New Food Books

Posted at Foodie Friday

I hesitate to call it a cookbook, because although it does happen to contain recipes, that's not necessarily what the focus is.

I'm a bad girl, I have cooked some lovely new things this week but have not had the time nor patience to photograph and write out recipes. Our visitors have left now so we're slowly getting back into the swing of things with an empty house. There will be more actual food in the near future, especially as my darling husband just ordered The Flavor Bible for me! I'm really excited!

The book I've been reading is called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. I've been reading it on and off since it arrived a couple of weeks ago. I've talked about various chapters of the book to anyone around me who will listen. Whenever I open my mouth my husband announces that he doesn't want to hear another word about the book and would read it himself if he were that interested. Hurrumph.

I've always wanted my own vegetable garden, but now I'm more determined than ever. I just need to wait to get out of the apartment and back to somewhere with a backyard. I want to learn to make cheese, Kingsolver makes it sound so, well, awesome.

More importantly she stresses the importance of locally grown food. Not just in flavour or vitamin content, but also as being important to the economy and environment. Living in Germany has its challenges on this front. The food in the commissary is mostly imported from the US, I've always had a hard time with that. I shop on the economy quite a lot, but there are some American things that my poor darling husband cannot live without. Similarly there are a number of things from the UK that I miss, but they're less readily available so I am generally forced to do without (until I get visitors bearing gifts of course!) however it's been nearly 3 years (2 in the US and 1 in Germany) so I'm pretty used to it by now, my poor husband has only been away from the US for a year. But because of the exchange rate I simply cannot afford to do all of our grocery shopping on the Germany economy.

There is a market in the center of Heidelberg, but their prices are quite expensive. There is however a small roadside stall near to where I live that has locally grown fruit and veg. As a bonus they're very cheap too.

When we return to the states I'm going to be paying more attention to the locations of farmers markets and things like that. I'd also like to join a farm co-op if there is one nearby!

Anyway, back to the book! I found it to be completely inspiring. It kinda makes me want to go and buy a farm, it has reinforced my recent obsession with squashes! It makes me miss fresh eggs. There's one part where Kingsolver talks about her daughter watching a chickens egg exit from you-know-where, it make me laugh so hard because I remember watching our hens lay their eggs when I lived with my parents. They'd run around squawking for a few minutes and making a fuss before going inside their house and pushing out an egg.

I can't really talk about it much more without re-writing the whole book. I recommend it for anyone who is remotely interested in food, where their food comes from and the state of America's farming industry. Also if you're into gardening, raising livestock or just want a good laugh.

I also received a copy of Jamie's America from my parents for my birthday.

This one is of particular interest to me because I'm not American but I'm surrounded by them all day, every day (le sigh). I have a fascination with regional foods in the US, because quite frankly I know very little about what you guys eat. I'm in love with Louisiana (although I have never been there) and there is a whole chapter devoted to their food customs as well as many others.

I haven't yet had a chance yet to read through the entire thing, but my husband was very excited at the presence of Jumbalaya so it looks like it's going to be a hit.


I've set up a tumblog to link to interesting things I find or want to keep, mostly recipes, sewing patterns and quotes at the moment. Sort of like online bookmarks. It's here if you're interested.

Random funny of the day, slightly food related - When I breastfeed Mikey before his nap or before bedtime (yes I still nurse my 2 year old, I never expected to be doing that) he's decided now over the past few days that teddy needs to nurse before he does. So he presses teddy's nose on (in absence of an easily visible mouth) to nurse for like a minute, Mikey says "Yum" (presumably because teddy does not have the gift of language, probably due to the aforementioned mouth, or lack thereof) and then has his own turn. It is too cute.

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Banned Books Week 2009

September 26−October 3, 2009 is banned books week in the US. This week you should be celebrating the freedom you have as an American to be able to read any literature that you so choose. It is to teach and celebrate First Amendment rights, the power of literature and free society. I'm sometimes unsure of how to write about this, I'm not officially an American Citizen as of yet, but my son is. So excuse me if I say "you" instead of "we" at some points.

This is something very close to my heart, not just because my husband is one of the many who serve in the army and fight for freedom, but also because I believe in the First Amendment, freedom of intellect - the freedom to access information and express ideas, I am looking toward training to be a librarian and finally of course, the fact that I love to read.

I do not believe that anyone else has the right to restrict books or information that I, or others, would like to access, or to have books removed from schools and libraries because they do not personally agree with them. We are a diverse people, we all have different standards, morals, ideas. That is the beauty of a free society and it is something that must be preserved.

The Color Purple, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, A Clockwork Orange, Catcher in the Rye,The Great Gatsby,To Kill a Mockingbird and Ulysses, wonderful examples of amazing and teachable literature (and books that I have both read and studied extensively in school at some point, be it highschool level or degree level) that have been challenged, restricted, censored or banned in the US at some point since their publication. I would not like my son to grow up in a world where he is not permitted to read books such as these, and other pieces of classic literature.

Yet I do understand why some people would want certain books restricted from libraries. They worry for their children, books such as Harry Potter or And Tango Makes Three do not line up with their views or what they would like to expose their children to. That is ok, I do not personally agree, but as a mother myself I understand wanting to protect your children from what you do not think is appropriate for their age or for your personal family values. Removing those books from schools and libraries does not solve anything. You should monitor what your own children are reading and censor within your own household as you see fit, but you do not have the right to tell me what my child can and cannot read, regardless of seemingly good intentions.

“While not every book is right for each reader, every reader has the right to choose reading materials for themselves and their families and should be able to find those materials in libraries, classrooms, and bookstores. Our goal is to protect one of our most precious fundamental rights—our freedom to read." Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF)

Censorship is dangerous, it is our diversity that is what makes America the country that it is today.

Most frequently challenged books of 2008

National Coalition Against Censorship

American Booksellers foundation for free expression

The Kids' right to read project

Top 50 banned books that everyone should read

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book cataloguing

I am spending this evening re-cataloguing my books on goodreads by ISBN after purging my out of date account, if you have an account then add me! If you don't, then go make one and then add me!

It may well take me all night to finish this, but it's something I love doing. Plus I'm armed with a hefty glass of wine, be damned the consequences! Perhaps that's a little insight into why I want to be a librarian (not the wine part). Just as soon as I get around to finishing my literature degree and getting a masters in library science that is. I abandoned a great dream of mine because I fell in love, packed a single suitcase, moved from England to the States and married the man of my dreams. Or something like that, Johnny Depp wasn't actually available at the time. And the man of my dreams isn't ignoring me for a videogame right now.

Just as soon as I work out exactly how to get my transcript over from England and translated into American, I'll be applying to finish my degree. Then I get to pretend to talk smart again and stuff. I know.

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On Reading...

While waiting for my most recent book purchases to arrive (and after finishing The History of Love), I re-read two Margaret Atwood books. I have to say that this woman is probably one of my absolute most favourite writers. I'm not even sure why, I perhaps enjoy the raw gritty female emotion. I don't often read books by women, I don't often like them... they tend to contain overly frivolous and romanticized characters and are just, well, bland (for lack of a better word). I could get into a Virginia Woolf style rant about feminism and words, but really I wont because that would take forever and honestly I have written enough essays on that particular subject to last a lifetime. So I can just leave you with my favourite quotation from her and tell you to read something of hers if you're interested.

"...who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?"
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

Actually I don't normally get into feminism either. Perhaps living the opposite sort of lifestyle as a Stay at Home Mum stops me from that (or stops me being taken seriously at least). Not that I don't think it's important, but a lot of things are important.

As for Margaret Atwood, the ones that I re-read were The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake. They were as wonderful as I remembered.

My new books arrived on Thursday, a David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day) which I have already finished and packed up for my husband to take with him on TDY next week. I also recieved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and Julie & Julia. I have started Julie & Julia and I like it so far, being about a third of the way through. The writing is a bit awkward in places but I suppose it's the feel and idea of the whole thing that I like. It really appeals to me at this moment in my life.

I don't watch TV. That's a lie, I do watch TV but only while I'm doing something that doesn't allow for reading a book at the same time. I watch the British channels that we get here, so that I don't forget my accent.

I thought at one point that because I read so many books and written about so many books for my degree (or at least the part of it I did before dropping out to move to the states and marry a soldier) that I'd be great at writing reviews. Sadly that's really not the case. I royally suck at writing reviews, it makes me kind of sad. My reviews consist mostly of "It's really good, you should read it, you'll know what I mean" or "Don't bother". I feel as though I lack the right words to accurately describe what I thought about the story, characters or whatever. I fall in love with the good ones just a little, it's like being asked to describe a relationship with a husband, boyfriend, significant other... I just can't do it.

So in that case I'll just continue to fill up my head with all of these words, stories and lives. I'll find something to do with it all one day.

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Olive Kitteridge et al

Last week I finished reading The Gormenghast Trilogy. I had seen the made for TV BBC film as a teenager and fallen in love with it... so much so that for Christmas that year my parents bought me the books and also a book on the art and creation of the TV film. I haven't watched the film in a long time, due to the demise of the VCR and only having a copy on VHS. I sometimes try to convince myself that it would absolutely be worth buying a British (Region 2) VCR just so that I could watch this one film again. Really though, who am I kidding? I just need to find it on DVD!

The book, though, is another creature entirely. I was completely absorbed by the first two novels (Titus Groan and Gormenghast), they're often cited as being similar to The Lord of the Rings; except there's something about them that makes them appeal to me much more, as I am not a Lord of the Rings fan in the slightest. Gormenghast has that very dry, self-depreciating humor that I love so much, especially in this genre where writers tend to take themselves a little too seriously. It is certainly a satire on the genre and also on British culture.

One thing that really did stick with me when reading it is that the cast for the BBC film was beyond perfect. The scenery was beyond perfect. The literature itself had been toyed with and moved around, but really that obviously only served for it to better fit the medium of film. There were parts that I wished they'd kept in the film, especially toward the end of the second novel, but it in no way retracted from the quality of the story.

The third part, however, was sorely lacking. In fact it was skipped from the BBC production as well. The story really finished at the end of the second novel, it seemed obvious that the third had been left incomplete by Mervyn Peake as his health deteriorated only to be published post-humously. Honestly I stopped reading the last one (Titus Alone) halfway through.


Another book I finished reading this week was Olive Kitteridge, which was beautiful. I really enjoy reading very character oriented books and this was no exception. It is a series of short stories that revolve around a woman named Olive Kitteridge. Each story is from the perspective of a different character and each character knows Olive in one way or another, some are her close family and others merely know her in passing. In some stories she is barely mentioned, but the impact that one seemingly insignificant person unintentionally has on the lives of the people around her is simply amazing and inspiring to read.

I've now started reading Unaccustomed Earth. I am halfway through and I am enjoying it. Like Olive Kitteridge, it is a series of short storys, however this time they are based around individuals who do not know one another and only have one thing in common, that they are of Indian (as in "from India", not Native American) heritage and living in America. I'm always drawn to books that address cultural displacement, it's something that appeals to me being an Ex Patriot myself. Although my displacement from British culture to American is obviously not as extreme as those who have come from very different countries.

And before you get yourself thinking, "Oh wow she must have a lot of free time, reading 1600 or so pages in only a week!" I read very fast, like stupid fast. It's one of the main reasons I decided to major in English at university, I can read fast so I can go to work to pay for university while everyone else is reading their set 3 novels per week, then I can read mine the night before class. Sneaky right? Yeah sneaky. The only time I really get to read is while I'm sitting with Mikey in his room at night waiting for him to fall asleep. I quite enjoy that quiet time.

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I believe...

I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen–I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones who look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline of good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of The Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies too. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

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We're still here

Wow, how did all that time go past? Things have been interesting in the household for the past week. Last Monday we visited Heidelberg Castle and got rained on. Mikey was very excited to be pushed in his stroller up the huge cobblestone hill and then even more excited to walk around on the cobblestones. He is just learning to negotiate steps and the cobblestones confused him, he thought they were steps too. Because it rained while we were there he also got to walk in the rain for the first time. He was nervous of puddles, even after me showing him he could splash in them. He pointed at the rain falling into the puddles and said "Ooooooo" which is his new word for something he thinks is interesting. Daddy took photos of us.


We've been playing outside a lot too. When we haven't been outside, Mikey has been bringing me his socks and shoes and lifting his feet for me to put them on so we can go outside. So when we're not outside I'm essentially diffusing tantrums about wanting to go outside. Poor boy thinks we're depriving him and that going outside at least twice in one day is not enough, no matter how hot it is (and it has been insanely hot). I've been reading The Happiest Toddler on the Block for some tantrum diffusing ideas. It's good, of course most of it is pseudo-science babble about how your toddler really is a cave man, but if you can get past that the main idea is great. The book can be essentially summed up by K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid). The idea that mid-tantrum your child is not interested in your reasoning because they "Want that now now NOW!" Understandable, I'm not particularly reasonable mid-tantrum either!

I've been using some of the ideas from the book today and I have managed to diffuse the majority of his tantrums more calmly and effectively than I had been able to previously. My problem is I'm also inclined to freak out if I don't get my way, so put us together and we're quite the pair. The book has served as good advice about how to improve myself and how I deal with his behaviour. Because let's face it, you're going to have at least some tantrums... that's how it works right? Mikey is quite spirited and liable to get frustrated easily, much like mummy.

Another book I've been reading is Creative Play for Your Baby, which I must first say is a beautiful book. I wish I had gotten it sooner. I bought the one for babies because it is for up to two year olds, I will most likely get the toddler version too. It is full of ideas for simple toys that you can make for your baby, the benefits of natural materials and imaginative play as opposed to generic plastic toys with rigid "games". Don't get me wrong, we have a ton of those too.

So I've got to get my crafty on. I have got such a huge list of projects to do, things that I put off and never get around to doing.

I am going to (in no particular order) -

1. Sand down and repaint the side table in the entrance hall. It's an ugly red and I would like to paint it white or grey... that area has no window so needs to be as light as possible. I'm also going to put on a little wooden decorative trim to fancy it up a bit, because it's quite boring.
2. Send back the world's ugliest military issue couch. In it's place I am going to re-upholster the foot rest from the chair in Mikey's room, put it there and over it with cushions.
3. Make previously mentioned cushions. I've been on about this for AGES. I've never embroidered before but it can't be that difficult, right?
4. Put up some shelves. Torn between getting a 4th bookshelf for the livingroom (yes we really have that many) or putting up some wall shelves. Raidhyn said he would prefer wallshelves because they are out of the reach of little fingers and don't have that attraction for small children who think they are mountain climbers, or are subject to bouts of biblioclasm. Not mentioning any names.
5. Make some of the toys from the previously mentioned book. There's a beautiful wall hanging with pockets for small teddies that I want to make.
6. Hang some plates. There's a spare wall right next to our kitchen area that is screaming "Pleeeeease hang plates on me!" No, really.
7. Finish the freakin' bedroom. One day. Probably in a few months(/years).

There's probably something else I've forgotten.

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The Great Work of Making Meaning

Excuse the relatively obscure title, it's a chapter title from Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog. It arrived in the mail room today, I read a few chapters while sitting with Mikey who was supposed to be falling asleep but kept looking up and grinning at me from his crib. I'm totally hooked though, it only took the first two short chapters.

Also in the mail was a long awaited Yoga DVD after Mikey destroyed my previous one, Geek love by Katherine Dunn and Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. I'm not a vegetarian, but one can never have too many different ways of making vegetables appealing. Ok so I do like vegetables (now at least, not so much when I was younger) but I have no idea how to cook them. I like them in retaurants but they always seem to taste flat and bland when I attempt it. Or at least they did, hopefully not after I've had a read through this mass of pages (1008 according to Amazon). I'm sad there are no pictures though, I do like looking at pictures of good food. Raidhyn is excited that there is a whole chapter about potatoes.

I've been exhausted these past few weeks. I don't understand it. I'm sitting down now (with a glass of wine, which is surprisingly good for a dirt cheap bottle I originally bought for cooking with) at nearly 9pm after finally clearing up the house from the tornado that was today.

I woke up this morning tired, like I have done almost every morning for the past 3 weeks or so. I laid around in bed, Mikey woke me up and was climbing all over the place. I finally had to get up when he started taking the books from my bedside bookshelf and burying me in them. I drag myself to the coffee machine in a vague attempt to jump start my day. It worked, it always works. Mikey and I play around in the kitchen, he "helps" me unload the dishwasher and put things away. I gradually feel myself slowing down by around 9 so I get another cup of coffee, Mikey and I hang out, play and watch cartoons (He likes Fireman Sam and Pocoyo best of all). Technically I am laying on the couch while he either sits on my stomach watching cartoons or wanders off to find something interesting to show me. All toys must be placed on my stomach while he sits on my legs and plays with them, noisy toys must be as close to my face as possible.

By 11 Raidhyn is up and I am totally wiped out, done for the day. Shame there's another 13 or so hours to go. I essentially wander around for the rest of the day in a haze, punctuated by a trip to the grocery store to buy something to make for dinner. Chicken Schnitzel cooked with garlic, bacon and white wine, green beans on the side. Yes it was good.

(If you're interested - heat a tbsp of olive oil in a pan, put in chopped garlic. Cook bacon in this until crispy them remove and put to one side. Cook the chicken in the same greasy mess until golden, remove and put to one side. Put the bacon back in, throw in some white wine and let it bubble up. Pour yummy and grossly bad for you bacon fat and wine mixture over the chicken. The green beans are steamed.)

Why am I so exhausted? I get about 5 hours sleep... Raidhyn likes to go to bed late, I don't particularly like sleeping alone so I'm going to bed between midnight and 1am, sometimes later. Generally 2 hours after I've gone to bed Mikey wakes up. We then sleep until Mikey wants up for the day at 6am. So I'm getting about 5 hours of sleep, in a lot of 2 hours, waking for Mikey, then 3 hours. Sometimes I'll nap for an hour during the day while Mikey is napping, although I always seem to wake up more groggy than I was before I napped.

Personally I don't think it to be completely unreasonable to be able to function for a full day on that amount of sleep. It wasn't so long ago that mikey woke every 2 hours in the night as well as getting up at 4am and I managed then [just about]. Hell, I feel like I managed better when he was a teeny tiny baby than I am doing now. After walking 15 minutes to the grocery store, then back again with a grocery-laden stroller and pulling said stroller up 3 flights of stairs I feel like I want to hibernate for a week.

Oh and by the way, when I read beauty tips on websites and the first tip is "get at least 8 hours of sleep" I want to vomit. Give me something I can work with, please?

Blergh.

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Do You Ever Just..?

[This post was written in two parts, one at around 2.30pm and the other at the time of posting]

Watch your baby sleeping and wonder how he managed to grow into such a big boy so fast? Mikey will be 2 at the end of September, last night he slept from light until light (9pm to 5am) but I stayed up until midnight expecting him to wake before I went to sleep like he usually does. I laid in bed and it took me a long time to fall asleep without him wriggling next to me and looking at his gorgeous little sleeping face. Weird huh? I considered going into his room to sneakily peek at him, but thought better of it.

He is napping right now and has been asleep from midday... it's now gone 3pm. He woke up briefly to the loud noise of the highschoolers playing music down the road from us but looked over at me laying on the bed reading a book and slowly closed his eyes again and fell back to sleep. This is a fairly recent achievement, he can now usually fall asleep without any intervention from me, just so long as he can see me.

***

I started reading Sophie's World again. I was given this book by an old teacher when I was 11 years old. It is a long book for an 11 year old but I read it from cover to cover and loved it. I read it again at 16 and now I am reading it for the third time at 23. This time around I am still enjoying it as an easy read but I am starting to find it lacking deeper thought, so much so that I very nearly paid $14 for a copy of Plato's dialogues at the PX. Thankfully I realised the error of paying that much for what was very probably a bad translation in the first place, I will have to be satisfied with the philosophy books that I already own. Perhaps it is time to give those a re-read.

The reason I mention the book, is that it strikes me as an unusual book to give to an 11 year old. How did my teacher know that it would be so perfect for me? Perhaps it was just an educated guess, I was quite the avid reader and the same teacher also gave me a copy of Dickens' David Copperfield as a prize for writing what she told me was an absolutely wonderful first person narrative (That must have also been at age 11 or so). As it goes, my teacher was either absolutely right about me and what I would enjoy reading, or she had a strong hand in shaping the future of my thought and perception. What a wonderful thing it must be to be a teacher and have that kind of impact. I half wish I still knew her or at least knew her address so that I could write to her. Part of the reason that I think I would like to be a librarian is so that I could do something like that. It only needs to be small things that make an impact on people's lives.

At the moment I just feel as though I am wishing time away. Deployment is nearly over and the last part is proving more difficult than every other part. Mikey is keeping me good company with his newly learned trick of leaning in really close for a kiss on the nose. It's cute, but sometimes he overdoes it and headbutts me in the face.

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Summer Reading List

I have started to compile my summer reading list for this year. So far, in no particular order -

Another Country by James Baldwin
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
Food Matters by Mark Bittman
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

I'll have to add to this as I think of more, there are some classics that I'm sure I'll throw in there somewhere and perhaps a re-read or two.

I also have some tv shows to catch up on (Dexter and Battlestar Galactica) and films to watch (Star Trek, Coraline and The Orphanage). I keep thinking I should read Twilight, so many people love it, so it must be good right? Then I remember the craze over the Da Vinci Code (by Dan Brown) a few years back, and how that book was complete and utter drivel from start to finish. So perhaps I'll just watch the Twilight film, chuckle to myself and leave it at that.

Man I'm a snob.

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3 CookBooks

I prefer my cookbooks to not just be a set of printed instructions on a few pages. If I wanted that then I would just log into epicurious instead of buying a book, or I'd call my mum and ask her. I enjoy cook books that are more of a guide to eating well and enjoying both cooking and eating. I want to be able to pick up a cook book and just enjoy reading it, marking certain pages to refer back to for ideas at a later date. Beautiful photographs are certainly not a must-have but I do enjoy those as well.

The first cookbook in my list was bought for me for mothers day last year by my darling husband. It was the first in what I hope will be a huge collection by the time that I am dead, that I can pass on to my grandkids and will be referred to as crazy grandma's weird, huge recipe library or something to that effect.

Nigella Lawson's How to Eat has actually become a kitchen staple. I cook something from here at least once per week. Not only are the recipes great but they're easy to improvise which is pretty important to me as it's often difficult to get hold of some (read: most) of the ingredients at the commissary on post. Nigella encourages improvisation, for some recipes she suggests other ingredients you can use that will taste just as good. If she doesn't, then I usually manage to work it out on my own and I don't feel guilty about it.

Her writing is intimate and wonderful, I feel like I'm sitting with her in her kitchen drinking a glass of wine and discussing food. This book also has a section in the back specifically for babies and children which has been invaluable as Mikey has grown older.

All in all, I liked cooking before I read this book. Now I love cooking, and eating of course. I thoroughly recommend this to anyone with even the slightest bit of interest in good food.

Second up is another Nigella Lawson book, Nigella Express. This was a birthday gift from that ever indispensable man... my husband.

Honestly, it's not as good as How to Eat. I'm not sure what it is, the recipes are wonderful and there are absolutely beautiful photographs throughout. I guess I feel as though there wasn't enough information in there. Instead of conversation interspersed with recipes, as in How to Eat, this book is obviously made for someone with less time to wade through walls of text. That's understandable given the title. I guess I'm just too needy. Either way, it's a solid cookbook with plenty of quick, easy and delicious recipes. Linguine with Lemon, Garlic, and Thyme Mushrooms is often requested by my husband, and even Mikey eats most of it. That crazy kid likes lemons, depriving us of the baby eating lemon face photo moment so many parents enjoy.

The final cookbook is not another Nigella book. It's from another Brit. Cook with Jamie by Jamie Oliver. This particular book takes a lot of inspiration from his restaurants, Fifteen. From the restaurant website -

In 2002, Jamie Oliver combined two ambitions: to open a top class restaurant and to give disadvantaged youngsters the chance to gain professional training that would set them up for an independent, inspired and productive life. Five years on, Fifteen is still achieving both, improving and expanding all the time.

If that's not a wonderful thing to do then I don't know what is. Seriously, go look at the website.

That aside, the cookbook itself is really great. Jamie is a very strongly opinionated cook and he passes on a lot of knowledge within these pages. Not just on cooking technique, but buying technique. How to choose the best ingredients to make the best food. The recipes are great too, some are very basic and others go above and beyond what I would normally cook for just my family, but would probably be good if I ever got around to inviting over guests. And really, even though I probably wont use a lot of the recipes in this one, I still think it was worth buying simply for the buying guides, the information and the basic recipes (like how to make your own pasta etc). Although I've only ever actually made 4 recipes from this book, I refer to it often when cooking (or considering) other meals.


I do have other cookbooks, and several magazines, but these are definately the three that I enjoy and use most often. The husband seems to enjoy gloating about how much money he'd pay for each particular meal in a restaurant, so I think I'm doing a fairly decent job.

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Book Reviews

I'm supposed to be reviewing books here at some point. When I get a minute to write about them that is. I'm generally too busy reading them to write anything, haha.

Recently I've read:

The Time Traveller's Wife
Water for Elephants
Drowning Ruth

They are all very good in their own way and I urge you to pick up at least one of them, but preferably all of them.

It was Mikey's first birthday on Tuesday. 1 year old... I can't even believe it. He's having his party on Sunday. Pictures then, it will be fun.

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Just Follow The Instructions Below

Go Read "The Time Traveller's Wife"

Now.

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