food by sole

7th February 2022

Chinese New Year at home (the reprise)

Home made Chinese New Year feast: chorizo dumplings, turnip cake, kale, rice

As the actual Chinese New Year fell on a Tuesday, we first celebrated ahead of time: the Friday before. Too tired to cook, too tired to go to the restaurant (and there were probably no tables available anyway), we caved in and had food from Duck & Rice delivered home. Once a year!

But this week-end Devvers was possessed by the spirit of the New Year and spent most of the week-end cooking a turnip cake… amongst other things, but this is what took the longest.

4th February 2022

Restaurante Navarro

Each time someone wants to visit Valencia and asks us where to eat a good paella, we’re at a loss, because obviously there’s no place like home to eat paella!

But we’re determined to give people the answer to their question, and we’ve decided we’ll try out restaurants to establish where to eat the best paella in Valencia.

Restaurante Navarro is one of the first ones that popped up in our research. It’s very central, very close to the town hall square, so it’s an obvious choice if you’re doing touristy things.

2nd February 2022

First attempt at making Altamura bread: I made a rock

As I mentioned, I have a stash of Italian flours at home and I’m attempting to make breads in different Italian styles. There’s more than pizza, ciabatta and focaccia!

My first attempt was to make a bread in the style of the pane di Altamura. But I was too impatient and didn’t wait until my semi-dormant starter was sufficiently lively again, so I made a nice looking rustic rock. It smells amazing, but it didn’t rise a lot, so it’s quite compact inside (it can be eaten in thin slices, haha!)

A look inside the Altamura bread: it is too dense

That said I got to practice handling the dough and folding it, so there will be less new concepts to learn at once the next time I attempt making this.

31st January 2022

Endo at the Rotunda

We last went to Japan in 2019. And I don’t think I need to tell you what happened next! Either way, we do really miss the country and the Japanese hospitality.

Thankfully, we can get a piece of it in London: Endo Katuzoshi’s restaurant Endo at the Rotunda in White City blurs the line between reality and illusion.

Is he a chef? Is he a magician? Maybe both at once!

28th January 2022

Scone spam

Anyone who runs a website which allows comments to be posted will be familiar with the neverending stream of spam comments.

They are easy for a human to spot, mostly because they normally talk about things that have nothing to do with your post or site at all. Often they’re nothing more than a collection of random words and then some links to pornographic, drugs, scams or other similarly illicit websites (or try to install malware in your computer). And typically the comment’s author name and email address are a collection of random letters too (or they have numbers on it).

So, it does look like something a bot created. The automated crap can be sensed from a long distance.

The problem is that there are SO MANY comments. It is just so time consuming to remove them. Fortunately there exist solutions such as Akismet that help you automatically filter the trash out.

But sometimes legitimate comments end up marked as spam. So I have a look at the spam comments from time to time to make sure the good comments aren’t lost forever, as the spam gets automatically deleted after a number of days—otherwise the database would eventually explode with rubbish.

Today I just did that, but this time I spotted something unusual: spam which talked about scones, in my Skulls & bones (or scones & scones) post.

Now that is interesting! Spam about baking! How thoughtful!