Food news antipasto

Michelin recently announced which restaurants would receive its coveted stars in the UK. One of those is London’s Chishuru, whose founder and chef Adejoké Bakare is the first black female chef to receive a star in the country. Bakare started Chishuru, which focuses on West African cuisine, first as a pop-up after winning a competition in Brixton. The chef said her achievement felt “quite surreal”. 

Do you have a Stanley cup? Sometimes it seems like I’m the only one who doesn’t and I didn’t understand the allure until I read Kiki Arinita’s take on the Stanley cup obsession that has struck the land. Arinita points out that cups figure prominently in many cultures throughout history, and that people love collecting things as much as they love cups, so the craze might not be as strange as it seems. Recent reports that there might be lead in the Stanley cups caused a stir, but it seems that the lead is only in the base and not in the part that holds the beverages, so fans can breathe a sigh of relief.

As long as we are discussing cups, we might as well talk about mugs. Soup mugs, to be specific. Eater’s Sarah Baird thinks we should all have a soup mug because soup is too special to be relegated to the same bowls that we use for cereal, but also too comfy to be confined to shallow bowls that feel prim and proper. Since soup is pegged to be one of the “it” foods of 2024, Baird encourages us to find a soup mug pronto, noting that there are a lot of retro mugs lurking on eBay, Etsy, and similar places. Maybe it’s time to dig the set of mugs out of the back of my china hutch.

This week we learned that Bob Moore, co-founder of Bob’s Red Mill, passed away at the age of 94. Founded in 1978, Bob’s Red Mill grew from a small company offering organic and uncommon cereals, grains, and beans into a global corporation. In 2010, Bob and his wife and co-founder Charlee, set up a plan to transfer ownership of the company to its 700 employees. Bob’s Red Mill CEO Trey Winthrop wrote this remembrance: “He did everything in his power to leave us on a strong path forward. All of us feel responsible and motivated to preserve his old-world approach to unprocessed foods; his commitment to pure, high-quality ingredients; and his generosity to employee owners and educational organizations focused on nutritional health.”

Do you know the differences between basmati rice and jasmine rice? If not, head over to Simply Recipes to learn from chefs, cookbook authors, and rice growers about how these products differ and which one is right for which dishes. The TL;DR is that jasmine rice is softer and stickier than basmati, although the article includes a lot more detail including some of the science that explains why these two long grain rice varieties cook up so differently.

Our final item for the week concerns a product that almost every household has on hand: vinegar. If you cook a lot you probably have more than one kind on hand (I counted seven types in my pantry), so some of them might sit around for some time. Since vinegar is used to preserve food, you might wonder if it ever goes bad – and if it does, how can you tell? On the Epicurious site, Michael Harlan Turkell explains than even though its acidic properties keep it from spoiling quickly, vinegar can deteriorate over time.