Food – Page 3 – BooksPlease

Teaser Tuesday: The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery

Published on July 27, 2010 by Margaret3 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB ofÂ Should Be Reading.

Share a couple or more sentences from the book youâ€™re currently reading. You also need to share the title of the book that youâ€™re getting your â€œteaserâ€ from â€¦ that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser youâ€™ve given!

This week I’ve been reading The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery. It’s a slim book, packed with richness – sumptuous, and full to over-flowing with words and images. It is verbose, florid and sensational – meaning that is celebrates all the sensations experienced relating to food.

Here is a description of one of my favourite foods:

… crimson in its taut silken finery, undulating with the occasionalÂ more tender hollow, with a cheerfulness about it like a plumpish woman in her party dress hoping to compensate for the inconvenience of her extra pounds by means of a disarming chubbiness that evokes an irresistible desire to bite into her flesh.

… my teeth tore into the flesh to splatter the tongue with the rich, warm and bountiful juice, whose essential generosity is masked by the chill of a refrigerator, or the affront of vinegar, or the false nobility of oil.

The raw tomato, devoured in the garden when freshly picked, is a horn of abundance of simple sensations, a radiating rush in one’s mouth that brings with it every pleasure. The resistance of the skin – slightly taut, just enough; the luscious yield of the tissues, their seed-filled liqueur oozing to the corners of one’s lips, and that one wipes away without any fear of staining one’s fingers, this plump little globe, unleashing a flood of nature inside us: a tomato, an adventure. (from pages 44-5)

Weekend Cooking – Watercress Soup

Published on July 4, 2010 by Margaret2 Comments

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. For more information, see the welcome post.

It’s been hot and sunny here all last week, but today it’s been raining on and off all morning. Just the right sort of weather to make watercress soup. This is my favourite soup to make because it’s so easy. The only preparation is peeling and chopping potatoes and onion, briefly sautÃ©ing themÂ in oil, then simmering them for about 15 -20 minutes in vegetable stock until cooked. Then add the watercress and simmer very briefly before blitzing theÂ soup with a hand blender in the panÂ – cooking the watercress like this means it keeps a fresh green colour.

watercress soup 1 — Simmer chopped potatoes and onion in vegetable stock

Weekend Cooking – Bread

Published on June 19, 2010 by Margaret11 Comments

Bread is one of my favourite foods. I’ve been baking my own bread for about 4 years now, using a breadmaker. I’ve tried making it by hand but all that kneading just defeats me and it is so much easier with a machine. It is very simple – you just put all the ingredients in the bread tin, choose the appropriate setting, press start and leave it to knead, prove and bake. My breadmaker has a little dispenser so you can add nuts, or dried fruit. Or there is a dough setting – doing all the hard work for you – and then you can shape the dough into rolls, baguettes, plaits, croissants or whatever takes your fancy and bake them in the oven.

I vary what I make, sometimes using a packet mix, which does give a very good result. My favourites are Cheese and Onion, Ciabatta and Mixed Grain. Other times I use fast acting dried yeast and the Very Strong White or Wholemeal flour, sometimes making half white and half brown bread. I recently bought a Country Grain flour – with malted wheat flakes, rye flour and malted wheat and barley flour and mixed that with the very strong white flour to make this loaf:

For this I used 1 teaspoon of yeast, 250 grams of the Country Grain flour, 225 grams of strong white flour, I½ teaspoons of sugar, 1¼ teaspoons of salt, 25 grams of butter and 340 ml of water and set the breadmaker on the wholemeal setting. It took 5 hours to make and bake. There is a rapid setting as well but I find that the bread doesn’t rise as much and it takes more yeast.

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs

Weekend Cooking

Published on May 2, 2010 by Margaret4 Comments

My food thoughts this weekend have been coloured by a passage I read in 100 Days on Holy Island: A Writer’s Exile by Peter Mortimer. He spent some time out at sea in a lobster boat catching not just lobsters but velvet crabs and large brown crabs. They’re brought to shore alive, because as Peter writes;

For some reason, humans consider it the height of culinary sophistication to boil a lobster alive in front of restaurant diners’ eyes. (page 89)

I’m not a vegetarian, although I’m edging that way. And this highlighted, yet again, for me the problem I have with being a carnivore – we have to kill a living being in order to eat it.To be confronted with it in person would be beyond me. I know the arguments for and against but having watched Jamie Oliver on one of his TV series (in Italy I think) kill a sheep I’ve only rarely bought lamb – also remembering my granddaughter’s disbelief that anyone could actually eat lamb!

I like crab but Peter Mortimer’s description of how he dealt with cooking the two crabs he was given at the end of his fishing trip also made me think hard about what I eat:

Millions of creatures and animals were slaughtered every day – humans, too. Here I was, anguishing over a brace of crabs. Except you could read of endless deaths. But needed to see only one.

Something of that morning’s experience, something of fishing’s inevitable brutality, had stayed with me, as if here I was about to square the circle, as if I were destined to perform this act of murder to resolve the day.

The two crabs interlocked their claws, as if seking safety in numbers. Their live presence filled the kitchen and though I turned my back on them it made little difference. (page 91)

He did the inevitable and cooked them, dropping them into cold water and brought them slowly to the boil as he’d read that was the most ‘humane’ way. And then he found that the smell of their boiling was nauseous and

… their clattering noise was intolerable. (page 91)

If I had to catch and kill my meal myself I’d soon become a vegetarian!

Weekend Cooking

Published on March 20, 2010 by Margaret8 Comments

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs.

This week I’m writing about chocolate – or more precisely Green and Black’s Chocolate Recipes. On the front cover:

Chocolate makes otherwise normal people melt into strange states of ecstasy. (John West)

Described as the “ultimate chocolate cookbook”, this book is filled with recipes from Chocolate Soup, Swedish Chocolate Coffee Lamb, Chilean Chocolate Sausages to Chocolate Drop Scones, Chocolate Cakes and Biscuits, Mousses and Truffles and many more.

Green and Black’s produce organic chocolate from cacao from the Mayan Indians in Belize. Throughout the book there are photos of not only the recipes, but also of the beans and the people who grow them with information about the growing and cultivation process.

There are chapters such as “Magic”, “Melting”, “Licking the Bowl”, “Mystical”, and “Wicked”. In the “Mystical” chapter there is this recipe called Dark with Coffee. It’s made with:

150g dark chocolate, minimum 60% cocoa solids, broken into pieces
2 tablespoons filter coffee
60g unsalted butter
3 large eggs separated
3 tablespoons castor sugar
Cocoa powder

Melt the chocolate with the coffee and butter in a heatproof bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Remove from heat (let it cool a bit) and stir in in egg yolks until smooth. Whisk egg whites into soft peaks, add sugar and whisk until stiff and glossy. Fold a ladleful into the chocolate and then add the rest of the egg whites carefully retaining as much air as possible until no white spots remain from the meringue.

Spoon into a serving bowl or individual dishes and chill for at least six hours. Dust with cocoa powder before serving.

This will serve up to six people, or unless you are like my husband, who made this recipe and spooned the mixture into two chocolate cups (but we didn’t eat it all in one go!) – truly a chocolate treat.

Weekend Cooking – French Cookbooks

Published on March 6, 2010 by Margaret8 Comments

Last week for my Weekend Cooking post I wrote about Italian cookbooks, so this week I thought I’d stay on the Continent and write about my French cookbooks. I only have four – two over 20 years old and two more recent. Three are by British food writers and one by a French woman writer.

The first one is Floyd on France – an old book with a photo of a young (well youngish) Keith Floyd on the cover. It was published in 1987 by the BBC based on his BBC 2 series of the same name. Keith Floyd hosted many TV programmes on cooking, combining food and travel. He died last September. This book includes his personal selection of some of his favourite French dishes. They’re French provincial recipes.

After a description of the “Principal Gastronomic Regions of France” the book follows the standard cookbook formula of recipes of Soups, Vegetables, Fish, Meat etc; recipes such as Shrimp Bisque made with live grey shrimps (I’ll never attempt that!) from Charente, a variety of omelettes, Carp in Wine Sauce from Burgundy, Jugged Hare with Tiny Dumplings from Alsace, and Nut Tart from Perigord.

I’m going to make his Leek Pie (from Charente) tomorrow.

(Click on the photo to see the recipe.)

Next The Frenchwoman’s Kitchen by Brigitte Tilleray, published in 1990. The brief biographical details given in the book are that she was born in Normandy and was a journalist before writing books on food. This is a beautiful book, one I love to peruse, admiring the photos of food and of France. It’s arranged by regions with information about the land and the people as well as recipes – such as Escargots Baked in a Wine Sauce from West France, Spicy Pear Pie from Normandy and Chicken with Cepes from The PyrÃ©nÃ©Ã©s .

French Leave by John Burton Race is an account of 2002, the year he and his family spent living in a farmhouse in the south-west of France. Another book full of beautiful photos and recipes. John is a two Michelin star chef, who was once a sous chef at Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, before opening his own restaurants. His book follows the seasons from Autumn to Spring, with recipes such as Cauliflower Soup with Truffle Oil, Loin of Veal with Pieds de Mouton and Crepes Suzette.

And last but not least Rick Stein’s French Odyssey. This is the book of Rick’s “journey of gastronique discovery from Padstow to Bordeaux and then on to Marseille”. It’s divided into a diary section and recipe chapters arranged by courses. Rick is one of my favourite TV chefs, and I would love to eat in one of his seafood restaurants in Padstow in Cornwall. There are recipes for classic French dishes such as Vichyssoise, Bouillabaisse, Cassoulet and Tarte Tatin as well as “new takes on traditional ingredients”, such as Fillets of John Dory with Cucumber and Noilly Prat and Prune and Almond Tart with Armagnac.