delicious and other foodie magazines

LUCKY DIP DAY

Well it's been a busy day, and I'm not actually sure that I am going to be able to finish this as I have to close down and go out and celebrate another granddaughter birthday very shortly. Not only was it a busy day but I also did not really know what to write about. So I did the lucky dip thing again - and this time I picked this little booklet enclosed with one of my delicious magazines. I no longer get it but did for years. Lots of recipes for the kind of food I like and it introduced me to a couple of cooks who have proven to be winners - Valli Little and Belinda Jefferey with some others along the way. The book title and cover is interesting - very of the moment. Menus - stress-free - entertaining. I suspect the first and last elements here are redundant - do people entertain at home any more? But the stress-free - very much what the modern cooks try to push - fine food with no stress. And the choice of foods on the cover is also very modern - Moroccan, paella, some salady looking thing. All beautifully presented. So really I could just leave it at that. And maybe I will as I have to stop really.

delicious (yes it has a small 'd') served me well for several years. It gave me a bit of relaxation thumbing through the pages. And later I went through them, picked out the recipes I thought there was some hope of me making some time, and transferred them into my recipe database. And every now and then when I am stuck I turn to it and find something - interestingly it's usually a cake. I cannot improvise on cakes like I can with everything else. I also use them when I am making a new cookery book for my family.

But delicious is just one of the foodie magazines available these days. In my youth all there was was the women's magazines which had a food section. I think it was in one of these that I first learnt to make spaghetti bolognaise - unbelievably exotic in those days - what was a clove of garlic? Was it one of those little bits or the whole thing? Such was our ignorance, and the women's magazines gradually introduced us to a wider world of food. Along with my mother, school cooking classes and my trips to France, (not a common influence), these were my first instructors in cooking. I still have a few pages from them - and our favourite apple cake recipe is in one of them.

Then things became more sophisticated and the Sunday newspapers started to publish glossy magazines with columns by well-known cooks such as Robert Carrier. I cut out all of those articles and pasted them in a file, which I have now lost. I cannot believe that I threw it out, but I guess I must have. There is certainly nowhere else to look. I miss it.

After the magazines I turned to the books, but in recent years I started subscribing to delicious. It was a sort of middle way. At the bottom end are the ordinary women's magazines which still do food - and indeed Women's Weekly continues to produce excellent small cookery books. I have an Italian and a Thai one which are really good and one on Tomatoes and cooking for two as well. And at the 'top' end there is Gourmet Traveller and Vogue Living which are full of very fancy food. Fine dining stuff. I have a couple of issues but I can't say I have ever made anything from them. delicious (and Taste and Donna Hay Magazine) are somewhere in the middle - with Taste, perhaps being a bit lower down on the scale. There are others, but I don't know much about them. And no doubt they also all have websites.

delicious and the like reflect the middle-class trendy and dare i say, urban hipster, food culture of Australia today. Multicultural, generally simple, and generally healthy too, with the emphasis on high quality ingredients, simplicity and good appearance. And this little book that I picked out does this in spades, as it is divided into menus featuring a particular cuisine - there are ten of them. The page I picked is part of the Italian section. It's an advertiser's delight - the booklet is produced in conjunction with Raco who make kitchen pots of various kinds and no doubt coughed up a considerable amount of the cost of producing it.

I have now ceased buying delicious. Why? They changed the design which irked me a bit - didn't quite like the layout as much - now isn't that petty? More importantly I think I decided that the recipes were becoming all a bit the same. I felt a bit like Delia who once said she was all reciped out. Indeed I don't buy many recipe books these days either. What more can I learn, and anyway when am I going to cook these things. My family still want me to cook the family favourites. So I stopped getting it and so far I don't really miss it. I am occasionally tempted when I see it in the supermarket but not often.

Anyway - my lucky dip has actually given me several ideas for articles and this is just one of them. The page I picked has at least another three. Later - for the next time I'm stuck.