Food news antipasto

We begin this week’s recap with sad news: influential chef Mark Peel has died at the age of 66 just days after being diagnosed with cancer. Peel worked at various restaurants including Wolfgang Puck’s Spago. Along with his wife at the time Nancy Silverton, Peel opened the famed restaurant Campanile, which won a James Beard Foundation Award in 2001. Campanile set the stage for the rise of the farm-to-table restaurant concept. Peel also competed in Top Chef Masters and was a guest judge on Top Chef.

Just yesterday I posted about making simpler foods like sheet pan dinners. It was as if Twitter were reading my mind, because what do I spy in today’s feed? Not one, but two posts on sheet pan meals. The first comes from BBC Food and offers twenty different traybake recipes. This was followed by a tweet from Nigella Lawson, one of my favorite authors, sharing her recipe for Spanish chicken with chorizo and potatoes. The photo above is antoher Nigella recipe, Chicken and pea traybake from At My Table. Next week’s dinners are set.

Tiktok is changing the food landscape with its viral videos and hacks. Not all hacks are created equal, however, and some do not live up to their hype. I am still perplexed by the one where spaghetti and meatballs are served on a countertop (please tell me that is a parody). If you are not sure about which Tiktok recipes or hacks to make, head over to The Evening Standard. They share five Tiktok hacks that are actually worth the effort (free registration may be required).

We all make mistakes when cooking, and hopefully we learn from them to become better at making meals and baking treats. Sometimes mistakes are made even before we step foot in the kitchen, says Good Food’s Adam Liaw. He tells us about six common cooking mistakes that actually have nothing to do with cooking. I know I am guilty of one of these: shopping indiscriminately, without a plan.

Making cheese at home can be intimidating for even the most intrepid cooks. Some soft cheeses like ricotta are approachable, but gathering all of the ingredients and following the complicated process to produce hard cheese can be a real challenge, which is why this next story is so impressive. California teenager Avery Jones not only made cheese at a young age, she made award-winning cheese, placing third in Best of Show in the American Cheese Society’s 2019 competition – when she was just fifteen years old. Her sheep’s milk cheese bested more than 1,700 other entries.