Best way to eat a chocolate digestive | Brief letters

Anthony Coulson from McVitie’s is missing a trick (Taking the biscuit: for 100 years we’ve been eating chocolate digestives wrong, 24 April). My wife’s family introduced me to the proper way to eat chocolate digestives – in pairs, chocolate to the middle. I have enjoyed them this way for more than 50 years.Henry ClayPetersfield, Hampshire Despite the advice about eating chocolate digestives chocolate side down, I shall continue to eat them with the chocolate side up. It’s easier to keep chocolate from sticking to the fingers

Rukmini Iyer’s quick and easy recipe for asparagus, pea and lemon orzotto | Quick and easy

This dish manages to be simultaneously spring-like and comforting, thanks to the intense flavour from the pea pesto. Telling you to stir whole peas through orzo feels a bit too much like nursery food, but if you are serving this to small children who are amenable to pesto pasta (mine are not), I’d suggest finely blitzing the pumpkin seeds before adding them to the pesto, because they’re quite large pieces otherwise. Top with seasonal asparagus and this is the perfect dinner to eat outdoors on a warm spring evening.Prep 15 min Cook 15 min Serves 2Sea salt flakes 180g orzo 200g asparagus50ml olive oil, plus 1 tbsp extra for the asparagus180g podded fresh peas, or frozen peas50g pumpkin seeds 50g parmesan, grated (a vegetarian one, if need be)Juice of ½ lemonBring a large pan of well-salted water to a boil, then tip in the orzo and cook for eight minutes, or until cooked through but still a bit al dente. Drain well, and reserve a mugful of the cooking water

How to make aloo gobi – recipe | Felicity Cloake's Masterclass

Basic but beautiful, and very easy, it’s well worth adding this classic Indian vegetable curry to your regular repertoireDescribed by chef Vivek Singh as “the most common and basic vegetable curry you will find anywhere in India”, aloo gobi (the name means potato cauliflower in Hindi) makes a great vegetable side dish, but it’s also full-flavoured enough to pair with plain rice or flatbreads for a very satisfying (and incidentally vegan) main meal.Prep 20 min Cook 1 hr Serves 4350g waxy potatoes 1 red or yellow onion 1 medium cauliflower 20g fresh root ginger, or 1 tbsp grated ginger4 garlic cloves 400g tin plum tomatoes, or 5 fresh plum or medium tomatoes and 1 tbsp tomato puree2 tsp coriander seeds 4 tbsp neutral oil 1 tsp cumin seeds ½ tsp nigella seeds ½-1 tsp mild chilli powder ½ tsp turmeric 1-4 green finger chillies 1 tsp salt 1 tbsp methi (dried fenugreek leaves)1 tsp garam masala Juice of ½ lime 1 small bunch fresh corianderChop the potatoes (common waxy varieties, often sold as salad potatoes in the UK, include charlotte, nicola, anya and jersey royals) into roughly 2½cm dice; there’s no need to peel them, but if they’re a bit dirty, give them a good scrub first.Peel and finely slice the onion (I like the sweetness of red in this dish, but brown will work fine, too).Cut any leaves off the cauliflower, saving those that are in good shape to add to the dish later (or use them in a soup or stir-fry, if you prefer).Trim off and discard the base of the stalk, divide the top into bite-sized florets and cut the remaining stalk into chunks about the same size as the potatoes

Meghan made one-pot pasta a trend – but is it any good? Seven all-in-one recipes tested

The duchess’s skillet spaghetti outraged purists, but there’s no shortage of single-pot pasta dishes to try. Here are some that make the grade, and others that most certainly don’tSadly, we cannot return to a more innocent age before the first episode of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s Netflix cookery show, with its recipe for one-pan pasta. This was a time when typing the words “skillet spaghetti controversy” into Google produced no significant matches. Now those three words are inextricably linked.To recap: Meghan piled uncooked spaghetti and other raw ingredients into a shallow pan, poured boiling water from a kettle over them and cooked them with a lid on

The Lavery, London SW7: ‘One of London’s loveliest new places to eat’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants

One of the main challenges of writing a weekly restaurant column is finding new ways (and at least 11 times a year) to describe the experience of eating Mediterranean small plates in a room painted in Little Greene’s Silent White. Other food – and, indeed, paint colours – are available, but in recent years, whenever you cast an eye over some hot, hip new place, you need to brace yourself for polenta, coco beans, galettes and neutral furnishing. The Lavery, just opposite the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, is by no small margin the new emperor of this style of cooking and decor, with a former River Cafe, Petersham Nurseries and Toklas chef, Yohei Furuhashi, serving up gnocchi with fresh peas on the upper floors of a dreamily restored, Grade II-listed Georgian townhouse.The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link

Preserving English eccentricity: 20 years of the World Marmalade Awards

What could unite octogenarian Cumbrian farmers, diplomats from Japan, Spain and Australia, and Paddington Bear?The answer, of course, is marmalade. Or, more specifically, the World Marmalade Awards.With a flock of spray-painted orange sheep, a giant red squirrel and Paddington wandering among the marmalade aficionados (many of whom are also dressed in orange), and a choir of schoolchildren performing a specially commissioned marmalade song, the event held at Dalemain Mansion near Penrith is something of a showcase of English eccentricity.The event’s founder, Jane Hasell-McCosh, set up the awards in 2005, “mainly because we’d had foot and mouth and the whole county had really suffered from it”, she said, and also because “I love marmalade and I was trying to think of a way of getting people to come to Cumbria”.It began as a local competition, with Hasell-McCosh, who lives in Dalemain, convincing people to hand over jars of their marmalade