Courgette, Corn, and Tomato Sautee

Fresh corn looses its sweet flavour soon after harvesting. I read (in The Vegetable Bible) that corn is past its best only a few hours after it is picked. I guess this explains why frozen corn often tastes so good. It is frozen immediately after harvest, thus preserving both nutrition and taste.

Cauliflower Gratin

Roasted cauliflower is just so deep, delicious, and nutty. If you grew up with wet, limp, boiled cualiflower, then roasting cauliflower will feel like a whole new vegetable. And to make it even more revelatory, add some caramelised onion, cream, and Gruyere cheese for a gorgeous cauliflower gratin.

This is a recipe from a magazine which said to mix store-bought caramelised onion relish with cauliflower florets, then top it with a mixture of cream and cheese. Since I couldn't find any store-bought relish, so I just made some caramelised onions the day before I wanted to make the gratin.

Seaweed, Ginger, and Carrot Salad

After a recent knee injury, I have started taking swimming lessons. Until last October, I was a keen long-distance runner. Then I had quite a bad injury that put me on crutches for eight weeks. (I wrote about my first social outing with crutches here.) I'm still not able to run, though I have managed to cycle three times in the last few months.

On my physiotherapist's advice, I needed to take up a sport that has a lower impact on my knees. I never learned to swim as a child, so I have just started a series of lessons.

Breakfast Parfait with Grain-Free Muesli

Let’s talk about your first name. Do you like it? Have you ever fantasized about changing it? My parents have often told me that they couldn't agree on my first name. My mother wanted to call me Juliana and my dad wanted Elizabeth. In the end they called me Sarah.

Sometimes I have imagined myself with Juliana or Elizabeth as my name. I think as Juliana I might be more of a romantic--it has a fairy tale ring to it. Elizabeth, meanwhile, sounds regal. I think it might fit with my slightly stoic personality. I would never have been a Lizzie, though, that seems too casual for my sincere side.

Tandoori Chicken Wraps

Think about the sensory perception involved in eating tandoori chicken wraps. You smell the spices and the ripe tomatoes. You can see the many colours and the steam coming off the chicken. You hear the lettuce rustling when you put your fingers in for a handful. And you feel the filling inside the flexible wrap when you're eating it. You taste the many flavours one at a time as you munch your dinner.

Easy Grain-Free Blueberry Muffins

I have noticed that the food I make myself just seems to taste better. I know this is a very selfish thing to say. In fact, this kind of selfishness is quite common. We humans overvalue the things we make for ourselves. For example, that Ikea furniture that we put together. It's not the greatest furniture ever but assembling it adds to its value for us.

I was reading about this in Dan Ariely's book The Upside of Irrationality. "Pride of creation and ownership runs deep in human beings." Ariely says that creating food is a good example of this. Even semi-homemade items taste better to us: steps such as adding some herbs to a bottled pasta sauce, mixing curry paste with chicken pieces, or adding eggs to a cake mix. These at-home adjustments give us a feeling of agency over our food, and hence the food tastes better to us.

But often homemade really does taste better, right? It's not just psychology that fresh from the oven muffins taste better than store bought. Adding fresh chopped parsley to a bottled sauce does, indeed, make it taste more fresh. (Although there is a line beyond which I don't think this is true; adding eggs to a cake mix may not actually taste better than a not-at-all homemade factory cake.)

Extra Virginity by Tom Mueller [book review]

This month's Kitchen Reader book was Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil by Tom Mueller (chosen by Amanda of Omar Niode Foundation).

This is a wide-ranging book, both in place and time. Olive oil has been in use since ancient times as a food; over time it has also been used as a fuel for lighting, a perfume, cosmetic, for religious annointing, as a fabric softener, contraceptive, detergent, preservative, pesticide, medicine, and machine lubricant.

Featured in the book is an olive oil producing family who run Castillo de Canena in Spain. (I have discovered an importer of theirs in Singapore: Delicia, so I plan to try their oils soon.) The brother and sister team come from a family that has been making oil since 1780 and they currently have 280000 trees. They make a low-grade bulk oil, which accounts for 95% of their production, and a line of high-quality extra virgin oil that already (as of 2013) accounts for a quarter of their profits. Their joy is in bringing out the best flavours in their premium oils by experimenting with irrigation, harvesting, and making small batches.