Eat

Author: Nigel Slater

Year published: 2013

Pages: 464

Time It Took To Read: About a week

I cook for two adults, and two young children. My fiancé doesn't get home until 6pm most nights, so whatever we eat has to be able to feed me and the boys around 5pm, and stay 'fresh' til 6, when he can reheat his. Souffles are out. I think most families tend to fall into something of a cooking rut, moreso when children are young and picky. My eldest son is on the autistic spectrum, and will occasionally decide not to eat something because he doesn't like the look or texture of it. I do the majority of the cooking, and tend to have about ten 'favourites' that I do on rotation, notably something-and-chips, enchiladas, sausage/mince casserole, sausage and mash, chicken curry, roast chicken, chicken noodle soup, a parade of pasta bakes, and chilli con carne. These are things I know everyone likes and will eat. But it gets boring, and I am a greedy food fanatic. 

I love Nigel Slater. His recipes are always totally reliable, and delicious. I have only cooked one recipe from this so far, and that was sausage and tomato lasagne. It involved mushing sausage meat up, and making a simple sauce from cream and mustard, and was delicious. I can't wait to cook more. The recipes are ordered into sections such as handheld food, stews, bakes. There's a tiny pudding section. There are two indexes: one at the front by main ingredients, and one at the back by other ingredients. Everything sounds gorgeous, and most recipes fit on one page, so no missing half the instructions because they're over the page. Recipes feed one, two or four and are easily multiplied. Nothing takes long to cook, or prepare. I love it.

Book count: 17/50

The Flavour Thesaurus

Author: Niki Segnit

Year published: 2010

Pages: 400

Time It Took To Read: A few weeks, during breakfast

Life's been a bit stressful recently. My eldest started school, and is now under investigation for suspected Aspergers or ADHD. This has meant many meetings, many alterations in routine and currently he only goes to school in the morning because he becomes unmanageable in the afternoon. 

We finally got rid of the mouse, my partner moved in and all my uni books arrived. I am now afeared of uni work because I have about half the quiet time I thought I would have to study in. But I'll manage. I'm good at managing.

I haven't done much reading at all. I've been reading my enormous uni set text on the evolution of modern medicine, and that has effectively stopped me reading anything else during the day. However, I did, finally, get round to reading this book which I've owned for nearly two years.

It took me by surprise. I was expecting a scientific tract on flavour molecules, and instead this is a chatty, informal book which lists different combinations of flavour - some which work, some which don't - with suggestions of how to use them in daily cooking. Some of it comes across as TERRIBLY upper-middle class, with talk of living in Belgravia and truffles, and some of the combinations you'd be hard pushed to find in your local Asda. BUT it's a well written, thoroughly enjoyable book and if you want inspiration for cooking, it's excellent. 

Book count: 42/50

Procrastinating? Moi?

So, I decided my fifty books should all be books I hadn't read before. Otherwise, there's no challenge for me. I'd just re-read the top two shelves of my bookcases and be done.
Now, thus far, this hasn't been a problem. However, with my exam looming in less than a week, I shouldn't be reading anything other than endless coursebooks about health. Health, health, health. Where everything you'd think is a good thing is actually bad, and they use big words like salutogenesis and iatrogenesis and expect you to understand and recite their  meaning verbatim (a paradigm of wellness in spite of disease, and medicine making you worse, in case you were wondering). Reading for pleasure at this point in time comes with a whopping great side order of GUILT and PROCRASTINATION. So, I've not really been doing much of it.
I've been reading magazines. Mainly the Radio Times, because I prefer reading about telly to watching it, but also cardmaking, Private Eye and food magazines, because I am crafty, snarky and greedy.
I've also been re-reading a few old favourite books. First, The Lord of The Rings because reading The Hobbit made me yearn for all that hobbity action, and elvish bollocks. Then The Pillars Of Hercules by Paul Theroux, which is a travel book about a man who meanders around the edge of the Mediterranean, carping furiously at everything. I love him. I also read French Provincial Cooking by Elizabeth David. She really started the food revolution in this country after rationing ended, introducing garlic as a non-terrifying foodstuff, and increasing interest in things like pasta. Her books are poetry, and her recipes all seem pretty legit. I admit, I read them for the food porn rather than as a manual.
Currently, I am reading...slyly and guiltily... Sunrise With Seamonsters by Paul Theroux, which is a collection of his journalism. It's mostly based around travel and other writers, and covers the first twenty years of his career. I'm also reading, less guiltily, The Art of Eating by M.F.K Fisher. If you have never heard of Mary Kennedy Frances Fisher, you are MISSING OUT. She was basically the US's version of Elizabeth David, waxing lyrical about French food and inspiring two post-war generations (she started writing between the World Wards) to eat better. The Art of Eating is an anthology of her first five books, and her autobiographical The Gastronomical Me is one of the best examples of food writing I've ever read. It is delicious. I am evangelising. Go read.

So, in a week, I start on the enormous pile of fantasy books waiting for me. After seeing the reaction of TV viewers to The Game Of Thrones Red Wedding, I can't wait.  And I really can't wait to get this hateful exam done... Where was I? Prevention...is it better than cure? Probably not... *sigh*

A History of English Food

Title: A History of English Food

Author: Clarissa Dickson Wright

Year published: 2010

Pages: 455

Time It Took To Read: A couple of months, largely read during meals

I borrowed this signed edition off my Mum a few months ago, and have been gradually getting through it when eating. I read when I eat, because I'm odd like that.
I'm fascinated by what people ate in ye olde days. The lack of detail about food in history, and historical fiction, annoys me. It's such a cliché: kings are always eating vast banquets, whilst commoners nosh down gruel. I've read a few books on the history of eating in Britain, but this is probably the book with the grandest scale. It begins in medieval times and carries on to the present, with a considerable portion of the book dedicated to the last 150 years.
It is exceptionally  readable and interesting. I love Clarissa Dickson Wright's presenting style, and her greed and adoration of food - never trust a thin food writer. The book does suffer very slightly from her continuous personal comparison of food then and food now. I see that she's comparing the similarities of diet, particularly in the country, then and now, but it does make her sound like she grew up in 1482, on a tenant farm.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book anyway, and there's a collection of medieval recipes in the back that I'm quite tempted to try. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in food, or British history. Om nom nom.

Book count: 24/50

Three Good Things

Title: Three Good Things On a Plate

Author: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Year published: 2012

Pages: 411

Time It Took To Read: About 10 days

This is the first Hugh book I've read since the River Cottage Fish Book. I wasn't massively impressed. I like the idea of cooking meals based on a few ingredients, as I don't like spending hours cooking with ALL THE THINGS. Saying that, his pheasant curry in the Meat Book is pretty damn good if you fancy something overly complicated that takes two days.

I like Hugh best in righteous fury against the meat and fish industry. This book has no such moral or ethical message. The three ingredient premise is fine, but most of the meals comprise rather more than three ingredients, not all of which I class as storecupboard standbys. He also mithers on about the amount of sugar in the dessert section. I dislike being told how to eat healthily by chefs, who make their fortune on tempting us into eating overpriced meals. There's no nutritional information on any of the recipes, which makes the knowing asides about sugar consumption ring rather false.

Each recipe takes up a double page, one page for instructions and ingredients, one for a large picture of the finished dish.The whole recipe to a page principle is one I heartily endorse, after having to hold a book open with elbow while mixing a cake and looking for the next instruction. 

I made a Courgette, Mozarella and Pasta bake for lunch for me and the kids today. It took 40 minutes, and I made slightly less than the recipe called for. It also included double cream and parmesan. I think it could have benefited from an onion fried with the courgette mush. It was nice, but rather bland. The kids refused to eat it. They prefer their pasta in swathes of tomato sauce. I enjoyed it though :-D

Book count: 14/50

Kitchen Diaries II

Title: The Kitchen Diaries II

Author: Nigel Slater

Year published: 2012

Pages: 532

Time It Took To Read: Three weeks

I have been obsessed with food and food writing since 2004. I moved in with my ex and his parents around then, and missed my mum's cooking dreadfully. My mum's cooked professionally since I was small, and always had a massive stock of food magazines and books. I started buying cookery and food books whenever I saw them. I have a fairly massive collection of them, and as I've grown older, I've grown pickier about what I buy. I've never been much of a fan of Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsey. However much they scream "home cooking", it always strikes me as restaurant food. I don't want some arty farty salad or dessert full of egg whites, I want stew and traybakes. I prefer inspiration to aspiration.
Nigel Slater is my absolute favourite food writer. Nigella Lawson comes a close second, but I've never been able to get her savoury recipes to work, though her baking is sublime and ALWAYS works. The first Kitchen Diaries is probably my favourite cook book, especially when I just want some inspiration rather than instruction. So, I snapped up Kitchen Diaries II in the sales after Christmas. Nigel's writing is sensual, and greedy. He likes the same sort of food that I do, and sometimes he likes to faff about for hours making a curry, and sometimes he has a lump of cheese with some bread. My own cooking tends to veer wildly between cooking roasts, spiced noodle soup, cakes and egg and chips. I try to give my kids something proper to eat every day, and rarely resort to convenience food - fish fingers and chips being my sole freezer standby, coz my kids inexplicably don't like pizza. Oh, and peas. This isn't out of some snobbish aversion to convenience: I just like cooking and I *REALLY* like eating.

The book took me three weeks to read because I only read food/cookery books when I'm eating. If I read them at other times, I become overwhelmingly peckish and end up gorging on biscuits. It's designed to be read throughout the year, with seasonal recipes that Nigel has actually cooked and eaten, almost every day. There are a lot of recipes from Simple Suppers and Simple Cooking, as he was developing the TV shows while he was writing, though it's not a tie-in book. It's autobiographical, with lush photography and it's personal. Nigel doesn't dictate.

I've cooked two recipes so far, both for Thursday night tea for me, my boyfriend and my kids. First was beer braised sausages. I don't like sausages unless they've been braised - a hotdog is my idea of hell. So, I fried some sausages and onions up, then put them in the oven for an hour with Guinness, stock and some sugar to get it to caramelise. I served it with mashed potato and some steamed winter greens. It was the nicest thing I've eaten this year, so I'll be making it a LOT more often! Fear my food photography!

 I also made a hazelnut chocolate slice. Well, it was supposed to be a slice, but I didn't have a small enough baking tin, so I made a regular 23cm round cake. I'm quite a slapdash, sweary, messy baker. I'd be rubbish on GBBO. I messed about a bit with the quantity of hazelnuts - the original recipe had half the praline blitzed and cooked with the cake and the other half used as topping, but I just made the cake-praline. I didn't trust the kids not to choke to death on whole nuts. The praline...was a shit...I used cling film on the tray so I didn't ruin the baking tray/make the praline taste of chips, and wished I'd done the same on the spoon (ruined) and the saucepan (probably ruined). I also burned my thumb. Bloody praline! Otherwise, the cake came together nicely, even though I mixed it while holding the toddler on one hip because he'd decided me making a cake was absolutely unacceptable behaviour. The topping was a nutella buttercream, which I made with my eldest's 'help' (i.e. he shoved his face in the bowl when I'd finished mixing it, after cowering in the corner screaming about the noise the mixer makes).
Here it is, in all it's wonky glory (another reason I'll never be star baker). It is VERY hazelnutty, as you'd expect considering the whole tub of nutella in the buttercream...

Apologies for the lack of recipes. I did look to see if they're in the public domain, and they're not...so go buy the book.

Book count: 12/50