By Jostein Gaarder

Rs 729

Somewhere down the line, you may find yourself ensnared in the cynicism of Christmas. Consumerism, tacky bunting, holiday shopping hordes, tinny carols blasting in the mall, the Santa hats worn by the children begging at the signals like grim wordless taunts at the frippery of your merry-making. Regardless of your spiritual upbringing or your current system of belief, you are held prisoner of the season, enforced jollity and all.

The last year and some has been super interesting for me (and for you I hope). We’ve had kitchen successes and yuck-cesses, discoveries and disasters, managed classics and couture food. Despite having started out as a reasonably confident cook in the kitchen, the last few months have humbled

Jelly — ummm. It conjures up the 70’s and the 80’s, large, lurid, wibble-wobbles brought out in triumph and placed next to the package-made caramel custard on the table after dinner.

One of my first memories of eating choux pastry was when I was quite small and my parents had bought a cardboard box full of chocolate drizzled éclairs filled with the fluffiest whipped cream — a hint of vanilla, a whisper of sugar. It was an epiphany. This for me, was the most magnificent thing ever. Since

There was a Twitter joke doing the rounds recently that is an apt commentary on this book: Science needs to come up with a way to turn bad books back into trees. Formerly a racy, sensationalist blog with aspirations of “outing” the “double standards” of Fantastic Plastic Life Central, aka Dubai, Ameera Al Hakawati (not her real name) has committed to print, a story.

Fish lies precariously in our nutritional chain. Commercial fishing industries are now notorious for their non-sustainable practices. Farmed fish (like farmed meats and poultry) can be injected with growth hormones and antibiotics and your local fish-monger (if you live by the ocean) may be inadvertently selling you fish polluted by your own city’s sewage and effluents. Yet, fresh, untainted fish is fabulous for you and your children. It’s

Fish lies precariously in our nutritional chain. Commercial fishing industries are now notorious for their non-sustainable practices. Farmed fish (like farmed meats and poultry) can be injected with growth hormones and antibiotics and your local fish-monger (if you live by the ocean) may be inadvertently selling you fish polluted by your own city’s sewage and effluents. Yet, fresh, untainted fish is fabulous for you and your children. It’s

Even my mother, superlative in the kitchen, decades of judicious planning for family meals or catering generously for parties behind her, finds it hard to judge how much rice must be cooked.

No greater proof lies in the eating of any pudding as much as the humble, bumbling, bread and butter pudding. It doesn’t matter if you used real vanilla, threw a few golden sultanas in or dusted it with cinnamon. All that needed to be done was for you to butter some white bread, dust it with sugar, pile it into

Bringing home the bacon is one thing — knowing how to turn it into pasta carbonara is quite another.