Here are some horrifying delights, whether you most fancy monster feet or zombie brains. I will never understand why pumpkins have the monopoly on Halloween , as they have for two or three decades. People used to make lanterns from turnips, or swedes, but pumpkins are just easier to carve even if there is nothing remotely scary about them, just as there is nothing melancholy about a cabbage or spellbinding about kohlrabi. So, in the spirit of advocating a pumpkin-free Halloween, here are 10 spooky recipes, all mercifully created without the tyranny of Big Pumpkin. Eight years ago, student food blogger Melody Moxham created a three-course Halloween vegetarian meal, and while I have to discount her main dish for succumbing to the lure of the pumpkin, her starter is pretty great. The end of October might be a bit chilly for gazpacho but, if we have another freakishly warm spike, this deserves room in your repertoire. Only a maniac would do that. In , he was tasked with creating a Halloween dish, and came up with chicken with black-eyed beans. Honeycomb is famously tricky to make, but stick with it and you will end up with cute little triangles that you can dip in chocolate and decorate with flaked almond toenails.
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Zombie brain
In a move beyond parody, this week has seen domestic goddess Nigella Lawson repeatedly explain that she knows how to say the word microwave. The quickest way to stop people laughing is to explain the joke, to foolishly transport them from mid-wit laughter to thoughtful self-reflection and biting psychology. My feed is back-to-back tweets that deconstruct humor, with killjoys and pedants immediately grounding any momentary flights away from terrible world news. After my eyes rolled so far back into my head I could see the nape of my neck—because I truly believe that an adult woman who has her own decades-long career in gastronomy knows the correct way to say microwave —I tried to see what the issue was. I think the silly, affected pronunciation stems from our archaic British stuffiness, a hangover from being world leaders in trifling, pompous, self-important ceremony, much like every episode of The Crown. We can easily send it up in a sort of vaudeville act as unsmiling Victorians whose sense of self pivots on precise etiquette. The deliberate mispronunciation is a sort of inversion of centuries of privilege and the naughtiness of a convenient microwave.
Beetroot batwing soup
Excuse the name-dropping, but Nigella and I are on first-name terms, after all. She has shared with me the secrets of her favourite family recipes. Her husband, Charles Saatchi, is pictured placing his hands around her neck outside a Mayfair restaurant and she is later seen with tears streaming down her face. They call her "the queen of food porn". It's a reductive phrase given her wide appeal, but it does capture the essence of the transaction with her audience. If so, the scales must have fallen from their eyes when a newspaper story exposed the not-particularly-shocking Nigella Express practices of featuring hired extras and filming some scenes in a studio kitchen. Perhaps this story will at least inspire some first-person accounts of domestic violence to supply the insight and context that the pictures lack. This is not to excuse Saatchi of the offence for which he has been cautioned.
During the Dec. Lawson subsequently clarified what was obvious to some viewers, but not to others: She was only joking. In December , internet users — many of them several months into protracted and intermittent COVID lockdowns — reacted with a mixture of delight, amusement, and genuine confusion, when popular English television chef and food writer Nigella Lawson appeared to wildly mispronounce the word for a thoroughly commonplace kitchen appliance — the microwave. Eternally grateful to Nigella Lawson for letting us know we've all been mispronouncing microwave for the last 50 or so years. The footage was authentic, and was not dubbed over or digitally altered. Lawson, who is a household name in the U. Fact Checks. In a December television episode, Nigella Lawson wildly mispronounced the word "microwave. Mixture About this rating.