Bacony Brussel Sprouts.

I used to hate brussels sprouts. I wasn't force fed them as a kid, actually I don't remember ever having them as a kid. As an adult I have had them steamed a few times and they were rank. Yesterday I had the shaved Brussels sprout salad from my fav cafe and I finally realized what was missing from my previous brussels sprouts experiences.... Bacon. Delicious, crispy, salty bacon. Of course!! Da da daaaaaaaa..... I bring you my bacony roasted brussels sprouts. Now I love brussels sprouts, I hope you will too.

These cute little baby cabbage-looking veggies are from the same family as broccoli, cabbage & kale so it should come as no surprise that they pack a serious nutritional punch. They are a storehouse of anti-oxidants with vitamins C, K, A &; B-complex. Keep in mind that vitamins A, E & K are fat-soluble and need dietary fat present to enable them to be absorbed by us. That is why it's a great idea to have a drizzle of coconut oil, olive oil, grassfed butter or ghee with your veggies to ensure you are able to absorb the most nutrients from them. They say 'you are what you eat' but actually 'you are what you digest & absorb'.

Brussels sprouts- about 500g
2 lge rashers of free-range gluten-free bacon, roughly chopped
1 red onion, roughly sliced
1 tbs coconut oil, ghee or grass-fed butter

Preheat oven to 180C. Wash the Brussels sprouts & chop off the bottom stalk. Cut them in halves. Add them with the onion & oil to a baking paper lined tray and toss well to coat. Sprinkle bacon over the top & bake for 25-35mins. More recipes over at MY FOOD RELIGION .

(Credit; huffingtonpost By SHANNON COOPER)

How to make the perfect apple pie

Puff or shortcrust, cooking apples or dessert, cream or custard – and can plain old apple pie compete with tarte tatin and strudel?.

Felicity Cloake's perfect apple pie. Photographs: Felicity Cloake for the Guardian

When something is described as "as American as apple pie", it simply means that no one remembers exactly which immigrant group brought it with them – and where the apple pie is concerned, those mellow mists of time are more like a fruitful fog, because it's been a staple in the States since before those states existed.

Indeed, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America suggests that the typical American version of this classic dessert descends from "15th-century English pies" and ideas brought over by the earliest colonial settlers.

Having looked at a few medieval recipes, many of which involve sugar, sweet spices, and butter, I'd go so far as to suggest that the typical British pie hasn't moved on much either, and with good reason. If the pie ain't broke, then you may as well eat it.

Apples

Marcus Wareing's apple pie.

Once upon a time, the pie would have been made with whatever variety of apple you happened to have in the orchard, woods or local market. This presumably accounts for the vague reference to "some apples" in the family recipe included in Florence White's 1932 Good Things in England.

Thankfully, most modern recipes are more specific: Jane Grigson recommends reinette or, like Tamasin Day-Lewis, cox's orange pippin; Marcus Wareing bramley and braeburn or pink ladies, and Angela Boggiano bramleys and cox's. I'm unable to find the first but try all the others, and decide that I like Boggiano's combination best. The cooking apples break down into a sharp, pleasingly fluffy mush, while the spicy flavour of the cox's seems more fitting in a pie than the crunchy, sweetly effervescent pink ladies, or the blander braeburns.

The bramleys need cooking before adding to the pie, as Boggiano and Wareing suggest, but, like the latter, I'm going to use the dessert apples raw, for the maximum contrast of texture and flavour. The two should remain distinct in the finished dish, though I'm not going to add them in two separate layers, as in Wareing's recipe; his pie is so deep that it's possible to eat it without ever mingling the bramley and cox's in one bite.

Grigson thinly slices her apples, while White expressly warns against this on the basis that "the juice will boil out before the apples are cooked, and the result will be tough and tasteless". I certainly don't find this to be the case, but I do prefer the texture of larger chunks.

Pastry

Jane Grigson's apple pie.

Grigson uses puff, while everyone else chooses a variety of crumbly shortcrust, which, though less visually impressive, I prefer – the rich stodginess is a better match for the autumnal apple. Given this is a dish better served warm or cool than piping hot, the shortcrust keeps better too.

Actually, I lie: White's recipe has a puzzling pastry that is halfway between a shortcrust and a bread dough, so wet it's almost impossible to shape, but, once baked, beautifully crisp thanks to the addition of lard. Again, however, the texture is one best appreciated straight from the oven.

Wareing and Boggiano both go for a rich shortcrust, yellow with egg yolk and sweet with sugar, while Day-Lewis chooses a plainer pastry, which she suggests making with spelt flour for its "nuttiness and texture". I like the almost crumble-like richness of Wareing and Boggiano's pastry, but the contrast between the sweet and sour fruit filling and the more savoury flavour of Day-Lewis's version is ridiculously pleasing; I can't stop picking at it. An enriched but unsweetened spelt pastry seems the way to go here.

Angela Boggiano's apple pie.

Wareing flavours his pastry with lemon zest, which is a nice touch, while Boggiano goes for mature cheddar, citing the Saxon proverb that "apple pie without the cheese is like a kiss without a squeeze". I wholeheartedly agree with her in theory, but it's a bit weird with custard, and apple pie is naught without a drop of Bird's. If you're more of a cream or creme fraiche person, however, I'd urge you to give it a whirl.

Boggiano, Day-Lewis and Wareing all encase their pies in pastry, while Grigson and White only deploy a pastry lid. This seems like cheating to me: a proper apple pie should be free-standing if required. That said, give the bottom a fighting chance at crispness by doing as Day-Lewis suggests, and sprinkling the pastry with flour and sugar before adding the fruit. Saveur magazine informs me that, as the filling cooks, "this extra layer will protect the pie dough from absorbing too much moisture".

Filling and flavourings

Tamasin Day-Lewis's apple pie.

Grigson adds raisins to her filling, some of which I decide to soak in rum in obedience to Annie Bell's recipe. They look pretty, but I find them too sweet, booze or no booze – unlike White's rose petals, which get entirely lost in the welter of other ingredients. If you'd like a floral note in your pie, a little rosewater would be a better bet.

Sweet spices are still popular; White and Day-Lewis use cloves, Day-Lewis and Wareing cinnamon, and Day-Lewis also sticks in nutmeg. Her pie is too heavily spiced for my liking, but just a hint perks the whole thing up considerably without detracting from the apples.

The same goes for sugar: Day-Lewis uses a mixture of dark and light muscovado, but the treacly bitterness of the latter is overpowering. The light brown sugar, however, adds a more interesting, caramel flavour.

Florence White's apple pie.

As extra insurance against that apple flavour getting lost, I'm taking a tip from White's recipe, and stewing the cores and peel in water to make a kind of apple stock, which gives her pie a marvellously intense flavour. It may sound like a bit of a faff, but given you have to peel and core them anyway, it's only a matter of sticking the results in a pan of water and leaving them to bubble for 15 minutes, and the results are truly remarkable.

Day-Lewis adds more flour to the fruit itself, possibly as a thickener, but, save for the base layer, I don't think this is necessary: the stewed apple will do that job with considerably less risk of gumminess.

Grigson, White and Day-Lewis add lemon zest, which has a natural affinity with apples, to their fillings, with Day-Lewis using it in combination with orange zest. As I've included zest in the pastry, I won't be using it here, but a spritz of lemon juice, as Boggiano suggests, is an easy way of brightening the flavour.

Grigson and Day-Lewis baste the apples with butter, which gives the whole dish a lovely, silky richness – elevating it from a simple, homely pleasure to something really quite special. Which is as it ought to be.

The perfect apple pie

(Serves 6-8)
4 bramley apples
2 tbsp butter, plus extra to grease
1 cinnamon stick
4 cloves
125-150g light muscovado sugar, depending on taste
3 cox's apples
Nutmeg
1 tbsp flour
1 tbsp demerara or granulated sugar
1 egg white, beaten
For the pastry
350g spelt or plain flour, plus extra to dust
190g cold butter, grated
1 egg plus 1 yolk, beaten
1 lemon

Peel and core the bramleys, reserving both. Cut the flesh into chunks. Melt one tablespoon of butter in a saucepan and add the cinnamon stick and cloves. Fry for a couple of minutes, until aromatic, then add the chunks of apple, plus 100g of the sugar. Cook, uncovered, stirring occasionally, for about 30 minutes until the mixture is fluffy and fairly dry.

Meanwhile, put the cores and peel in a small pan and just cover with cold water. Bring to the boil, then turn down the heat and simmer for 15 minutes. Allow both this and the compote to cool, then remove the cinnamon stick and cloves from the compote (if you can find them).

To make the pastry, put the flour in a large mixing bowl and add the grated butter and a generous pinch of salt. Rub in the butter to the consistency of fine breadcrumbs, then stir in the egg and the finely grated zest of the lemon until you have a dough (or you could use a food processor). Wrap well and chill for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, peel and core the cox's and cut them into chunks. Stir these into the stewed bramleys along with the juice of half a lemon, 50ml of the apple stock, a grating of nutmeg and the remaining muscovado (start with 125g sugar, and add more if you think it is too sharp).

Preheat the oven to 180C. Grease a large pie dish with butter, and roll out two-thirds of the pastry to about 5mm thick. Use to line the dish. Sprinkle the base with one tablespoon of flour and one tablespoon of sugar. Top with the apple mixture and dot the top with small pieces of the remaining butter.

Roll out the remaining pastry to 5mm thick. Brush the rim of the pastry base with egg white, and then top with this lid, pressing down to seal. Trim the edges (use these trimmings to decorate if you wish), and cut a small hole in the middle. Brush with egg white and sprinkle with sugar. Bake for 35-45 minutes until golden, then allow to cool a little before serving.

(Credit; The Guardian; By Felicity Cloake)

Meat detector that distinguishes between beef and horsemeat is unveiled. 

Retailers will soon be able to distinguish almost instantly between beef and horsemeat in products, thanks to a bench-top device built by British engineers.

Oxford Instruments and the Institute of Food Research have developed a machine that can identify meat before it is processed. Earlier this year, food retailers were badly hit by a scandal when horse meat was found in beef products.

The technology can distinguish between fatty acids from horses, cows, geese, pigs and sheep. It is also being developed to recognise rat meat.

"Each fat gives off a different signal," said Paul Bunting, sales director at Oxford Instruments. "The great advantage of this is that rather than spending £500 to send off meat for DNA-testing and waiting up to a week for the result, they can use this and get results in minutes."

Mr Bunting added that he has started to talks with all of the country's biggest supermarkets. Mid-size retailers currently spend up to £1m a year on sending samples for testing.

(Credit; The Independent)

Getting drunk without the hangover or health risks – scientist seeks investment for ‘alcohol substitute’ drug.

Former Government drugs advisor Professor David Nutt says his team are on the brink of a ‘serious revolution in health’ – but he needs help getting round the powerful drinks industry.

Scientists are developing a drug which mimics all the positive effects of being drunk without any of the health risks, addiction – or hangovers.

The “serious revolution in health” is being pioneered by the former Government drugs advisor Professor David Nutt, and has been described as doing for alcohol what the e-cigarette has done for tobacco use.

It targets neurotransmitters in the brain directly, giving the taker feelings of pleasure and disinhibition that are in some cases “indistinguishable” from the effects of drinking. Yet because it acts directly, it can also be immediately blocked by taking an antidote – with “drinkers” potentially able to then drive or return to work straight away.

Prof Nutt is one of the country’s leading neuropsychopharmacologists, but he and his team at Imperial College London have hit a stumbling block – perhaps unsurprisingly, no one in the drinks industry is willing to fund the drug’s development.

Speaking to the Dragon’s Den presenter Evan Davis on the BBC’s Today programme this morning, Prof Nutt appealed for investors to come forward and support his ground-breaking research.

He said: “I think this would be a serious revolution in health... just like the e-cigarette is going to revolutionise the smoking of tobacco.

“I find it weird that we haven't been speaking about this before, as it's such a target for health improvement.”

One of the biggest benefits to Prof Nutt’s alcohol substitute would be to remove addiction as a drinking problem. The scientist said 10 per cent of drinkers become addicted, and that addicts account for most of the one and a half million people killed by alcohol every year.

The Professor said that the drug would be taken in the form of a range of cocktails, and added: “I’ve done the prototype experiments myself many years ago, where I’ve been inebriated and then it’s been reversed by the antagonist.

“That’s what really gave us the idea. There’s no question that you can produce a whole range of effects like alcohol by manipulating the brain.”

(Credit; The Independent)

Elbows at the ready: Aldi offers 1973 Napoleon Vintage Brandy worth £107 for bargain price of £29.99

Discount supermarket Aldi is taking on high-end spirits retailers this Christmas by offering vintage bottles of brandy for a fraction of the recommended retail price.

A bottle of 1973 Napoleon Vintage Brandy would set you back £107 if purchased at an upmarket stockist. But Aldi has slashed over £77 off the list price to offer the same product at the bargain price of £29.99.

This is not the only premium alcoholic beverage the discount retailer has cut the price on this Christmas. Shoppers can also pick up a bottle of 15-Year-Old El Dorado Rum for £36 (discounted from £44), Grand Cru Champagne NV for £22.99 (£20 cheaper than elsewhere), Glen Orrin 30-Year-Old Whiskey for £54.99 (£80 cheaper than upmarket retailers).

In recent years the supermarket has made a concerted push to lure wealthy shoppers away from higher-end chains by developing a reputation for offering quality food and wine at affordable prices. Last week it came top in a blind Christmas pudding taste test by the Good Housekeeping Institute with its £3.89 Connoisseur Christmas pudding, seeing off stiff competition from Harrods and Heston Blumenthal.

(credit; independent.co.uk)

Filter coffee: the return of a has-bean.

Once the most unfashionable of coffee serves, filter coffee is making a comeback in trendy cafes and even Wetherspoons. Is it time to ditch the soy latte?

Wetherspoon pubs and Britain's third-wave coffee shops don't have a lot in common, but, collectively, these very different hangouts are key players in a remarkable revival of filter coffee's fortunes. When Italian, espresso-based cafe culture took off in Britain in the 90s, filter fell out of favour for good reason: it was terrible. Yet today, in any discerningcoffee shop you will find several coffees offered as filter, while this yearWetherspoon installed whiz-bang Bunn filter machines in its nearly 900 pubs as written by the Guardian.

Admittedly, our bearded brew-geeks and the bar staff at 'Spoons aren't dealing in exactly the same product. In specialist coffee shops, they save the pour-over and other filter serves for single-origin arabicas from, say, Ethiopia or Kenya, which require a gentler brewing process. In Wetherspoons, which sell 30m coffees a year, they are using Lavazza's Tierra – albeit freshly ground, but originally developed for espresso drinks – and knocking out refillable filter coffees for £1.15 a pop. Nonetheless, as with the return to prominence of filter at [insert your own swearword] Starbucks, or its use at Grillshack in London, the latest venture from restaurant mogul Richard Caring, it all adds up to a marked boost for this once-derided option.

Logically, this filter revival should come as no surprise. There was never anything fundamentally wrong with filter coffee. In Scandinavia and the US, particularly, it is served properly (regularly refreshed; made with freshly ground coffee) and remains popular. In Britain, however, it was one of many things we roundly abused. The unloved filter pot, meanly dosed with stale ground coffee and left to stew for hours in a pub or hotel conference suite, is one of our food and drink scene's (bad) running jokes.

Little wonder that, when those gleaming espresso machines began to arrive in Britain in large numbers, churning out sexy, continental lattes and cappuccinos, filter became something you would only drink under sufferance. But is that changing? Are we ready to abandon those frothy espresso-based coffees for what experts insist are the more sophisticated, grownup pleasures of well-made filter?

Personally, I'm a partial convert. A proper flat white is a wonderful thing, but I'm not a huge fan of big, milky coffees, and I've neither the money nor the inclination to spend big on a domestic espresso machine or a Nespresso capsule job. I do, however, have a hand-grinder and a couple of one-cup, pour-over ceramic filters – similar to this – which, using a bit of elbow grease (and around 16g of whole beans and 250ml of not-quite-boiling water), produces what, for me, is a damn fine cup of black coffee. It is less harshly bitter and more rounded than an espresso and much longer, obviously, yet fuller and brighter than a watery Americano.

Although, I should point out, a picky barista would tell you that I'm doing it all wrong. Call me a philistine, but I like a bit of backbone; a certain brute, dark, roasted coffee flavour in my cup. That, to me, is coffee; and consequently I use darker roasted beans. In contrast, in most specialist coffee shops, filter is mainly used to draw out complex and, at times, very subtle flavours from prized, lightly roasted blends and single-origin arabicas, which, to me, often taste like a different drink entirely. Kenyan beans, for instance, when served filter, are often described as having a sweet, light, citrussy quality, and one barista told me that I shouldn't really think of gourmet, filter-brewed coffees as coffee at all, but more like fine teas.

Really? Perhaps I'm an espresso man in a new filter age, but I can't see that happening. I want a coffee that ultimately tastes like coffee (as the serviceable filter at Wetherspoons does, at least). But what about you? Are you pleased that cheaper filter coffee is making a comeback? Have you graduated to drinking specialist, single-origin options? Or is your coffee break still all about pumpkin-spiced lattes and caramel macchiatos?