarragon with a pinch of coarse salt. Slowly add the olive oil while stirring. Pour the oil over the salad, followed by the grapefruit juice. Season with salt and pepper and toss. Top with microgreens. Serve immediately while lobster is still warm.

Adrianne Curry Adrianne Palicki Aisha Tyler Aki Ross Alecia Elliott

I am in the process of cleaning out my pantry by using up all the “bits n bob” items on the shelf. I do this by seeing what I have that needs using and creating a meal plan that intentionally incorporates a specific ingredient. I polished off some molasses by making a chili molasses butter to slather on grilled corn.

But, I have NO IDEA what to do with the 1.5 bottles of light corn syrup. I also have about .25 bottles of dark corn syrup. I don”t even know how they ended up in my pantry. I eat pretty healthy and generally avoid sweets, so I am at a total loss.

Please help me find a use for this ingredient by suggesting possible recipes? Thank you so much.

Dania Ramirez Danica Patrick Daniella Alonso Danneel Harris Deanna Russo

Scientists believe warming waters caused by El Niño led to a shortage in anchovies, the seabirds’ main food source

An initial study into the deaths of hundreds of Peruvian seabirds, mostly pelicans and boobies, on the country’s northern beaches indicates they died of starvation due to a lack of their main food, anchovies.

The dead and dying seabirds have been littering beaches in Peru’s northern regions of Ancash, La Libertad, Lambayeque and Piura. More than 1,200 were found in one nature reserve and numbers are expected to reach several thousand and rising.

Scientists believe that a warming of Peru’s coastal waters, usually attributed to the El Niño phenomenon, has caused the shortage of Peruvian anchovies. The fish flourishes in the cold water Humboldt current, which hugs the Chilean and Peruvian coastline, and forms the base of a marine food chain which makes Peru’s Pacific waters one of the world’s biggest fisheries.

“Oceanographic changes may have affected food availability and there is a likelihood that this has affected the distribution of anchovies,” Patricia Majluf, a marine biologist and former fisheries ministers said.

“When there is a warming of sea surface temperatures the fish go deeper which means fledging juvenile pelicans, which cannot yet dive, are not able to feed themselves.” Majluf resigned on Friday saying the sector was “in disorder, full of irregularities and corruption.”

The majority of dead and dying birds found so far have been juveniles, many of them severely underweight. Peru’s health ministry has urged people to stay away from beaches where there are dead animals.

She added there was a “fairly high chance” of an El Niño event occurring later this year. The last major El Niño in 1997 and 1998 caused the deaths of millions of seabirds and other marine animals such as sealions.

The seabird deaths follow closely a massive dolphin die-off, which began in January, on the same stretch of coastline. The death toll could exceed 3,000, according to volunteers’ counts. It is among the largest ever reported worldwide.

The strandings are a mystery. Initially experts said the causes could be acoustic impact from testing for oil, now it seems more likely that the cause is a virus or other pathogen. However even in the US, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) classified more than half of recorded marine mammals strandings since 1991 as “undetermined”.

Raul Castillo, the scientific director of Peru’s Oceanic Institute said brucellosis and leptospirosis, both bacterial diseases, had been ruled out following port-mortem examinations on several dolphin carcasses.

However tests have yet to be completed for morbillivirus, a highly infectious virus related to measles in humans and canine distemper. The Florida-based Dolphin Research Centre says the morbillivirus has caused several cases of mass deaths among cetaceans in recent years.

“We know from studies in other countries that the dolphins most likely to get killed by viruses are those with the highest loads of contaminants in their bodies, like pesticides, herbicides and DDT,” said Stefan Austermuhle, a German zoologist specialising in Peru’s marine biodiversity who also heads Mundo Azul, an NGO.

He added the Peruvian authorities had handled the dolphin die-off extremely badly as many animals had been left to rot on the beach potentially exposing local residents to pathogens or contaminants. In some fishing villages, meat had been cut off the carcasses for food.

Camilla Belle Carla Campbell Carla Gugino Carmen Electra Carol Grow