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.

Payment Deferred by Joyce Holms: Book Review

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

I like puzzles and that is one of the things I like about crime fiction – solving the puzzle. The problem for crime fiction authors must be judging it correctly – how to drop the clues into the narrative in a subtle way so that the reader doesn’t get the solution too easily. I like being able to work it out for myself – but not too soon. In Payment Deferred, Joyce Holms has managed it well.

Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Bywater Books (30 Aug 2007)
Language English
ISBN-10: 1932859314
ISBN-13: 978-1932859317
Source: Gift from the author

This is the first of Joyce Holms’s series of books featuring Tam Buchanan and Fizz Fitzpatrick. Tam is a lawyer who spends Monday mornings giving legal advice at a community centre in Edinburgh. Fizz is soon to be a mature student of Law and much against Tam’s better judgement talks her way into becoming his assistant. She looks like a teenager, but is actually 26, with a talent for getting people to talk to her.

Murray Kingston, an old friend of Tam’s, is released from prison having served three years convicted of molesting his daughter after his wife’s death. When he turns up at the community centre wanting Tam to clear his name and help him get his daughter back it is Fizz who persuades Tam to review the evidence. Murray believes he was set up.

I thought this was a well plotted book,which moves at a good pace, with a good sense of location (Edinburgh and Berwick) and convincing characters, particularly Fizz and Tam – the relationship between the two of them developed from lukewarm to exasperation. Having solved the case they part:

“See you around Buchanan,” she said coldly, as the doors slid shut between them.

Buchanan sagged back against the wall and closed his eyes. He felt utterly depleted.

“See you around, Fizz”, he whispered to the empty landing, and the words blew away like dry leaves into the silence.

But even as he said it, he knew with absolute certainty that he wouldn’t be shot of her so easily.

After a minute or two he started to laugh, and couldn’t stop.

Their partnership was not at an end, as there are eight more books in the series. I’ve already read the most recent – Missing Link.

Details of all Joyce’s books are on her website.

Have You Read These Books?

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

Danielle at A Work in Progress has been enjoying reading bits of Michael Dirda’s Book by Book.  She writes:

In a chapter on the pleasures of learning, he lists books he calls “patterning works”.  These are not necessarily obvious classics, but he says that these are the books later authors regularly build on.  “Know these well, and nearly all of world literature will be an open book to you.”

She asks – How many of these have you read?  So I’ve listed them as follows:

The Bible (Old and New Testament–King James Version) — Yes, amazingly (to me) I have read all the Bible, although I scan read those boring bits in Leviticus etc.

Bulfinch’s Mythology (or any other accounts of the Greek, Roman, and Norse myths) — I’ve never heard of this but I have read quite a lot of myths in various books.

Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey — I’ve only read excerpts at school.

Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans — No.

Dante, Inferno — I started to read this a couple of years ago or so, when I was taking a short WEA course. When the course finished I was full of good intentions to carry on reading it, but that never happened.

The Arabian Nights — Again, I’ve read some of the tales.

Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur (tales of King Arthur and his knights) — Like Danielle I have read some versions of King Arthur. I would like to read the Penguin Classics version of The Death of King Arthur, which has been sitting on the bookshelves unread for quite a while now.

Shakespeare’s major plays, especially Hamlet, Henry IV, Part One, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream,The Tempest — King Lear. I have read all these and more both at school and whilst taking an Open University course on Shakespeare.

Cervantes, Don Quixote — No – I keep meaning to and it’s been on the TBR list for ages.

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe — Yes. I visited Lower Largo in Fife, where Alexander Selkirk lived. He was Defoe’s inspiration for writing the book. There is a statue of Selkirk on one of the houses – see Margaret’s Miscellany for photos.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels — No – I’m aiming to read it this year.

The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen — Yes – I loved these as a child when I first read them.

Any substantial collection of the world’s major folktales — Yes – again as a child when I was forever borrwing books of fairy tales from the library.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice — Yes, several times.

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland — Yes – and Through the Looking Glass, which one of my aunties gave me.

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes —  I have read Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles but not the short stories, although I’ve got a book of them on loan from the library at present.

Some gaps there in my reading, but I hope to fill some of them this year.

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.

Crime Fiction Alphabet – Letter B – W J Burley

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

This week I’ve chosen to feature W J Burley to illustrate the letter B for Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet. I knew of  his Wycliffe novels but had never read any, or watched any of the TV dramatisations, so I came to Wycliffe and the Last Rites with no preconceptions. I really don’t know why I never watched the 1990s TV series starring Jack Shepherd as Wycliffe, but as I didn’t I was able to form my own image of him in my mind directly from the book.

William John Burley was born in Falmouth, Cornwall in 1914. His first book was published in the 1968. All in all he produced 22 more Wycliffe books and 5 others. He died in 2002 whilst he was writing his 23 Wycliffe book. There is more information about him at this website – W J Burley.

Wycliffe and the Last Rites
Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Orion; New Ed edition (7 Nov 2002)
Language English
ISBN-10: 075284931X
ISBN-13: 978-0752849317
Source: I bought it

Description from the back cover:

A bizarre murder shakes the Cornish village of Moresk. Arriving at church on Easter morning the vicar discovers the body of a woman sprawled across the chancel steps. To add to the horror, the church is filled with the discordant sound of an organ chord, the notes apparently chosen at random and wedged down.

Has the church been desecrated by a Satanist ritual? Chief Superintendent Wycliffe sees the crime more as an expression of hatred directed at others in the community, besides the dead woman. His investigation, however, is frustrated at every turn, and when another horrific murder is committed Wycliffe thinks he knows who the killer is. But can he prove it?

My thoughts:

This novel has a strong sense of location, with many passages describing the beautiful countryside of Cornwall. The characters are also well defined – a small local community focussing on the twin sisters, Katherine Geach and Jessica Dobell. The relationship between them is strained, with Jessica having a sense of guilt about a hit and run accident she’d witnessed 16 years earlier and admitting that she hadn’t played fair with Katherine.  After their parents’ deaths Jessica had inherited the family farm and lived there with the Vintners and their son, a strange family filled with hatred and resentment over their reduced circumstances. Then there is the Vicar and his sister, who had been forced to move from their previous parish, the houseboat man, Lavin, who is badly disfigured following an accident, and Arnold Paul, the organist and his ‘brother’.

Detective Chief Superintendent Wycliffe is a quiet character who thinks things through before divulging his suspicions to his colleagues. He delegates tasks to his team leaving himself free to concentrate on the victim. To him ‘hope is an ultimate resource’. His evening walks are a necessity for him to ponder what he has discovered and he is calm and collected:

It was characteristic that he should walk rather than drive or be driven; he refused to allow his days to become crowded with events in a frenetic succession of images like a television screen, lacking even commercial breaks to aid digestion. (pages 44 -5)

His problem in finding the murderer is that all the possible leads pointed to a limited range of possible suspects but none of them matched his specification for the criminal. It seemed he had to believe the impossible. It’s a tightly plotted book, concisely and precisely written and I enjoyed it very much. I have one other book of Burley’s to read – Wycliffe and the House of Fear. After that I’ll be looking out for his other books.

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.