Looking to shake up the menu for your holiday dinner this year? Why not make it a look back at the year that was? Google has released its top searches of the year and unveiled a list of the most popular "trending" recipes of the year.
It is not a surprise that TikTok pasta took over the year as it was one of the simplest pasta dishes you could make, and the reward was so high for an incredibly low effort. The rest is a list of all things delicious, from sweet to savoury and from breakfast to dessert. Check out Google's top ten trending recipes, and try not to salivate.
TikTok pasta
Baked feta pasta went viral earlier in the year. It was so popular that it caused a shortage of feta in Finland. Cherry tomatoes, a generous drizzle of olive oil, a sprinkle of flaky sea salt, pepper, and a brick of feta all go onto a casserole dish to roast until the skins of the tomatoes split open, the feta turns a delicate shade of gold and all the juices marry. Then, with a wooden spoon, the feta is broken up, revealing a soft, creamy centre that beautifully combines with the other ingredients.
Minced fresh garlic and basil cut into a chiffonade are added before tossing in the pasta and mixing. The result is a cheesy, salty sauce balanced by the freshness of the herbs and the sweetness of the jammy tomatoes.
Bacon jam
Bacon jam is a bacon-based relish. It is made through a process of slow cooking the bacon, along with onions, vinegar, brown sugar and spices before mixing in a food processor. Bacon jam, like other fruit jams, requires a certain level of sugars to be officially labelled 'jam'.
Birria tacos
Birria tacos, if you have not heard of them yet, were all over social media and the internet. They are traditionally an addictive sweet, sour, slightly spicy and utterly savoury Mexican beef stew that is slow-cooked until the beef is tender and fall-apart juicy and delicious. Someone had the bright idea to stuff this beefy goodness into a taco shell, and then dip the whole mess into the stew and fry it up. They blew up after that, and the rest was history.
Crockpot chicken
With a true crockpot, the crock itself is a container with heating elements all along the sides as well as on the bottom.
Technically this device is called an electric heating oven (no matter the brand), and features a ceramic or porcelain pot that fits snugly into the crock with a glass lid to trap the heat and moisture inside. It cooks food slowly at a low temperature, with the heat surrounding the food and bringing it up to a safe temperature quickly.
Hamantaschen
Hamantaschen is an Ashkenazi Jewish triangular filled-pocket pastry, associated with the Jewish holiday of Purim. Traditionally, the dough for hamantaschen was made with yeast. With the invention of baking powder during the 1840s, and its wide adoption during the first half of the twentieth century, baking powder supplanted yeast, and hamantaschen dough became a cookie rather than pastry dough.