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Ladies and Gentlemen, please let me introduce you to “The Marmite Guide To Better Cooking”; a 1969 culinary classic dedicated to the goopy brown loveliness that is Great Britain’s favourite yeast by-product based spread. Being the Marmite lover that I am I always appreciate a new recipe that makes the most of the versatile salty goodness of Marmite, so I dug straight in, looking for inspiration. I must admit I wasn’t expecting a birthday cake made from mashed salmon, hard boiled eggs, cream cheese and Marmite…

The following is the introduction to the recipe, word for word:

Children’s tastes have changed. Nowadays at parties they gravitate towards the savouries, leaving behind all the jellies, trifles and cakes that took so long to prepare. And the biggest white elephant of the lot is, more often than not, the traditional birthday cake itself! Although the children love to see it in the middle of the table and shriek with delight at the blowing-out-of-the-candles ceremony, how many actually eat it? Not many I suspect. So why not, for a change, make a savoury birthday cake? It can look just as pretty as a sweet one and at least there’s a fifty-fifty chance it’ll get eaten! But to make sure, I’d reverse the usual order of the tea by letting the birthday girl or boy do the candle bit first. They you can serve pieces of cake and let the children fill up on what they like afterwards!

I mean seriously.  Who do they think they’re kidding? “Oh, kids love savoury nowadays”. “Make a savoury cake, and serve it up first”.  And wait until you see the recipe….

To make the birthday cake, buy a small unsliced oblong sandwich load for an average party (10 to 15) children or a large load if you’ve got half the class coming! Leave the loaf for one day. Remove all the crusts then cut the loaf horizontally into 4 long slices. Spread 2 slices with butter and a thin layer of Marmite. Sandwich together with finely mashed canned salmon or tuna. Spread top of sandwich with more butter and Marmite then cover with chopped hard boiled eggs bound together with a little salad cream. Spread next slice of bread with butter and Marmite and stand on top of egg filling, buttered side down. Spread top of sandwich as before with butter and Marmite then cover with a layer of cream cheese coloured pale green with green food colouring. Spread last slice of bread with butter and Marmite and stand on top, with unbuttered side facing. You now have a loaf layered together with three different fillings. Stand on a bread board or platter and cover top and sides with cream cheese. To decorate, smooth top with a knife dipped in hot water and ridge the sides with prongs of a fork. Colour some more cream cheese green or pink and pipe a fancy border round top and lower edges. Write ‘Happy Birthday’ on top theninsert candles holders. Refrigerate a few hours before serving.

Read it again. Seriously. Just imagine yourself as the six year old recipient of such a monstrosity on your birthday.

Yet more recipes for things from the garden.  This time some early beetroot, turned in to some rather tasty beetroot and feta soup.

Here it is then. I had to try something with them all

Sautéed Glut of Radishes

So. You got overenthusiastic when you sowed the first radish seed of the spring and now you’ve got a glut. What do you do with them apart from slice them into salads? There are very few recipes for cooking radishes, but Francois pointed me at the Pimp my Radish thread at Ask Metafilter, where I found this one. I particularly like the use of both the radish and the tops. Radish tops taste a whole lot like spinach, by the way. This makes a light summer lunch or an interesting side (use where you usually might use a spinach dish)

Preparation time

5m

Cooking time

15m

Difficulty

1

Serves

2

Ingredients

• 2 bunches radishes (12 large to 20 small per bunch); they have to have their tops still intact
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• Sea salt

Preparation

Top and tail the radishes and cut them into large chunks. Remove the stalks from the radish tops and wash the resulting leaves in a salad spinner (or similar). Peel and finely chop the garlic.

Get the olive oil good and hot in a wide frying pan. Put in the chopped garlic and fry lightly for a moment or two, before throwing in the chopped radishes. Stir fry for a couple of minutes before putting in the leaves.

Keep stirring until the leaves have cooked down and then serve, sprinkled with the sea salt.

What on earth do you do with 200 radishes? I now realise that although radishes and lettuces make perfect catch crops planting them willy nilly while waiting for other crops to come up is going to leave you with a glut. Right now I’ve got about 150 left from my original crop of 200. I’m palmed some off to others, I’ve eaten the rest. Neither Claire nor the kids like them. I’m on my own!

Recipes featuring radishes at:

• Vegbox recipes
• Fabulous foods (excuse the pop ups, keep your pop up blocker set to kill)
• UKTV Food
• BBC Food

None of them are exactly inspiring, are they? Here’s to another round of salads!

We built blogging tools into Forkd pretty much right from the start. Jared, one of the two main brains behind the idea, is a heavy food blogger and he (quite rightly) didn’t want to have to type his recipes in twice. Indeed, the ultimate target was to provide a single central repository for your recipes from which you could publish to multiple places (a la Flickr for photos or Youtube for video).

Sadly very few people so far have used the facility. No great surprise, I guess, in that few of our users as yet are bloggers and that it takes quite an investment and some experimentation to get a nice layout. We’ve done our best to produce microformat-like HTML for the recipe that we post to the blog, but you’ve got to style it regardless.

Still, as one of the people that built it and as both a blogger and keen cook, I thought it about time to actually use the tools myself. I’ve got approximately 20 original recipes on there now; variations on recipes from a wide range of blogs and books. Here is my current favourite:

Chicken Vindaloo

Hot, sharp, genuinely interesting; this isn’t as hot as its British curry house counterpart. Instead this is based on more traditional recipes (primarily this one at Aayi’s recipes). Worth noting that, whatever we may have been led to believe, the aloo in vindaloo doesn’t mean potatoes. Instead it means garlic (explanation at Wikipedia). The use of caramelised onions in the marinade make this a truly unusual but extraordinarily tasty dish.

Preparation time

30m

Cooking time

20m

Difficulty

2

Serves

2

Ingredients

• 2 skinless chicken breasts
• 1 medium onion
• 3 tbsp groundnut oil
• 1″ thumb ginger
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp mustard seeds
• ½ tsp coriander seeds
• 1 tsp cumin seeds
• 1 tsp fenugreek seeds (optional)
• ¾ tsp salt
• 1 tbsp red wine vinegar
• 3 birds eye chillis
• 1 tomato
• 25g fresh coriander (small bunch)
• 125 ml water

Preparation

Chop the chicken breasts into roughly 1 to 2″ cubes

Peel and roughly chop the onion. Get 2 tablespoons of the oil good and hot in a frying pan over a high heat and fry the onions until they go properly brown. They provide the unusual colour and flavour; you are looking to almost burn them they should be that brown. Once they are browned drain them of any excess oil and put them to one side.

Peel and roughly chop the garlic and ginger. Roughly chop the chillis (seeds and all) and the tomato. Put the caramelised onions, garlic, ginger, chillis, tomato, mustard seeds, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, fenugreek seeds (you can leave these out if you can’t find them), salt and red wine vinegar in a blender and whizz them up until you have a thick but smooth paste.

Put the diced chicken in a non-metallic bowl and thoroughly coat it in the paste. Leave it for a minimum of 30 minutes (and upto 4 hours).

When you’re ready to cook get the remainder of the oil hot over a medium heat in a wide pan. Put the chicken and all the marinade in the pan and stir fry for a few minutes.

Add enough water to make a thick gravy and turn the heat right down. Leave to cook for approximately 15 minutes.

Finally, finely chop the fresh coriander and put it in the pan. Turn the heat up fiercely for another 1 or two minutes to drive off any excess liquid and wilt the coriander leaves and then serve.

Well then.  We’re there.  After months and months of development Forkd is opening up to public registrations.  Feta mark 4 is released today with yet more snazzy new features, including a really rather awesome activity stream, Wordpress integration, RSS feeds, commit messages and much more.  We’ve even managed, amazingly, to bring something new to the game of tagging with the ‘tag brush’ feature.

We’re stopping development for a bit to focus on growing our user and recipe base, but the plan is to start on the next release (Gammon?) in about a month.  If you’ve not signed up, please do.  And please try out some of the tasty tasty food.