Lebkuchen (German spiced honey biscuits) are a seasonal favourite for us in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and these homemade ones didn’t disappoint. In Spice: A Cook’s Companion he provides advice on how to source and blend spices well, and how to make the best of them in your kitchen. The recipes build on bringing your spices alive – whether that’s creating blends to easily enhance your food when short of time on a weekday evening, or in infusing and blooming spices to bring out the very best of these treasured ingredients. With a few (such as harissa) there are specific instructions on how to make the recipe; for the rest Mark provides basic instructions and advice in the chapter introduction. The caraway was such a revelation in Basan’s dish that we were immediately drawn to Mark’s Bacon and Caraway Tart as the first recipe to make from Spice.

Spice: A Cook’s Companion by Mark Diacono Kavey Eats » Spice: A Cook’s Companion by Mark Diacono

Mark Diacono… has such a friendly, self-deprecating and comfortable voice you want to follow him into the kitchen. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. I love Mark’s note in his Introduction that “ the brilliance of spices [is that] they are – like music, painting and poetry – almost entirely unnecessary and yet utterly essential. In terms of equipment, he recommends an electric spice grinder over a mortar and pestle for most recipes (though not all). The recipes Mark includes are not only appealing to eat, but also provide plenty of inspiration for using spices more creatively in the kitchen.Mark Diacono is lucky enough to spend most of his time eating, growing, writing and talking about food.

Spice: Recipes and Techniques to Transform Your Mastering Spice: Recipes and Techniques to Transform Your

Spice is a vibrant exploration of flavour, fragrance and heat that majors on the kitchen, with a celebration of over 50 spices that will fill your kitchen with a wealth of heady aromas and tastes.For each spice Mark gives an introduction, a guide to using it, which spice blends it features in, and a list of ingredients that the spice has an affinity with. I’ve come across references and recipes featuring achiote (aka annato), anise seeds (not the same thing as star anise), cinnamon berries, grains of paradise, kokum, tonka beans, and wattleseed before but never cooked with them.