Gordon White

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

Recipe: Tarte De Pâques

Don’t let my extreme cultural insensitivity stop you. This is delicious served warm/room temperature and finished off with a nice glass of vin santo.

Consider this the Total Recall look. (Think about it.)

That’s A Whole Quarter Of A Year??

Blogs are like children. You do actually have a favourite one. And this is my recessive ginger blog.

Google's inaugural Think Publisher event last week

Butternut Curry For Dinner So You Can Have A Nice Lunch For Once

I ate this cold straight from the fridge but then I am as urbane and sophisticated as a NASCAR pit man.

It really does not feel like four months since I cooked this. Hope the rest of those lentils are okay.

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.

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 …

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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 …

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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. …

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Review: Capote Y Toros

Posted by Gordon White

See my review on Qype.

Sherry is very much my drink at the moment so a visit to the latest addition to the Cambio De Tercio family -a ham and sherry bar- was greeted with considerable interest.

Bonus points for being close to home, too!

When I say that sherry is my drink what that means is that I am slowly, ignorantly working my way up from the driest fino to the more interesting and challenging varieties one sunny weekend at a time.

If this journey was available in book form it would look like the wine list at …

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Bank Holiday Fritatta

Posted by Gordon White

Yep. I made it.

As per the last post, one of the suggestions for a shut-in Bank Holiday in London was fritatta making.

There were a couple of minor differences to the base recipe:

I used 3 shallots rather than one large onion. Shallots are sweeter. I thought they’d be a better match for the ricotta and the tomatoes.

This turned out to be one of my more awesome weekend decisions.

We threw in a few torn sage leaves left over from last night’s risotto al limone.

But otherwise it’s basically the same. This makes enough for four people …

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10 Bank Holiday Suggestions For London Shut-Ins

Posted by Gordon White

Of course I’m doing this by choice. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact I am too disorganised (lonely?) to have booked in an awesome adventure.

And, in fact now that it comes to it, I want to be antisocial this weekend. I want to commute no further than my TV room and/or closest shop. So there.

Feeling the same way? Laid low by your final month of pregnancy? Scared of crowds?

Let Gordon provide the menu to -well not awesomeness per se- but how about slightly-less-shitness?

Annotate your cookbooks. I use those little post-it flags. Then

…

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Baked Onion Tagliatelle: Stolen Recipe Ideas

Posted by Gordon White

Last weekend was a fun day for the three remaining people in Britain who read newspapers in printed form. I am 33% of them. It was the ten year anniversary of Observer Food Monthly.

There is no city on earth that is better served by newsprint than London. It’s a dream.

As mentioned to Tan, the first thing I was going to cook was Nigel Slater’s baked onions. And I meant it.

Saturday night rolled around. Baked onions on their own seemed a kinda weird thing to eat as a main so I threw some tagliatelle …

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Find The Bright Side Of The Apocalypse

Posted by Gordon White

In the last post we saw how you can spot an apocalypse with food trends.

Which is all well and good, but not everything to do with the apocalypse is strictly bad. Example, as previously mentioned, Pimm’s is popular again.

Plus, no one is quite sure what Doomsday will look like in London but here are some popular guesses. (You never know, it might be fun.)

Also the love of the monstrous is widely popular once again. Something that warms the steampunk/Orcish/Lovecraftian/Sauropod cockles of this freakshow heart.

(Sidebar: I liked that interview so much that I …