Author: Taryn Nicole

23
Sep
2015

My Year Of Cooking Slow

categories: Book Club, Books, Cheese, Duck, Slow, Soufflé, Soup, Truffles, Valli Little

It’s done, fini, that’s all folks. Nearly a year to the day I have made all of the recipes I selected from Valli Little’s book Slow. I bought this for our very first Tasty Reads bookclub meeting way back in August of 2014 and cooked the last recipe I had selected on 1 September 2015.

Recipes in book: 60

Recipes marked to cook: 34 38 39

Cooked to date 12 22 38 39

Recently Cooked

p6 Braised Beef Cheeks With Salsa Verde

Can you believe that I have lost the photos of this? I was so proud of having cooked Beef Cheeks. However, I deleted a whole heap of photos from both my camera and phone before we went on holidays and I think the Beef Cheeks and the Truffle Oil Mac and Cheese fell victim to some overzealousness on my part.

I have no really ooky factor about beef cheeks although I know many people do. My only concern with cooking mine was that everything I have read about them says you have to trim them really well. I feel I might have been a bit too meticulous in this area as I there seemed to be an awful lot of “trimmings” and not a lot of beef cheek by the time I had finished.

Also, In homage to one of my favourite Melbourne restaurants, MoVida, which does an amazing beef cheeks in red wine, I replaced the mashed potatoes suggested by Valli with a cauliflower puree which was delicious – mine was not as good as the one at MoVida but that one is sublime!

Anyway, I was so glad I made this, the beef was meltingly tender and mellow and the Salsa Verde was zingy and bright. The creamy smooth cauliflower puree contrasted beautifully with both. This was amazing. Here is Valli’s picture:

p8 Braciola

Because I am not a millionaire, I did not buy a fillet of beef for this. However because I am obsessed with little food, I made a mini version of Valli’s Braciola and it was super! I used thinly pounded steaks, rolled up the filling and quickly seared them. The stuffing, which is salami, cheese and sundried tomato is to die for. This would make a lovely canapé.

p10 Steak with Wild Mushroom Sauce

This is exactly what it says on the box. Steak with Mushroom Sauce. If you like Steak with Mushroom sauce, you will like this.

p22 Lamb & Apricot Tagine

One of the dishes Dani has brought to the bookclub meetings was a Lamb and Apricot Tagine. In my mind, it was the one from Persiana and when I made that one a while ago I was very disappointed as it was not nearly as nice as my memory of Dani’s. I mentioned this the next time I saw her and she said said had made the Valli Little one. I made this one a few weeks later and it was maybe still not as good as Dani’s but better than one in Persiana. Kudos to Valli Little for an amazing delicious recipe. Just no one tell Sabrina Ghayour. Because I love her.

p24 Massaman Curry Lamb Shanks

This is such a good dish for winter! Slow cooked, fragrant, hearty. Magnificent! I swapped out the peas in the recipe for beans and served with bread instead of rice.

p28 Lamb En Croute

This was the last recipe I made from Slow and it was a lovely way to finish. I was a little disappointed as even though I followed the recipe to the letter, by the time the pastry cooked, the lamb was over cooked for my taste. Next time I make this I will cut down the sear time on the lamb. And pray. p36 Macaroni Cheese with Truffle Oil

Sorry, this is another photo from the book. There is a story attached to this though. I went to…ok…in Australia we have two main supermarkets, and then we have the IGA’s and then we have the European Cheap Supermarket. Now I am quite fond of the European Cheap Supermarket except for one thing. The people who shop there, in my locale anyway are….ok….I’m going to sound elitist and snooty here but just between you and me…they’re all kinds of trashy.

To wit – the other day I went in there and was nearly barrelled over by some dude stealing a pack of biscuits. I think he thought that my going in through the turnstile would negate his charging out but no, Einstein, it doesn’t work like that and you triggered all the alarms anyway.

If I was more like a commando instead of totally living inside my head I could have taken him down and been a citizen’s arrest hero. Then again, he was stealing fake Tim Tams from Aldi. Hardly a master criminal. I like to think that if I was going to launch myself into a life of crime, I’d at least go for the real Tim Tams.

Anyhoo, all this is just cotton candy. I went into the cheap European….oh, WTF, I’ve already outed it as Aldi, a few months ago and they were selling truffles.

Only thing was no price on the truffles and, being Aldi, no one to ask. So, I took it up to the counter, along with my six slabs of their Fair Trade Dark Chocolate (amazing) and my six bottles of their Tudor Pinot Noir (even more amazing) and asked the price. Because you know…truffles…that bottle could be a thousand dollars. I’m kinda doubting that in Aldi but you know…c’est possible.

“Seven ninety nine” drawls the sales clerk.

“I’ll take ’em” I say.

And that should have been the end of it. Buyer. Seller. Agreement. Capitalism at it’s finest.

Until some toothless old hag who was behind me in line decided to get in on the act. I almost expected her first line to to “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes” But instead she snatched the bottle from the cashier’s hand and began shrieking

“Why are you paying eight dollars for such a small jar? What’s in that?”

“It’s truffles”

“So what’s that then?”

“Well…they’re…they taste kind of like the most mushroomy mushroom you ever ate but they grow…”

“I could buy a kilo of mushrooms for that”

“They’re not mushrooms”

“You said they were”

“No I didn’t”

“Well, I hope you know how to cook them better than you know how to explain them”.

Well, I hope you fuck off and die you nosey old bag. I’m sorry I’m not buying eye of newt or tongue of dog or any other ingredient I’m sure you are far more familiar with.

I used one truffle for something else then topped up the jar with some olive oil. After about a week it became quite truffle-y Then I used that oil on my Mac and Cheese. And it was good. But you know…Mac and Cheese = comfort food goodness with, or without, truffle oil.

p44 Meatballs with Heavenly Mash

Mmmm..meatballs. And that mash was heavenly. It contains cream, fontina cheese and butter. Need I say more?

p62 Roast Quail with Split Pea Dhal

Sounds very exotic. Tasty pretty ordinary. It was the first time I had cooked quail. It might be the last. I did not care for the curry butter at all.

p68 Duck Cassoulet

I hadn’t originally planned on making this, but I had some confit duck legs and some white beans from something else so and I thought why not? A better question would have been why? Not my favourite. By a long shot. I think it was the olives. I normally love olives but I just don’t think they worked in this dish.

p88 Mushroom Soup with Garlic Bread

This was delicious.

p92 Cauliflower Cheese Soup

I found this too much. Too much cream. Too much cheese. Who knew either of those things existed? But apparently they do.

p104 Pumpkin, Goat’s Cheese and Onion Marmalade Jalousie

This was very tasty. I am already thinking about how to do mini versions which I think would be adorable. My only problem with this is that I find most bought onion marmalades too sweet. This one was no exception. I think I will have to start making my own. Sigh. Another thing to add to my increasing list of things I need to cook from scratch!

This is one of my favourite photo’s. I think it turned out really well.

p106 Twice Baked Souffles

The Francophile in me really wanted to like these. The rest of me found them a bit heavy. Which reminds me. Back when I used to work in the hell-hole, the area I was in merged with another department. And as part of the two groups getting to know each other we had to do this dumbarse thing where we each had little cards printed up with a picture on one side and a fact about you that no one might know on the other. And you had to swap them with everyone you met. Because we were all five. I mean really? REALLY? We’re playing SWAP CARDS? FFS people! Anyway my “fun” fact was “I am a Francophile and have just read Harry Potter in French”. And I thought that was kind of cool until one of the biggest dumbarses looked at my card and said “Francophile? Is that like a Pedophile?” For a vague second I knew exactly how those people who mow down their work mates with machine guns must feel like. It was the kind of event that made me want to re-evaluate every choice I had ever made in my life that had lead me to be in that place, at that time, swapping dumbarse cards with the terminally stupid.

p110 Mushroom & Potato Tarts

These. Were. Awesome.

Damn, they were good! I need to get these on high rotation.

p116 Bagna Cauda with Baby Vegetables

Mmmmm…salty creamy dip with vegies AKA – All the good words. I loved this. And the dip with the eggs? Out of this world good.

p118 Instant Fondue with Roast Vegetables

And just when you thought the best was past, Valli goes and saves the best to last!

I went totally over the top with this. Valli’s suggestion is roast vegetables. Which I had but I also had grissini sticks, twiggy salami, roasted olives, potato chips…anything that can be dunked, should be dunked in this. This is not only super tasty but so much fun. What a fabulous appetiser, give everyone a fork and allow them to tuck in!

I don’t think it’s any surprise that I have loved cooking from this book and there are so many recipes I will cook over and over. My favorites? The fondue above, the beef cheeks, the radicchio and gorgonzola risotto, the fish pie, the feta baked mushrooms, the recipe that made me like carrot soup. This may be a little book but it is jammed with great recipes.

Hmm…our December book club was going to be a recap on all of the books we have cooked. I am so tempted to do the instant fondue….

What do you think? Anything grab your fancy? What would you make?

Previous recaps of Slow are

Here

and

Here

I feel like I have been a bit more vitriolic this time. I’m putting it down to reading that Marie Kondo book on The Magical Art of Tidying Up. Don’t even get me started on her particlular brand of insanity but I think maybe I am cleaning out my closet mentally as well as physically.

Next up, I will be focussing on cooking through Persiana which is still, to my view, the best book we have ever done at Tasty Reads even though I liked Vall’s Lamb and Apricot Tagine better. See you with the results of that in a year.

Oh, do you have a favourite post on here? In October I will be doing a LIVE reading of a post at a local literary event. I have a couple of posts that I think might go down well in front of a live audience but please let me know what you think. And if you are local, please don’t come, I am terrified enough about doing this as it is.

Have a great week!

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14
Sep
2015

Nuwara Eliya & A Tea Punch Cocktail

categories: 1970's recipes, A-Zof Cooking, Books, Cocktail, Peaches, Sri Lanka, Travel, Whiskey

If you were looking to write a Gothic novel, your first choice of location would most likely not be tropical Sri Lanka. Because the tropes of Gothic novels include storms, rain, mist and fog and Sri Lanka is all sunshine, white sand, blue water and palm trees right?

Wrong, so wrong. Welcome to Nuwara Eliya.

Situated “up country” Nuwara Eliya is about as far away most people’s idea of a “tropical” country as you can get. This is a famous tea growing district – all of the bushes you can see in the photo above are tea plants. We were there for three days and the weather was like this the entire time, all low swirling clouds, fog, mist and rain.

As we climbed higher and higher into the hills, the weather changed from hot and sunny, to cold and gloomy. It was as if you were entering a different, very isolated world – even though the nearest town was only a few kilometers away and you could usually get a decent wifi signal.

As well as the weather, a good Gothic novel should be set in a (preferably haunted) old mansion or manor house. Nuwara Eliya is nicknamed Little England and The Hill Club, where we stayed, would not look out of place on the Yorkshire Moors.

I’ve read enough Agatha Christie and watched enough episodes of Midsomer Murders to know that the English Manor house is actually a hot bed of murder and sexual intrigue. If it’s not a pyromaniac mad woman in the attic, it’s something nasty in the woodshed!

The Hill Club may well be the one place where the sun hasn’t set on the British Empire. Staying there is like taking a step back in time. I suspect that not even in Britain today are there many hotels where one wall in the bar is adorned with a large portrait of the Queen and another with an equally large photo of Winston Churchill. And this is not someone’s idea of a decorating a hotel with some kitschy memorabilia from the days of Empire. This is a Hotel from the days of Empire. Actually, sorry, not a hotel at all. A gentlemen’s club.

The olde-worlde atmosphere only contributed to the feeling that you had somehow strayed into either some sort of time slip stream or parallel universe. I would not have been entirely surprised to wake and find myself back the 1940’s or to see a ghostly figure roaming the halls. Speaking of which, there was also a long corridor which could have come direct out of The Shining:

Add to this some flickering lights and power outages caused by the storm and you have almost the perfect place to gather around the fire in the reading room either to read your favourite Gothic novel by candlelight or to see who can make up the spookiest story. Who knows, it may even be the next Frankenstein!

But telling ghost stories can be thirsty work, so whilst you are doing that you need the perfect libation to not only wet your whistle but give you some Dutch courage in the event that a large hound starts baying outside or the tap, tap, tapping on the window turns out not to be a tree branch but your dead lover come to woo you from the grave.

All of which, after the longest intro, ever means, I made us a cocktail.

I wanted to make something with tea to highlight the wonderful produce from Nuwara Eliya. And, in a wonderful piece of serendipity, the very next chapter of The A-Z of Cooking contained a recipe for a tea punch. (Yes, we are still only up to D – Dips and Drinks).

Sadly, the Tea Punch in The A-Z of Cooking was non-alcoholic. So, I boozed it up. Because in my mind, a punch needs to have a little punch if you know what I mean.

My only dilemma with this was what to use as the “spike” for my tea. Absinthe would have been the Byronesque choice however I can’t bear the taste of it nor the big shirts with frilly collars.

Arrack was my next choice because I brought a bottle home with me, but that would be no fun for any of you. Arrack is a Sri Lankan spirit made from toddy, which is the fermented juice from a coconut palm.

I then found this wonderful article in Gothicked which confirmed not only spiked tea as a Gothic drink of choice but also whiskey. I still had some Jameson’s from when I made the Emerald Presse so I used that.

The original recipe called for Orange Bitters, I had Rhubarb Bitters so I used them instead.

Whether you are in a Gothic Manor house or at home just reading about them, this is a really nice drink – the combination of the tea, whiskey and ginger give it a dark, smokey flavour whilst the peach and orange adds some sweetness and a lovely bright tropical colour!

If you are a reader and you were interested in learning a bit more about Sri Lanka, particularly the civil war that tore that beautiful country apart in the ’80’s and ’90’s you might want to take a look at this book:

I read it when we were there which made the story that much more real, particularly as completely by chance we stayed at two of the places, Mount Lavinia and Havelock Town which feature in the book.

And if anyone is inspired by this post to write a spooky Gothic tale or locked room murder mystery set in Nuwara Eliya, please let me know, I would love to read it!

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Tea Punch Cocktail

Print Recipe

A tropical cocktail with a dark heart

Author: Taryn Fryer

Ingredients

Scale

50ml strong Ceylon tea
30ml whiskey
30 ml peach juice
30 ml orange juice (about 1/2 an orange)
5 drops Rhubarb Bitters
Dry Ginger Ale
Orange and peach slices to garnish

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Instructions

Mix the tea, whiskey and fruit juices.
Top with the dry ginger ale.
Add the bitters and stir to mix.
Garnish with orange and peach slices

06
Sep
2015

Oeufs A La Cantalienne & Greens with Horseradish Dressing

categories: Eggs, France, Salad, Salad Dressing

What do you do when, you are about 30 seconds away from your front door and realise that you have left two essential ingredients for your planned dinner in the fridge at work?

First, swear.

A lot.

Then drum up an emergency supper of Oeufs a La Cantilienne and serve that with a Salad of Bitter Greens with Horseradish Dressing!

Happy days!

How eight hours can change you. I started the day off being super organised! For dinner, I had planned to celebrate Meatless Monday by making the cauliflower and chickpea “meat” balls from the Meatball book which is our latest selection from the Tasty Reads book club. I’d read the recipe that morning and realised I was short a few ingredients – namely basil and parsley for the green sauce which was going to accompany the meatballs.

I had tasted this green sauce on a visit to the Meatball and Wine Bar and it is SENSATIONAL. As far as I was concerned, no green sauce, no non-meatballs. You can kind of see the sauce in this picture. The man in the street looks pretty taken by them too!

But I digress. We’ll get to the meatball book in due course. Today is all about the eggs. And the cheese and the horseradish dressing.

Anyway, back to my super-organised morning, I was early that day so I stopped in at the supermarket beside the station and bought my herbs. And stored them in the work fridge for the day.

Where they stayed.

What to do? I wasn’t going back to get them. So, another dinner needed to be pulled out of the ingredients I had in the fridge and the pantry.

Now I ‘m going to let you in on a secret. I actually had the ingredients for a very posh and trés français version of the Oeufs a La Cantalienne. Because I plan my food within an inch of my life it was on my menu plan for later in the week. But you could also make a perfectly delicious version of this from ingredients you are likely to have in your fridge. It’s a great emergency meal!

So what are Oeufs a La Cantalienne? It’s a French Baked Cheesy Eggs. The version I was going to make had duck eggs, comté cheese and créme fraiche. But it would be equally delish with normal eggs, cheddar or swiss (gruyere) cheese and cream or sour cream. Of course the flavour will be slightly different with each variation but hey, it will all be good!!!

What’s more, these will be on the table in about 20 minutes. Just enough time for you to pour yourself a glass of vino and make your Bitter Greens Salad with Horseradish Dressing.

And you know. Eggs, cheese and cream. That’s never going to be bad. About 12 minutes in the oven is about perfect. I got a bit distracted by ~~a reality cooking show on the telly~~ something really important and end up cooking mine for about a quarter of an hour but in another plus, this recipe is pretty forgiving!

The bitter green salad with horseradish salad is a perfect accompaniment to this. I used rocket (arugula), kale, spinach and radicchio in mine but whatever greens you have in your fridge will be fine. This is not a meal to be too precious about!

The horseradish dressing is….OMG…just make it. Make it now!!! So good. So, so good. I have made this salad, or versions of it about a million times since – with eggs, avocado, steamed beans and broccoli, grilled salmon…and everytime it has been amazing. It’s my new favourite thing.

And, in a reversal of the initial dilemma of leaving things at work, there was a morning when when I got to work and realised I had left the horseradish dressing for my salad in the fridge at home. Well, there was no eating the salad without the dressing, I kept it in the fridge, bought my lunch and brought the dressing in the next day! That’s how good this dressing is. If it wasn’t totally unseemly, I would be licking it off the spoon. (I totally did that when no one was looking).

Oh, and when I finally made the non-meatballs? Total let down. The green sauce was pretty good but the balls were like the worst falafel I’ve ever eaten.

I should have just made more eggs!

Oeufs A La Cantalienne And Bitter Greens With Horseradish Dressing

Print Recipe

A great emergency supper. The Oeufs A La Cantalienne can be made as fancy or as simple as you like and the salad has quickly become a firm favourite!

Author: Taryn Fryer

Ingredients

Scale

For the Oeufs A La Cantalienne

2 duck eggs //eggs
30g Comté cheese//sharp cheddar//gruyere
1 tbsp crème fraiche //sour cream //cream
pinch of nutmeg (optional)
For the Bitter Greens Salad
2 tbsp mixed toasted seeds – I used pepitas, sunflower seeds and flax seeds
2 cups bitter greens – I used rocket (arugula), kale, spinach and radicchio
1/2 red onion thinly sliced

For the Dressing

3 tbsp creme fraiche
2 tbsp fresh grated horseradish or 1 tbsp prepared horseradish
1 tbsp champagne or white wine vinegar

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Instructions

For the Ouefs A La Cantalienne

Preheat oven to 220°C.
Grate the cheese and scatter half over the base of a buttered individual baking dish.
Separate the eggs, keeping yolks intact.
Whisk whites to soft peaks. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg.
Fold in the remaining cheese.
Pour mixture into the baking dishes and make an indentation in the middle of mixture.
Place an egg yolk in each indentation.
Add a 1/2 tbsp of crème fraiche by the side of each yolk.
Bake for 10 minutes or until golden and set.

For the Salad

Toss the greens and onion together.
Whisk the crème fraiche, horseradish and vinegar together until smooth.
Just before serving, toss through the greens and onion.
Top with the toasted seeds.

Notes

The dressing will make much more than you need for one salad. You’ll want to use the extra on everything you eat over the next week!
If you are making this for more than 2 people you can cook it in one large baking dish, you might just have to adjust the cooking time to be a bit longer.

Nutrition

Serving Size: 2

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25
Aug
2015

Birthday Beatles Cake

categories: 1960's recipes, Birthday Cake, Cake, Margaret Fulton Cookbook

They say it’s your birthday
It’s my birthday too, yeah
They say it’s your birthday
We’re gonna have a good time
I’m glad it’s your birthday
Happy birthday to you

Hey there

So yes, it was my birthday…and I made us all a cake. And, oh boy, what a cake. Just in case you thought that after that weird stroking meat hand we were done with Margaret Fulton? No way. No how. Nyet.

Because I saved the best for last. Because back in the 60’s Margaret Fulton made a very special cake. Which I totally copied for my birthday. And it was awesome.

What made it so good?

The burnt sugar cake? Incidentally a first for me (and utterly delicious)…

The caramel icing?

That it came with four….huh…maybe fab four friends to help get the party started?

Yes, I made The Beatles Cake!!!! Which of course, you already knew if you read the heading so my attempt at suspense was all for nought.

Here is Margaret Fulton’s original version, made back in the day.

And here is mine:

I think I did a pretty good job of this. I was very pleased with my Beatle cookies. Dare I say they may possibly even look slightly more like their counterparts than Margaret’s original? And I know they’re not going to win any form of identikit prize and it may not be the face of Jesus on a grilled cheese sandwich but it’s almost recognizably The Beatles. If you squint. And look from far away…

I found the recipe here, although the burnt sugar cake is also included in the Margaret Fulton cookbook.

http://www.womansday.co.nz/food/recipes/everyday-recipes/2013/7/retro-recipes-for-a-beatles-party/

I changed it only slightly, I used the same icing pen for the eyes as I used to pipe the yeah, yeah, yeah biscuits and I rolled my liquorice flat (9-10 seconds in the microwave and it became soft enough to roll out). Then I cut the hair shapes out with a pair of scissors.

Also, the template in the link did not work so I had to make my own face templates. I looked at a few things and I decided my best option was actually to use some of the images I found looking under Beatles cartoons. I printed them, cut them out, then cut around them to get the face shapes.

I felt very sorry for Ringo. The original recipe called for a peanut for each of the other Beatles’ noses and THREE cashews for Ringo’s! Too cruel Margaret, too cruel. I used a whole peanut for Ringo and a half peanut for the others.

Beatles Cake Ringo — Beatles Cake – Ringo

To be honest with you I did not think I could pull this one off. There were so many points of worry – the shape of the cookies, decorating them, the right amount of burnt for the burnt sugar cake, the caramel icing. This whole thing was FRAUGHT with a lack of confidence in myself more than any real complexity in the cooking. I mean it wasn’t the easiest thing I have ever made but it also was not as hard as I made it out be in my head.

Beatles Cake - George — Beatles Cake – George

The secret was like most things to give myself plenty of time and to break the recipe into little pieces. I baked the cookies on Friday night, baked the cake on Saturday and did the icing and all the cookie decorations on Sunday. For me this was about right. I think trying to do more would have lead to madness.

Did I mention this was delicious? And in the end….haha…worth all the bother. Margaret Fulton sure knew how to make a cake! It was also HUGE.

But only fitting this time round to finish some words from my favourite Beatle, George Harrison:

All the world’s a birthday cake,
So take a piece….but not too much

Wise words to live by.

Have a great week!

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17
Aug
2015

Home Cooking – Laurie Colwin

categories: Books

You know how sometimes you meet someone and you just click? And you want to spend the rest of your life sitting on a sun drenched balcony with a glass of crisp rosé and maybe a some lovely fresh seafood just listening to that person talk? Because right from the get go you recognise that this person is charming, delightful, witty and that you will be friends forever?

These are the people who one of my childhood reading friends, Anne of Green Gables would have called “kindred spirits”. And that is EXACTLY how I felt whilst reading Laurie Colwin‘s Home Cooking.

Oh, yeah, I’m back! I hope you all enjoyed the Margaret Fulton holiday special. Particularly as I only got about a third of the way through the book…so plenty more where that came from, even if it is about a year away. Holiday deets will be forthcoming but first Home Cooking because like rust, I never sleep and I pretty much wrote this whilst on holiday almost immediately after closing the last page….or whatever the Kindle equivalent of that is.

I LOVED this book. And I really want to be BFF’s with Laurie Colwin.

Wanna know why?

Laurie Colwin is a little bit like me

As frightening as that may be, reading parts of this book was a little like talking to myself. I could just imagine us chatting and having so many of those “Me too” moments vis a vis….

“I love to stay home…I love to eat out, but even more, I love to eat in”
“In foreign countries I am drawn into grocery shops, supermarkets and kitchen supply houses”
“Dinner alone is one of life’s pleasures”
“There is no such thing as really bad potato salad”
“At night some people count sheep and others read mysteries. I lie in bed and think about food. Often I make up menus. Sometimes I invent recipes”
“My favourite party is a tea-party”

She also shares some characteristics with some of my best friends both in real life and my favourite food bloggers!

She is opinionated

“As everyone knows, there is one way to fry chicken correctly. Unfortunately, most people think their method is best , but most people are wrong. Mine is the only right way,”
Grilling is like sunbathing. Everyone knows it is bad for you but no one ever stops doing it”
“I do not like to eat al fresco. No sane person does, I feel”
There is nothing to be said about (gingerbread) mixes. They are uniformly disgusting”

She has a sparkling wit

I was once romantically aligned with a young man who I now realise was crazy, but at the time, he seemed…romantic”
For eight years I lived in a one room apartment a little larger than the Columbia Encyclopedia”
“It is possible to get nasty food everywhere, but with the exception of a few eccentric meals fed me by my peers, the only awful thing I ate in England was a packaged pork pie; but then a person who eats a packaged pork pie gets what she deserves”
I am a great champion of English food, but what I was given at these dinners was neither English not food as far as I could tell.”

She writes about food like a dream

“The smell of chocolate bubbling over and slightly burning is one of the most beautiful smells in the world. It is subtle and comforting and it is rich. One tiny drop perfumes a room like nothing else”
“Soup embraces variety. There are silken cream soups that glisten on the spoon and spicy bisques with tiny flecks of lobster”

I was so sad at the end of the book to discover that Laurie Colwin passed away in 1992 aged only 48 that I cried a little. After loving every word of this wonderful book, I truly felt like I had lost a friend. And whilst I will never be able to a share cucumber sandwiches with anchovy butter with her in a teeny apartment in Greenwich village I feel like I have found a “kindred spirit” whose wit and wisdom will stay with me long after I have closed the last page of “Home Cooking”.

As I read this on holiday, I have not yet cooked anything from Home Cooking, but as soon as I do I will tell you all about it. I have however ordered the sequel to this book, called More Home Cooking and, based on Laurie Colwin’s recommendation, I have also moved Elizabeth David’s book English Bread and Yeast Cookery to the very top of my wishlist. In the meantime, the folks over at Food52 recently had their own Laurie Colwin celebration. You can read about that over in their site.

And I will leave you with some more lovely words from this wonderful writer.

No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.

Please note that whilst I received my copy of this book for review for free via Net Galley, my opinions are, as always, entirely my own.

Have a great week!

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Author: Taryn Nicole

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Ingredients

Instructions

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Oeufs A La Cantalienne And Bitter Greens With Horseradish Dressing

Ingredients

For the Oeufs A La Cantalienne

For the Dressing

Instructions

For the Ouefs A La Cantalienne

For the Salad

Notes

Nutrition

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