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Food & Drink notes
Eat soup; Join the club; Oven ready; Blitz spirit
Visit an EAT café (top lunch spots all over London and in Manchester, Birmingham and other cities; www.eatcafe.co.uk for info) order soup and feel good. Familiar-face chefs - including Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Michel Roux Jnr, Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray - will be serving next week as part of EAT's fundraising to help the homeless. All the rest of the year, for every soup sold, 5p will go to the charities. Help too, and buy a copy of the lovely, heartwarming and useful fundraiser Soup (£17.99) full of recipes from top chefs.
Join the club
Pick a bone or chew the fat about recipes with Mark Hix, our award-winning cookery writer, over dinner on 8 November at the Blueprint Café, London SE1. The evening is one of a series in the Blueprint Café's Food Book Club, hosted by head chef Jeremy Lee and the guest author(s) of a recent food book. Mark Hix and Malcolm Gluck, co-authors of The Simple Art of Marrying Food & Wine, will join diners over the three courses, each matched with wine. Tickets are £45 (020-7378 7031).
Oven ready
Although this dinky model bears the name Dualit, it does a whole lot more than make toast. You could even use it to bake bread. The new mini oven fits on a counter-top (perfect for studio flats), defrosts, bakes, grills and cooks. So you can do real, not microwave, cooking in the smallest kitchen. It has adjustable feet, wire racks, grilling pan and a baking tray. You could even use one as an overflow oven in a normal-sized kitchen. Made in the UK by the 60-year-old family firm. £179.95, www.dualit.com
Blitz spirit
Domestic goddess Nigella worships her KitchenAid mixer, the machine that will come to your aid in the case of any party - or everyday supper. There's a blender too, that's just as robust and beautifully retro-looking, in colours that include tangerine and black. Complete the set of top gear with the new KitchenAid Artisan Food Processor (above) in Imperial Red, in the shops from next week (00800 38104026 / www.kitchenaid.com). For £249, the machine comes with three bowls in different sizes to fit on the heavy-duty steel base. So you don't need to take up the entire dishwasher with one giant bowl. But for those endless chopping jobs there's a 2.8-litre work bowl. Also included: blades, slicing discs, dough blade and citrus press, which fit in their own case.
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