Crispy Dreams and Cotton Candy: why are there so many new kinds of grape?

When I first tried a Cotton Candy™ grape, I did a double take. Did someone swap out my fruit for fairy floss? The burst of sugary sweetness was so unexpected, it felt like I should have been picking at it from a stick, not plucking it from a bunch. This wasn’t nature playing tricks – it was the result of careful breeding.A steady stream of new grape varieties are popping up in Australian supermarkets and green grocers. “More than 15 new varieties have been available in Melbourne markets this season alone,” says Thanh Truong, Fruit Nerd and author of Don’t Buy Fruit and Veg Without Me

Rukmini Iyer’s quick and easy recipe for spiced carrot soup with fennel, chilli and crab | Quick and easy

This is the perfect transitional soup. I often make it without the crab, because it’s economical enough that you could have it on a weeknight with enough left over for lunchboxes the next day. But if you’re having friends over, or just fancy a treat, the flavour of the soup works beautifully with the crab – you could even use tinned crab, too.If you’re cooking for one or two, the soup base will keep for up to two days in the fridge, or freeze it in portions. Add more stock when reheating, because the soup thickens in the fridge

Rachel Roddy’s recipe for sausages with braised chicory | A kitchen in Rome

From Tuesday to Saturday, Andrea Legri makes approximately three kilos of sausage a day for his stall on Testaccio market. At about nine on any given morning, he may well be in the back section of the stall, which is visible through glass, his hands steadying the tabletop machine that feeds the minced pork into opaque casings. If ordered in advance, Andrea will also prepare sausages al punto di coltello (point of the knife) – that is, the meat cut by hand, which, paradoxically, manhandles it less and makes a colossal difference, producing a juicier, chewier sausage. One customer, who has been a regular for decades and with whom I am on dog-walking-nodding terms, quite regularly orders 3kg of hand-cut sausages for his family.Andrea is a third-generation butcher: his grandfather took on the stall in the late 1950s, when Testaccio was still a slaughterhouse district, and passed it on to his son, Franco, who was later assisted by his own son, Alessandro, Andrea’s brother

Notes on chocolate: more Easter eggs, because these are quite special

Sometimes you just want to splash out on something a little more luxuriousI really think this has to be my last column on Easter eggs, don’t you? One egg had sat on my sideboard for a few weeks. I didn’t hold out much hope for it, but it was wolfed down in two sittings (not just by me) with a strong recommend from my testers to ‘write how good it is’, so here you go: Coco Chemistry’s Large Milk Honeycomb Crunch egg, £25. (A dark chocolate version is also available.) This is not a craft-chocolate egg by any stretch, but maybe that’s not what people need all the time.Melt has two cute eggs, one is just milk and in very simple packaging with a cardboard bunny cut out

Wines you’ll really want to Swig

Inclusive, inventive and imaginative… The online wine specialist Swig packs a might punchDomaine Gamiller Priune, Côtes du Rhône, France 2023 (£18.95, swig.co.uk) What do you look for in a wine merchant? Inclusiveness would be high on my list, by which I mean no snobby condescension or arch comments if you betray that you don’t know your chardonnay from your chablis (or, indeed, that you don’t know that chablis is always made from chardonnay in the eponymous part of northern Burgundy). Enthusiasm, a feeling that your merchant really loves what they sell and wants nothing more than to share it and find the right bottle for you, is another welcome quality, as too is a sense that prices are fair – if not “never knowingly undersold” at least not “always furtively oversold”

Shiki, Norwich: ‘Unexpectedly reasonable’ – restaurant review

A pre-match lunch with my father at a Japanese restaurant is in a league of its ownShiki, 6 Tombland, Norwich NR3 1HE (01603 619262). Sushi and sashimi from £2 per piece, small dishes from £3, larger dishes from £10, beer from £3.50, sake from £6.50We only get to truly value excellence by experiencing what it is to fall short. In politics