Craft beer has gone stale: let’s hear it for age-old favourites | Richard Godwin

The writer Vladimir Nabokov was extremely particular when it came to language, and rather more basic when it came to sustenance: “My habits are simple, my tastes banal,” he once told an interviewer. “I would not exchange my favourite fare (bacon and eggs, beer) for the most misspelt menu in the world.”I’ve often thought of this as I’ve perused misspelt beer menus over the years, wondering what Nabokov would make of all the hazy dubble IPAs and triple brown mocha porters, because, over the course of what we might have to label the “craft era”, beer has become anything but simple. You may well have lamented this, too, especially if you’ve ever been cornered by an enthusiast at a party. India pale ale (IPA), for example, which was once a distinctly British style of ale designed for export, has, in the hands of American craft brewers, become a sort of standard-bearer for complicated beer: aggressively hopped, often startlingly bitter and/or sour, and redolent of a bygone era of millennial hipster striving

What a ​four-​year-​old ​taught ​us ​about the ​magic of ​baking​ a chocolate ​cake

Valentine’s is on the horizon, which means we are about to officially enter chocolate cake season – that soft-focus part of winter when confectionery and romance blur together. For our four-year-old goddaughter, it is always that time of year. Just hearing the two words together makes her roll her eyes and roll out her little tongue in anticipation of pleasure, like a cartoon kid. When we told her we would come and bake a chocolate cake with her, there were squeals of joy.Settling on a recipe was the first challenge – Ravneet Gill’s fudgy one, Felicity Cloake’s perfect one and Benjamina Ebuehi’s traybaked one were all contenders

Rachel Roddy’s recipe for pork ragu with herbs (for gnocchi or pasta) | A kitchen in Rome

It’s 10.30am and steam carrying the smell of onions, beans, cabbage and braised meat escapes from the kitchen in the corner of box 37 on Testaccio market. In the small kitchen is Leonardo Cioni, a tall chef from San Giovanni Valdarno, midway between Florence and Arezzo, who, for the past three-and-a-half years, has run box 37 as Sicché Roba Toscana, which roughly translates as “therefore Tuscan stuff”. The escaping steam is effective advertising, leading eyes to the blackboard above the counter to discover exactly what is going on in the back.Always on the menu is lampredotto

Rich plums and ripe tomatoes: Australia’s best-value fruit and veg for February

Tomatoes ripe for cooking, cheap watermelon and cucumbers for $2 a piece – but it’s the final call for apricots, cherries and mangoesGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailJuicy watermelon, deep-purple plums and ripe roma tomatoes are some of the vibrant fruit and veg highlights this month, says Graham Gee, senior buyer at the Happy Apple in Melbourne.“Tomatoes are plentiful, in particular the saucing varieties,” he says. “Roma varieties are sold nice and ripe, ready to make passata.” Cooking tomatoes are roughly $2 a kilo at the Happy Apple, with Australian field tomatoes going for about $5 a kilo in supermarkets.Watermelon is “very cheap”, says Michael Hsu, operational manager at Sydney’s Panetta Mercato

How to make moreish cookies from store-cupboard odds and ends – recipe | Waste not

I often eat a bag of salty crisps at the same time as a chewy chocolate bar, alternating bite for bite between the two, because the extreme contrast of salt from the chips and the sweetness of the chocolate fire off each other and create an endorphin rush. The same goes for these cookies, adapted from a recipe by Christina Tosi at New York’s legendary Milk Bar.Christina Tosi writes in Gourmet Traveller Australia how she first learned to make these cookies at a conference centre on Star Island, New England, where they’d bake them each week with a hodge-podge of different ingredients. Being on an island, they didn’t always have access to what they wanted, so they had to come up with a new recipe every week using whatever they had. In the spirit of the recipe’s origins, I’ve adapted Tosi’s recipe for the UK, and made it flexible, so you can raid your own store-cupboards and adapt and invent your own version from it

Camilla Wynne’s recipes for blood orange marmalade and no-bake marmalade mousse tart

If you’re intimidated by making marmalade, the whole-fruit method is the perfect entry point. Blood oranges are simmered whole until soft, perfuming your home as they do so, then they’re sliced, skin and all, mixed with sugar and a fragrant cinnamon stick, and embellished with a shot of amaro. Squirrel the jars away for a grey morning, give a few to deserving friends, and be sure to keep at least one to make this elegant mocha marmalade mousse tart. A cocoa biscuit crust topped with a chocolate marmalade mousse and crowned with a cold brew coffee cream, it’s a delightful trifecta of bitterness that no one will ever guess is an easy no-bake dessert.If you’re not up for preserving, make this using shop-bought thick-cut marmalade