Gordon White

London life skills learnt the hard way. Also recipes for some reason.

Genoese Squid For People Who Never Cook Season

This recipe is Genoese-inspired, from Diana Henry’s life changing book, Food From Plenty. The dish is for people who -like me- actually really like seafood but never really cook it because they’re too chicken shit.

Radish And Olive Salad For A Confusing Detox

In between catching up with business partners, family and friends over the new year there are evenings at home spent crying into my XXXL muumuu about how much weight was gained over Christmas.

A Very European Union Of Sausages

Chorizo, for instance, goes with everything and appears fun and exciting and vivacious like a hot Spaniard you meet at sunset by the beach.

How To Do Burns Night At Home

Of course, if you are going to be racist and turn your nose up at the fine people of Scotland’s proud heritage then I am going to make you work for it. This Highland stew is much more hassle but will begrudgingly serve as a delicious replacement.

Seventies Party Food For People Who Weren’t Alive In The Seventies

Quite a number of this year’s food trends have a seventies feel to them… chopped liver, wines made of things other than grapes…

Rhubarb And Ginger Jam

Posted by Gordon White

Okay so this is so amazingly not in season.

But while I have the motivation to throw a bunch of recipes somewhere where I can find and remember them again I’m just going to get on with it.

Besides, it’ll be January before you know it and that wonderful forced rhubarb will be appearing on the fruit and vegetable stalls on Chiswick High Road and it will be jam time again! (Mental note: buy a new maslin pan as I completely destroyed the last one making a Scottish wildberry jam in August.)

This recipes is basically lifted completely from here…

More

Two Ways With Tomatoes

Posted by Gordon White

Told you I have been storing up crappy phone photos of food since the summer.

But maybe that’s convenient?

If you live in the same hemisphere as me then the first one -barely a recipe at all- is an awesome way of bringing some actual tomato taste back to the watery-yet-powdery monstrosities grown in hot houses in Holland and Surrey.

For those of you on the other side of the world… Boom! You’re in tomato season. Hit it!

1. Oven-roasted tomatoes

1. Slice some cherry or santini tomatoes and lay out in a single layer on a shallow oven …

More

Recipe: Occu-Pie (Get it?)

Posted by Gordon White

Just because there is going to be a lot of recipe posts in a row doesn’t mean we have to skimp on the biting social commentary.

This recipe is lifted from the aforementioned Veg Every Day cookbook which you should all buy.

I’m slightly annoyed that the book version of the recipe -allegedly created in response to a challenge to make something based only on what you can find in a corner store- is startlingly less sophisticated than the one he used to promote his book in the Guardian, especially as I have been experimenting with filo pastry quite …

More

On Not Taking My Own Blogging Advice

Posted by Gordon White

So at the moment I am remotely helping someone set up a food blog on the other side of the world.

This is something I can do with my eyes closed:

Assess market size and competitiveness.
Find a USP/branding position.
Understand which keywords to go after.
Create 20 pieces of high quality content that match these keywords.
Find and follow the alpha and beta bloggers in your space.
Launch.

Except as I am freely giving this strategy advice it occurs to me that I’m not really following it and I don’t care.

All this premature talk of the death of …

More

Post-Riot Mushrooms: A London Equation

Posted by Gordon White

The twenty first century is weird. Imbalance and opportunity don’t look like what they used to.

Times past… Antipodeans would come to the Eurozone to make money and then return home for the lifestyle.

A lifestyle that less often (but still not never) involves riots, right wing terrorism, millionaire-friends-of-the-prime-minister hacking into dead girls’ phones, Victorian levels of inequality and so on.

But I think that equation is now reversed.

If I returned to the southern hemisphere for a couple of years -and believe me the idea crosses my mind as the English summer “sunshine” trickles down my windowpane- I’d make, …

More

Grown Ups Macaroni: Recipe

Posted by Gordon White

It’s still raining gay houseguests around these parts. I’m going to miss them desperately when they go.

But not enough to devote huge amounts of time cooking them dinner, obviously.

After all the booze we have consumed over the last few… ever it was high time we consumed something starchy to soak up the three bottles of wine, pastis and gin we were drinking.

Enter grown-up’s macaroni!

This is really just a speedy combination of my bucatini con gorgonzola and the way-too-rich-for-gays-but-delicious-nonetheless Deliaroni. It’s sum is probably greater than it’s parts. The house-gays even asked for the recipe so …

More

5 Tips For Turning 30

Posted by Gordon White

Gordonmas coincided with International Smurf Day so we made cocktails out of smurfs. They got us totally smurfed, too.

It finally happened.

Despite the best efforts of goats’ cheese, the gypsies outside Gare du Nord, a rudderless Republican party and possibly you, I turned thirty on the weekend.

All in all I feel pretty good about it. In fact, when my father got up to drunkenly say some nice things about me which I immediately followed by drunkenly saying nice things about everyone else in the room we both agreed on something.

It’s just a number.

This is not how I saw it at the beginning of the year. But having sailed through relatively unscathed (except in terms of …

More

Spuntino Review: Why I Love London

Posted by Gordon White

My intention was to review Polpo first as we were there on the weekend after visiting Ai Wei Wei’s Somerset House exhibit.

And because in my head it makes sense to be vaguely chronological about these things.

But we were seeing a show in Soho on Tuesday and we ended up at Spuntino beforehand so here we are. It’s too good not to get out there right away.

For us as least, Chinatown is a more traditional pre-theatre destination. However, my last meeting of the day had finished early so I had an hour to kill before James arrived. …