Getting healthy with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, I may just have crush. On your food that is, and your philosophy, and your stunning new cookbook, River Cottage Light & Easy. I’ve heard a lot about you Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall, but I never endeavoured to get to know you. You were just some crazy-haired, outdoorsy, wellington-booted, wooly-jumpered, British farmer-chef with a cult-like following — which is not really my kind of thing. For my recipe fix I relied on chefs closer to my Sydney home, or proponents of the cuisines that I adore, such as Thai, Indian, and Mediterranean. That is until I decided to take an even healthier approach to what I’d always considered to be a relatively healthy, home-cooked diet. 

How to overthrow a head cold and eat right for your body type

Anjum Anand’s cold-busing curry (Photo: supplied)

When I was sent a recipe for the Ultimate Cold-busting Curry at the onset of Sydney’s wintertime, I didn’t expect to use it. I needed another curry recipe like a hole in the head and I usually escape winter without so much of sniff or a snuffle, even when friends and colleagues are crashing around me like flu-ridden flies.

But on the tail-end of winter came almost two weeks of persistent, and often torrential, rain. Somewhere in the middle of it a head cold moved into our house, uninvited. It latched on to one of us, then the other and has proved difficult to shake. So Anjum Anand’s Ayurveda-inspired cold-busing curry is getting a workout this weekend.

Quick and Easy Indian Cooking with Anjum Anand

The stars are aligning, and in a irresistibly Indian kind of way. Six months ago I was sent on a food-writing assignment to India with British chef and television personality Anjum Anand; a friend recently gifted me a ticket to an Indian film called The Lunchbox starring, you guessed it, Indian food; I’ve just been asked to review a batch of Sydney-based Indian restaurants; and Anjum’s Quick & Easy Indian recently landed on my desk for review. It’s a tough life, but I’m coping – one curry at a time.

Travels with Tessa Kiros

If like me you’ve coveted Tessa Kiros’ cookbooks for some time but have never bought one, for whatever reason – a moratorium on new cookbooks compounded by lack of shelf space, in my case – then this talented lady is one step ahead of you.

Kiros’ latest work, The Recipe Collection, is a celebration of her published works to date, including the poetically titled Falling Cloudberries, Apples for Jam, and Piri Piri Starfish.

This pretty, pink, floral hardback dips into myriad cuisines, including Italian, Greek, Portuguese and South African, from countries in which Kiros, of Finnish and Greek Cypriot heritage, has either traveled or lived.

It’s a lovely journey to be swept along on: so far i’ve traveled to Venice (spaghetti with tomato and scampi), South Africa (prawns with lemon, piri piri, garlic and feta), Portugal (roasted octopus in red wine with potatoes) and Finland (fish pie) – pretty much losing myself in the seafood chapter, as you can see.

Favourite food fiction

The Grass Harp by Truman Capote

I was one of those bookworm kind of kids who used to read into the night with a torch under the bed covers, completing entire books by 4am, them dreaming myself into them in for the last remaining hours of sleep. As my gastronomic interests flourished so too did my interest in food fiction. I now have a vast library of books that are thematically based on food: from novels, to memoirs, and manifestos that expose the ugly inner workings of factory farming, hierarchical restaurant kitchens, and multinational monopolies that have hijacked the world’s food basket for commercial gain. But it’s food fiction that gets me every time.