Category: Weekly Events

Weekend Cooking: Kitchen: Recipes from the Heart of the Home

Published on by Margaret17 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. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog’s home page. For more information, see the welcome post at Beth Fish Reads.

Nigella Lawson’s programmes and books never fail to entertain and inform. Her latest is Kitchen: Recipes from the Heart of the Home.

Click to watch this video

In the Introduction she writes about what the kitchen means to her and says:

A real chef would have an apoplectic fit and a nervous breakdown simultaneously – if forced to cook in my kitchen. The surfaces are cluttered, the layout messy and getting messier by the day (and, overall, I’ve no doubt my kitchen would fail many a health and safety test and law of ergonomics). But I love it, even if it is more of a nest than a room. (page xv)

Thank goodness for that , not only is Nigella a real woman she has a real kitchen too. I like the way she writes, with no fuss or nonsense and I like her mouth-watering recipes, that are easy to follow and a pleasure to cook. In this book she begins with a list of kitchen equipment that she regards as essential and non-essential too.

I previously posted a recipe from this book – Blondies, which my husband made. I bought him the book for Christmas and yesterday he made Strawberry and Almond Crumble, which is so delicious! We had friends round so I didn’t take a photo and we ate it all up! Here’s a photo from the book:
Strawberry crumble

The recipe is online at BBC Food Recipes.

Nigella writes:

The oven doesn’t, as you’d think, turn the berries into a red-tinted mush of slime, but into berry-intense bursts of tender juiciness. This is nothing short of alchemy: you take the vilest, crunchiest supermarket strawberries, top them with an almondy, buttery rubble, bake and turn them out on a cold day into the taste of an English summer. Naturally, serve with lashings of cream: I regard this as obligatory. (page 131)

I love that description of crumble as an ‘almondy, buttery rubble’, and I love this recipe. This book is one of Nigella’s best.

Teaser Tuesday

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

My teaser today is from Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary, which I’ve just started to read. This is the first Tommy and Tuppence mystery first published in 1922. It begins:

“Tommy, old thing!”

“Tuppence, old bean!”

The two young people greeted each other affectionately, and momentarily blocked the Dover Street Tube exit in doing so. The adjective “old” was misleading. Their united ages would certainly not have totalled forty-five. (Kindle Loc 56-61)

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event hosted by MizB of Should be Reading.

Sunday Salon – Current Books

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

This week I’ve finished reading two crime fiction books:

and posts on these books will be on my blog this coming week.

I’m still reading Eden’s Outcast: the story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson. So far I’ve been reading about Bronson Alcott and his unorthdox ideas about educating and bringing up children.  It was quite a coincidence I thought, when I was reading the Daily Express in the coffee shop recently and came across a review of Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and their Search for Utopia by Richard Francis. The reviewer describes this book as a

… richly textured history of the life and times of a back’‘to’‘nature community in 19th-century America. It was called Fruitlands, though Fruitcakes would have been more apt.
(Read more from this review.)

I haven’t got up to this venture so far in Eden’s Outcasts. There are many entries in the index under ‘Fruitlands’ so I expect to find out much more about it. His career as a teacher was not a success and it seems that his venture into communal farming wasn’t either.

I spent other reading time this week downloading more books onto my Kindle and have read the opening paragraphs of most of them. It really is so easy to get carried away and add more books to my to-be-read lists! But I only bought one book this week, so that’s not too bad.

It’s Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose and it’s been on my wish list for a long time. I read fairly quickly and know that I often read too quickly to take in all the detail. Prose writes that reading quickly can be ‘a hindrance‘ and that it is ‘essential to slow down and read every word‘. She also contradicts the advice to novice writers ‘to show, not tell‘, when ‘the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language‘. Using Alice Munro’s short story Dulse as an example, she says:

There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing. A lot of time would have been wasted had Alice Munro believed that she could not begin her story until she had shown us Lydia working as an editor, writing poetry, breaking up with her lover, dealing with her children, getting divorced, growing older, and taking all the steps that led up to the moment at which the story rightly begins.

Most interesting, I thought.

I still haven’t got used to Kindle’s use of locations as opposed to page numbers – the extract above is from Location 409 – 12. Nor have I mastered the technique of transferring my highlighted passages and notes from the Kindle to the computer!

I’m also reading The Matchmaker of Kenmare by Frank Delaney. This is an Advance Uncorrected Proof; the book is scheduled to be on sale on 8 February. It’s the first book I’ve read by Delaney, described by the publisher as a

… lush and surprising historical novel, rich as a myth, tense as a thriller …

From what I’ve read of it so far I’d go along with that description, except for the tenseness – but it’s early days yet. It’s set in 1943 in Ireland, a neutral country in the Second World War. It’s a long book and takes its time in setting the scene and introducing the characters. It promises well.

Booking Through Thursday – Firsts (on Friday)

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Although it’s now Friday I wanted to answer this Booking Through Thursday question:

Do you remember the first book you bought for yourself? Or the first book you checked out of the library? What was it and why did you choose it?

Teddy Robinson

I can’t remember which was the first library book I borrowed – it cold have been Dear Teddy Robinson by Joan G Robinson. My mum took me to the library before I started school and I remember that whichever book it was I liked it so much I didn’t want to return it and was only consoled when mum said I could borrow another book.

I think The Gloriet Tower by Eileen Meyler is the first book I bought for myself. I still have this hardback book. The description on the book jacket describes it as a

… tale for older children set in Corfe Castle a few years before the beginning of the Hundred Years War. The family there who found themselves drawn into a strange and cruel plot had no existence except in the Author’s imagination. Nevertheless a thin thread of fact runs through the story. The death of Edward II and the power wielded by his widowed Queen and her favourite Mortimer belong to history. The plot to ensnare the King’s brother and the merry-making and the dancing on the walls are true enough and true also is the story of the capture of the Earl of Kent.  … the castle and the wild heath, lapped by the waters of the harbour, are true until this day. They are there for all to see for themselves.

As far as I remember I chose this book because of its historical setting in a castle – I loved castles (still do), and I liked the cover picture. And so began my love of historical fiction. Looking at it today I think I’d like to read it once more.

Many years later I visited Corfe Castle in Dorset, now owned by the National Trust. It was swarming with people and I wished I could have seen it in years gone by when it wasn’t a tourist attraction.

Sunday Salon – the First Books of 2011

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

My reading this year has been from books I’d started in December and I’ve now finished these – Little Women by Louisa May Alcott and Just Me, Sheila Hancock’s autobiography. I borrowed Just Me from my local library. It interested me, not because Sheila is a ‘celebrity’ but because it’s about her life as a 75 year old woman, recently a widow and I wondered what she had to say. She comes across as a down-to-earth person, feisty and open about her views on life and her beliefs.

I’m still reading Eden’s Outcasts: the Story of Lousia May Alcott and her Father by John Matteson and I’m also reading a crime fiction book, Payment Deferred by Joyce Holms.

Much of my reading time this week, however, has been on my new Kindle. I’ve spent  hours learning how to use it, loading in free books, mainly classics and starting to read quite a few of them. I’ve bought one book – Ink in the Blood by Hilary Mantel and I’ll write a separate post about this remarkable little memoir in a few days’ time.

I’m enjoying the experience of reading on my Kindle but it certainly won’t replace reading printed books. For one thing I have plenty of those still waiting to be read and for another it still hasn’t got the feel of a ‘real’ book for me. That may come but for now the Kindle is another source of reading material and not a substitute.

I do like a number of things about it – the weight and ease of handling it is obvious. I also like being able to look up the meanings of words so easily – just a click and up pops a definition. I like being able to go immediately to where I’m up to and also find locations when I’ve highlighted passages. I haven’t tried making notes yet or using pdfs. I like the ease of acquiring books – too easy maybe for a bookworm like me, but so far I have been restrained – and of downloading samples. I like the customer reviews and the quick links to wikipedia and Google.

I can only think of a couple of downsides to using it and that is that the page size is a little on the small side for me – I’m ‘turning’ the pages too quickly on a larger font size and the smallest size is a bit too small for me. And it’s going to add to my TBR list very quickly!

Next up on my blog tomorrow –  Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet begins with the letter A.

Resolutions – Booking Through Thursday

Published on by Margaret15 Comments

Today’s Booking Through Thursday’s question is:

Any New Year’s reading resolutions?

  • Read what I like when I like.
  • Enjoy browsing in bookshops and online book sites.
  • Take part in the Reading Challenges I’ve joined, but not to worry if I don’t read many books for them, or if I don’t finish them.
  • Read books from my TBR shelves.
  • Restrict how many books I borrow from the library, because I often take books back unread.
  • Re-read some old favourites.

That looks like enough! :)