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Books > Health, Home & Family > Cookery / food & drink etc > General cookery > Cookery by ingredient
The weeds of the field and garden have two big advantages in the
kitchen: firstly, they are free to anyone; secondly, they contain
any amount of dietary goodness, often not so readily available from
the anaemic products of the hothouse and intensive farm. And what
is really needed is a set of recipes to turn them into everybody's
favourite supper. This Vivien Weise provides in spades. With plenty
of clear illustrations of the plants in question - ensuring that
every reader will be able to identify the quarry when out gathering
- Vivien has created a series of vegetarian dishes (all the recipes
are meat-free) with a defiantly modern slant: comfrey hamburgers,
daisy ginger soup, dandelion salad with a banana yoghurt sauce,
dead nettle aubergine spread, ground elder layered pancakes, and
many more. The great charm of this book is that you can go into the
vegetable plot with two baskets: one for dinner and one for the
compost heap. While gathering your supper, you weed the garden. In
the popular weed-cookery courses that Vivien gives at her home in
Germany, she demonstrates the culinary value of upwards of a
hundred different plants.
This sparkling book was first published in France in 2005 and has
been magnificently translated into English by the food writer and
historian Giles MacDonogh. It is part cookery book, part dictionary
and part cultural study of testicles: human and animal. Their
culinary use is the bedrock, although it would be impossible to
ignore the wider implications of these anatomical jewels. Blandine
Vie has a delicious way with words, and delight in exploring the
furthest corners of our vocabulary, both scurrilous and
euphemistic. The book opens with a discussion of balls, of pairs,
of virility and the general significance thereof; it then delves
more deeply into the culinary use of testicles, in history and
across cultures; there follows a recipe section that ranges the
continents in search of good dishes, from lamb's fry with
mushrooms, to balls with citrus fruit, to the criadillas beloved of
bullfighters, and Potatoes Leontine, stuffed with cocks' stones.
(There are, however, no recipes for cannibals.) To close, there is
an extensive dictionary or glossary, drawing on many languages,
which illustrates the linguistic richness that attaches to this
part of the body. It is in this section particularly that the
ingenuity and intelligence of the translator is on display as he
converts the French original into something entirely accessible to
the English reader.
Making cheese is an art, tasting cheese is a delight. Respect for
craft, raw materials and animals are how quality raw milk cheeses
obtain their full bodied flavours, rich in depth and complexity.
For this book, cheese refiner Van Tricht and cheesemaker De Snijder
went looking for the best raw milk cheeses. The result is a
selection of sustainable top products that are entirely handmade
and prepared the traditional way. Here, the authors talk about the
people and the stories behind 20 international raw milk cheeses,
while demonstrating their love for both the profession and the
product.
60 SMASHING RECIPES TO CELEBRATE TERRY'S CHOCOLATE ORANGE We all
love a Terry's Chocolate Orange. It's chocolatey. It's orangey.
It's round. It's a ball in a sea of bars. Not only is it great for
smashing open and sharing (or keeping hidden to enjoy alone), it
can be a deliciously indulgent ingredient in everything from
cookies to cakes, brownies to profiteroles! Celebrate the untapped
versatility of the Terry's Chocolate Orange with these 60 delicious
recipes!
For the forager, the seashore holds surprising culinary potential.
In this authoritative, witty book John Wright takes us on a trip to
the seaside. But before introducing us to the various species to be
harvested, he touches on such practicalities as conservation and
the ethics of foraging; safety from tides, rocks and food
poisoning; the law and access to the shore, our right to fish,
landing sizes and seasons; and equipment such as nets, pots and
hooks.
Next comes the nitty-gritty: all the main British seashore species
that one might be tempted to eat. The conservation status, taste
and texture, availability, seasonality, habitat, collecting
technique and biology of each species is covered; there are also
quite a few gratuitous but fascinating diversions. The species
covered include crustacea (brown shrimp, common crab, lobster,
prawn, shore crab, spider crab, squat lobster, velvet swimming
crab); molluscs (clams, cockle, dog whelk, limpet, mussel, oyster,
razor clam, winkle); mushrooms; plants (alexanders, babbington's
orache, fennel, frosted orache, marsh samphire, perennial wall
rocket, rock samphire, sea beet, sea buckthorn, sea holly, sea
kale, sea purslane, sea rocket, spear-leaved orache, wild cabbage,
wild thyme); and seaweed (carragheen, dulse, gut weed, laver,
pepper dulse, sea lettuce, sugar kelp, kelp).
Finally, there are thirty brilliant recipes. Introduced by Hugh
Fearnley-Whittingstall, "Edible Seashore" is destined to join the
other handbooks in the series as an indispensable household
reference.
For Sarina Kamini's Kashmiri family, food is love, love is faith, and
faith is family. It's cause for total emotional devastation when, ten
years after her Australian mother is diagnosed with Parkinson's
disease, unaddressed grief turns the spice of this young food writer's
heritage to ash and her prayers to poison. At her lowest ebb. Sarina's
Ammi's typed-up cooking notes become a recipe for healing, her progress
in the kitchen marked by her movement through bitterness, grief and
loneliness-her daal that is too fiery and lumpen; the raita, too sharp;
her play with salt that pricks and burns. In teaching herself how to
personalise tradition and spirituality through spice, Sarina creates
space to reconsider her relationship with Hinduism and God in a way
that allows room for questions. She learns forgiveness of herself for
being different, and comes to accept that family means change and
challenge as much as acceptance and love.
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