If you have any food art of your own, then tweet it to @WhiskTeam  or our Whisk Facebook page!

1. On the daily commute to work: For the busy bee, grocery shopping and all those other little errands can become a nightmare to schedule in. The Whisk App saves you from this hassle, so you can quickly select some recipes and check them out in minutes, whilst on the bus or train. Boost those productivity levels and free up some time on the weekend so you can relax… or have a dinner party?! Whisk really gives you the time to enjoy good food, without the hassle of shopping and queuing for it.

2. Next time you’re about to leave for a trip away from home and would like to have a delivery of  food arrive on your return, use Whisk. You can browse the recipes, choose your meals and hey-pesto, the delivery will be with you when you return. This will take your mind off things while you are away, and make returning from your holiday all the more bearable.

3. Have you ever been on the way home from a holiday and had that sad moment when you remember there is no food in the house and all perishable goods, have perished? Whilst sat in the departures lounge of the airport, whip out your iPhone or Android device and select some recipes for the coming week. Your family will be tired and hungry when you touch down. Tinned spaghetti on mouldy bread is not going to cheer them up, or sort out meals for the next few days! ‘Whisking’ your meals is a quicker, cheaper and more organised alternative to lugging your jet-lagged, hungry (and sunburnt?) self around the local supermarket.

4. In England, for at least one week each year we have heavy snow, for the past few years, this has become a fact of life. As per usual, the UK grinds to a halt and our transport systems are thrown into disarray. Driving is dangerous, walking is a cold and slippery experience. Thankfully the supermarkets integrated with Whisk delivered consistently throughout the January snow in England. Save yourself the trekking and sliding around on icy roads by ordering some recipes through Whisk. If the kids have a snow day, or you are unable to get to work, make the most of it and order the ingredients for a top notch home dining session followed by some piping hot apple pie. This also applies to when your car goes on strike, and any future zombie apocalypses, Whisk is here to make your life easier.

5. Last but not least… It may be utterly gross but you can use Whisk on the loo: Some people take a magazine into the bathroom, why not have a more productive few minutes and purchase some grocery shopping through Whisk! The ultimate in multitasking exercises.

1. Microwaved a ready meal that tastes more like the packaging and less like lasagna?
2. Devoured a watery noodelly snack that was awesome for the first mouthful and pointless for the rest?
3. Emotionally hunted down that emergency 24 pack of jaffa cakes in the bottom of the breadbin, and inhaled all 24 for your dinner?
4. Ordered a suspiciously orange coloured take away and smelt like a garlic naan for the following 3 days?

…There is another option, that takes the same amount of time, with ingredients you already have, and is one of the most comforting, easy, delicious saviours around… Make a meal, in a mug.

For this, you will need a decent sized mug, a fork, 5 minutes, some basic ingredients, and a microwave. Our Co-Founder Nick was so impressed with his chocolate mug cake, here he is in a video for you making another: (note, for a fluffier, lighter cake, add 1/4 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda)

Nick Makes a Cake in a Mug

Man nor woman can snack on biscuits alone. Instead we have supplied you with finest selection of quiche, strawberry pie, chocolate cake and macaroni cheese recipes, all made in a mug:

Source and recipe: howsweeteats.com

Strawberry Mug Pie. Add as much double cream as your bad day necessitates.

Source and recipe: blogs.babble.com

Macaroni Cheese, for one? Yes please.

Source and recipe: yammiesnoshery.com

Peanut butter pie mousse, hot fudge, and whipped cream. Whisk’s prescription for a broken heart.

Source and recipe: stltoday.com

What’s quicker than fast food? A fast quiche. Nice healthy bit of protein!

Source and recipe: passthesushi.com

Fancy some banana bread but don’t fancy washing up? Sorted.

Source and recipe: stltoday.com

Experience a whole tray of hot nachos, salsa, cheese and sour cream, in a mug. Genius.

Source and recipe: livelovepasta.com

Nutella cake, get to heaven in 3 minutes.

In the Whisk Kitchen, we are busy testing mug recipes to develop a new feature on the iPhone and Android Apps. Perfect for when you want to curl up on the sofa after a long day. Dining solo? The meal in a mug can rescue anyone from washing up and general cooking effort. These recipes are immensely satisfying for your hungry tummy and can double up as impressive gestures of peace when a mug of tea, just doesn’t cut it.

You can download the Whisk App here for iPhone and Android.

Alas, we have some fun finds to share with you blog readers, because cooking is getting sooo much cooler…

Waterproof iPad Cases

Do you look to youtube tutorials? Online recipes? Or catch up on Jamie Oliver/ Delia programmes? Well who needs a cookery book whose pages are cemented together and content is limited, when you can whip one of these highly practical and oh so stylish cases on your iPad or android tablet:

This waterproof cover is ideal for safely using next to custard, soup and other bubbling foods. Open up your Whisk App and do some clever cooking.

Download the Whisk App to your iPhone here

Download the Whisk App to your Andriod device here

Browse Waterproof iPad cases

Robotic Salt and Pepper Pots

Ever had that moment at the dinner table where “please can you pass the salt”, will almost always mean stretching across the table as your hair (or tie) falls into the gravy? You need a salt and pepper pot that will do the legwork for you… literally.

Okay… these are not the height of sophisticated technology, but simple ideas are not to be sniffed at, especially when they will have your dinner guests in stitches.

Here is where you can buy a Robotic Salt and Pepper Pot

Talking Fridge Pets

Our next find is one to conquer the $1.7 billion worth of wasted energy each year in the US alone… through fridge doors being left open. Utterly bizarre but totally adorable, these cute electronic friends live inside your fridge, only speaking when you open the door. How? A light sensor on the top of each Fridge Pet triggers any one of a number of sentences and phrases to make you close the fridge door.

As well as various greetings, Fridge Pets are not averse to dishing out a ticking off; keep the door open too long and your fridge-dwelling buddy urges you to close it.

Browse Talking Fridge Pets

HAPIfork: A smart fork to help your waistline

The final gem in our foodtech haul of clever gadgets is… a FORK. Not just any fork, but one that buzzes when you stuff your mouth too quickly. There is a significant school of thought to say that overeating and weight gain is the result of chomping too fast. Some of us foodies chomp, chomp and rapidly inhale a whole meal before being overcome with the “I’m so full I need to lie down” feeling.  Do you suffer from this?

The Hapi Fork was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month. The bluetooth-enabled smart fork is designed to help you control your eating by tracking how many bites you take and how quickly you eat. Overdo it, and the Hapi fork gets unhappy; its handle vibrates and sensors on the end light up, letting you know it’s time to slow down. This can be connected to your smart phone, which tracks your eating patterns… Also in the works, a smart spoon.

Hapifork

Aside from these fabulously quirky gadgets to improve recipe interaction, energy consumption, entertainment and health… you could just download the new Whisk App to your iPhone, or android smartphone, and James Bond will have some stiff competition against your kitchen tech.

The most popular New Years Resolutions for 2013

1. Save more money – 31%

2. Get out of debt – 22%

3. Get fit/lose weight – 18%

4. Change job/career – 16%

5. Quit smoking – 13%

6. Give up alcohol – 11%

7. Spend less time working – 9%

8. Spend more time with family/friends – 7%

9. Give up chocolate – 6%

10.  Move house – 2%

Leo Widrich, one of the minds behind Buffer App has written a fantastic piece on “Why 88% of New Year’s resolutions fail, and how to make them work”. He delves into some brain science, and concludes that we need to create little implementable habits, over a big sweeping resolution, such as: “Eat healthy food vs. Habit: Start substituting that 1 daily morning pastry for a banana.”

A highly implementable answer that goes quite some way to tackle resolutions 1,2,3,7,8 and 9 (above) is… Cook fresh food, ta dah!!! See where we’re going here?
         

Cook once a day or twice a week, but choose a specific cooking habit you can implement.

or

Learn 1 new cooking method each month.

Create entries into your diaries if it helps. Cooking fresh food will quickly have a positive effect on your bank balance, health, waistline, stress levels and time you spend with loved ones; the things that really matter. Who knew that kneading bread is so satisfying and proven to lower your blood pressure? Fresh food makes your home smell delicious, and brings us back to enjoying life’s simple pleasures. The benefits of using fresh ingredients go further to have a positive impact on everyone you cook for. Nobody is going to mind if you want to make a big lasagna.

If you are a busy bee, fear not! Whisk removes the hassle from food shopping, you literally pick a recipe or several recipes and we get the right ingredients in the right quantities delivered to your door. It. Takes. Seconds. The developers at Whisk are also working on a function that provides you with recipes to make with the leftover ingredients. Thrifty tech magic that reduces food waste, making your money go further.

So instead of trying to take on the world this January, cook up a better you with Whisk and reap a whole host of benefits.

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2013/01/03/the-most-popular-new-years-resolutions-for-2013/

http://blog.bufferapp.com/the-science-of-new-years-resolutions-why-88-fail-and-how-to-make-them-work

The weekly funeral procession of hunter gatherers meandering around a packed supermarket is rarely fun; we spend an unforeseeable amount of time pushing a trolley with questionable wheels around the aisles. Lets face it, writing a shopping list and hoping to stick to it is utterly impossible when faced with millions of offers on stuff you never knew you wanted, but really don’t need… The end result here is that we spend a great deal of time, money and not to mention fuel, on grocery shopping. We sit in traffic, struggle to find a parking space, queue in the supermarket, and then sit in traffic again, after spending more money than we wanted to. What would you do with that extra time and tighter control of your budget? Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone walk up and down the food aisles for you, week after week?

Benefits to you, your wallet and free time

UK online supermarkets save your previous shopping baskets, so it takes minutes to reorder or alter the shopping basket, minimum fuss. Offers are available online as they are in the store, but since they are on a screen, and not a warm patisserie rack, these offers are somehow less seductive, allowing for more rational thought, and excellent cost control. One of the best perks is seriously the free or highly inexpensive delivery cost. You pick an hourly window on the day you want the delivery, and it actually turns up in a Tesco van, or a Waitrose van etc to your home, like magic.

Projection of online grocery shopping statistics

Busy people of England, you can free yourself from hassle. 2013 is going to be a big year for online food shopping, vegbox schemes have exploded all over the country and new research by IGD shows that online grocery shopping will increase rapidly over the next five years from the £5.6bn it is valued at today. IGD chief executive Joanne Denney-Finch said online grocery shopping is “evolving at a blistering pace”. She said: “Although online only currently represents 3.4% of the overall UK grocery market, it is the fastest growing sector – set to grow by a phenomenal 98% over the next five years.
Increasing smartphone and tablet use together with new 4G mobile technology, should boost online grocery shopping and allow shoppers to use all services retailers provide.”

Here at Whisk we are excited to help people enjoy food the easy way. Gain more time, spend less money and have yourself an easier life with online grocery shopping.

Our Whiskmas Dinner

At the Whisk office, we really do things properly. Last Thursday the Whiskateers got heavily involved with peeling chestnuts, roasting veggies and wrapping pigs in bacony blankets. Like an over-sized Victorian family, we worked hard for our dinner. There was not a sachet in sight, raw materials only. We put the Whisk function through it’s paces like one would test an off-road car on the Giant’s Causeway. Not to blow our own trumpet, but it was a steaming success:

So much so that our co-founder and tech king, Craig, jumped into the canal with delight.

Here you can see a standard issue Whiskmas dinner: From the top left we have some stuffing balls, the first variety are apricot and hazelnut, the second were bacon cranberry and chestnut. Moving clockwise around the plate we have some beautiful sprouts, then purple sprouting broccoli roasted in grapeseed oil, as were the carrots (top tip), hiding underneath we have some humble parsnips slathered in a mix of maple syrup and whole grain mustard roasted at a high temperature (recommended), bread sauce…yes made from bread, pigs in blankets with premium quality sausage meat and chestnut smoked bacon, at the bottom of the plate, we have some dark turkey meat complemented by the lighter turkey meat, and this whole beautiful plate (moments after the photo was taken) was drowned in a rich turkey gravy. Heaven.

Cook Smart

The Whisk functionality allowed us to do this, and made a seemingly nightmare task of cooking a 3 course Christmas dinner for 12, rather simple. Whiskateers selected recipes from our publishers, and we checked out the ingredients like this:

We had a quick look around the kitchen to see what we already had, and then removed these items from the Whisk shopping list accordingly. A few leisurely clicks later the food was ordered. (And you too will be able to do this soon!)

The following day our Tesco man in his Tesco van delivered the goods, the delivery was £3.50. No fuel costs, no working out what you need and in what quantities, no lugging around bags, no traffic /parking/ trolley fuss. It’s a dream, and completely removes any excuse not to cook.

And almost by magic… this happened:

We would like to wish you a Merry Whiskmas!!

Please tweet us photos of your Christmas food, whether you are elbow deep in a turkey or plating up your home made mince pies, we want to see it! @WhiskTeam

Emma x

The French attitude to eating well is considered to be the direct reason why as a nation, they are slimmer, live longer and have a much better work life balance to the Brits, Germans and Americans. “Lunchbreak” is a concept sniffed at by many euro-american corporate workers, who have adopted the “Desklunch”, where one inhales a sweaty, overpriced pre-packed sandwich whilst fervently working away. In contrast, the French on average take 1.5hrs to “do lunch” and they like to do it properly. You may think this passion for eating must be a recipe for dietary disaster? (and a wider waistband?). You would be wrong.

The fat statistics on Europe…

In a world where obesity rates are increasing exponentially, France remains among the lowest in Europe. Statistics from 2009 indicate France’s obesity rate at 11%. Compare that to the United States (34%), Mexico (30%), New Zealand (27%), Australia (25%) and the United Kingdom (23%). This seems completely bizarre, when childhood memories of France involved fresh baguettes oozing with ripening brie, and the flailing french lady who looked after our gite insisting I take slug of wine (aged 12), then “appreeziate eet!”. My family would sit surrounded by the richest spread of fresh cheese, flan, moules and shock horror… bread. Most of the time we ate with real french people, 3 times a day, without fail.

I think back to the meals we ate and I came to this realisation: everything consumed was homemade or fresh. Not once we had a pre-packaged desert, or packaged snacks. The huge city of Lyon to this day is densely populated with greengrocers, little independent bakeries and butchers who run a roaring trade. The rural french dwellers we knew often served us the most lip smacking fresh vegetable salads, the ingredients plucked from their gardens. This may seem alien to our grab-and-go western meal culture, but I promise you so many french people live like this… and they are very slim.

A simple lesson in health

So, this conclusion is echoed through many articles on French lifestyle. However, the amazement with gastronomic French culture extends far beyond food alone, what I am getting at is how the French take time out of their day to eat properly. Maybe the rest of the world over-complicates the idea of maintaining a healthy weight or being healthy? Could the answer simply be a case of making time to sit down and eat freshly prepared, home cooked food, on a regular basis, with your friends, coworkers and family? Here at Whisk, we certainly think it helps.

The Gastro Card

Being a glorified bunch of foodies here at Whisk, when we’re in need of an outing, we like to dine out in Birmingham. It is in the name of our professional duty (it really isn’t)… which is why an epic discount card is absolutely essential to us.

The Gastro card is exclusive to the West Midlands so we’ve got plenty of these wonder-cards in our office. It comes packed with discounts and benefits, like 25% off your food bill, free glasses of champagne, 50% off wine etc.  Whether you have to dine clients and need to keep company expenses low, or just love eating out with your friends…a must for any Birmingham eater-outer. The offers you receive are always exclusive to Gastro Card holders and it covers a huge selection of wonderful restaurants across the Midlands.

At only £30, this could be likened to a high yield, risk free investment. If you like to eat out, you need this in your wallet much like Donald Trump needs prenuptial agreements; it has saved us an absolute fortune!

Gastro Card works with schools to develop cooking lessons, as a matter of health awareness and career awareness. This is another wonderful reason to grab a Gastro Card.

Order yours at:

www.gastrocard.co.uk

The Digbeth Dining Club

‘Street Food’ is still a relatively new concept in the UK; cities all over the world including Hong Kong and New York are well known for their amazing street food. Back in August, The Digbeth Dining Club and Spot*light brought the concept to Birmingham!  The Digbeth Dining Club describe their aim to ‘introduce the best locally sourced ‘street food’ to Birmingham’s trendy artistic hub, by creating a platform for the West Midlands’ finest street artisans to produce incredible food in front of their customers – by providing honest food that you can trust, at affordable prices’. I took very little convincing.

Last Friday, my growling stomach, some friends and I decided to check out The Digbeth Dining club. We were not disappointed. There is something mouth-wateringly appealing about hot food being made in front of you. Rather than ordering from a menu, you can see and smell what you might like to eat. After effectively inhaling the pheasant and fig wrap (you should have seen the look the guy I bought it from gave me, he thought I was something off Doctor Who), I perused the pizza stand where they were just making up fresh dough; I could taste it in the air. I saw lavishly topped fresh dough thrown into a pizza oven and cooked until it was a gorgeous mess of cheese and loveliness, with the little hiss of steam that comes off a properly fresh, thin pizza crust when you bite into it. Half crunchy, half soft. All perfect. I demolished the entire pizza, more appreciative of its hot savory tastiness, whilst standing in the crisp evening air. This was not on the same level as any pizza you defrost, but pizza made lovingly from scratch, by a large Italian man, called Giuseppe … ok maybe he wasn’t, but you get the idea.

My friends and I did NOT share, mainly because the food was so reasonably priced, the whole pizza was £5, yes £5… amazing. I absolutely recommend you take a wander (or eventually a waddle – in my case) around the Digbeth Dining club.

www.digbethdiningclub.co.uk

The recipe is taken from the Honeybuns Gluten Free Baking book by Emma Goss-Custard, published by Pavilion.

Heathcliffe Brownies

Ingredients

175g/6oz butter, plus extra, melted for brushing

400g/14oz dark chocolate, chopped

1 tsp espresso coffee power or granules dissolved in 1-2 tsp hot water

Finely grated zest of 1 orange

1 tsp orange oil

4 eggs

100g/3½oz ground almonds

125g/4½oz milk chocolate, chopped

150g/5½oz muscovado sugar

85g/3oz almonds, toasted and chopped

Pinch of salt

2 drops of vanilla extract

Topping

250g/9 oz dark chocolate, cut into chunks

1 tbsp olive oil

1 tsp orange oil

Preheat the oven to 180^oC/350^oF/Gas 4. Cut a rectangle of baking parchment to line the bottom of a 30 x 23 x 4 cm/12 x 9 x 1½ in baking tin. Pop the parchment into the tin and brush the tin with melted butter.

Melt the butter with 200g/7oz of the dark chocolate in a heatproof bowl and set over a saucepan of gently simmering water, stirring until smooth (alternatively I chose to pop into the microwave for approx 2 minutes). Stir in the dissolved coffee. All the mixture to cool slightly and then stir in the orange zest and orange oil.

Crack the eggs into a clean mixing bowl, then add the ground almonds, milk chocolate chunks and the remaining 200g/7oz of dark chocolate, the muscovado sugar, chopped almonds, salt and vanilla. Finally, pour in the melted butter-and-chocolate mixture. Using an electric mixer, beat at medium speed until creamy and thickened, but don’t overmix as too much air will cause the brownie to crumble when baked.

Spoon the mixture into the tin and bake for 25-28 minutes. Take care not to overbake. The brownie is ready when the edges are slightly crusty and the middle is still soft, but with a firmish ‘skin’. Allow to cool for 1 hour.

For the topping, melt 150g/5½oz of the chocolate with the olive oil and orange oil in a heatproof bowl set over a saucepan of gently simmering water, stirring until smooth (again I chose to do this in the microwave to save time). Spread this over the brownie. Scatter the remaining 100g/3½oz of chocolate over the top and leave to set for 2 hours. Cut into pieces.