How to turn pastry scraps into a quick and tasty caramelised onion tart – recipe | Waste not

This is my quick version of pissaladière, and it transforms a small amount of leftover pastry scraps into a spontaneous treat. Keep and combine any trimmings into a ball and re-roll as and when required. Pastry keeps well in the freezer, and by skipping two time-consuming steps in the traditional recipe – that is, making the pastry and caramelising the onions – this one comes together about an hour faster. Instead, the onions are cooked upside down, steaming and caramelising beneath a blanket of pastry with anchovies and black olives for a fast, fun twist on a French classic. And if you have less pastry, you can always halve the recipe

Australian supermarket chocolate ice-cream taste test: ‘My scorecard read simply: “I’m going to buy it”’

Sweet memory lane or boulevard of broken creams? Nicholas Jordan and friends sample 23 tubs in search of nostalgia, glee and chocolate excessIf you value our independent journalism, we hope you’ll consider supporting us todayGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailI grew up in a house barren of treats – there was no regular supply of chocolate, snakes, sour lollies or caramels. There was one exception: ice-cream, and I was mostly free to eat it whenever I wanted. That constant, childhood joy was the start of a storied love affair. Later, when I had money to buy my lunch in high school, I would get a one-litre tub, a pair of spoons, and my friend and I would eat the entire thing and nothing else. Sometimes, if we were particularly greedy, we’d split a two-litre tub

Sweet dreams? Healthy ways to put pudding back on the menu | Kitchen aide

I eat healthily, but my meals are never really complete without pudding. Yoghurt and stewed fruit aside, do you have any suggestions for what will hit the spot without verging too far into the unhealthy? Wendy, by emailThe truth is, you can’t often have your cake and eat it – or not a big piece, anyway. “My main piece of advice, which maybe isn’t all that welcome, is to keep to small portions,” says Brian Levy, author of Good & Sweet, in which his recipes contain no added sugar. “My grandma would keep mini chocolate bars and have just one, but that’s never really worked for me.”’Tis the season for stewed fruit, but have you tried Melissa Hemsley’s banana slices sandwiched together with peanut butter, half-dipped in melted chocolate and put in the freezer? (FYI the same tactic also works like a dream with dates

José Pizarro’s recipe for pumpkin and spinach with pimenton

I grew up with the taste of pimentón de la vera, the smoky, fiery spice Spain embraced from the New World and made its own. Pimentón gives our food its soul. One of the dishes everyone loves back home is espinacas con garbanzos (spinach and chickpeas), which is it’s simple, nourishing and full of comfort. At this time of year, however, when the markets are overflowing with sweet pumpkins, I love adding them to the mix, too. Their gentle, autumnal sweetness lifts the spinach and chickpeas beautifully, and they combine to create a dish that we’ve been serving all month at my restaurant Lolo in south-east London

The £1 oyster: cut-price shellfish is all the rage – but is eating it advisable?

Name: Oysters.Age: Triassic – so about 250m years old.Appearance: Grey and snotty.Oysters, eh? What pearls of wisdom (see what I did there) do you have for me on the noxious bivalve? You’re not a fan, then?Absolutely not. What desperation drove early humans to think, “Time to smash open this forbidding, rock-like blob and eat whatever godforsaken, gelatinous mess it disgorges”? Well, younger diners don’t agree – they’ve gone mad for oysters

Double, heavy, pure cream? Helen Goh’s guide to baking across borders – plus a finger bun recipe

When Sweet, the baking book I co-authored with Yotam Ottolenghi, came out in the United States in 2017, my excitement at seeing so many people bake from it was matched only by my horror at what I saw them pulling from their ovens on Instagram: pale cakes with thick, dark exteriors.Posts from Australian and British readers showed no alarming results and I quickly realised something had gone awry in the American translation. As it turned out, the recipes had been converted in-house by the publisher, using a straightforward formula to change celsius to fahrenheit. What no one had noticed was that the conversion also needed to take into account the oven setting: fan-forced versus conventional heat. Many American ovens, it seems, still don’t have a fan function