A Christmas bonanza
Thank you to my wonderful family for an absolute bonanza of cookery books and I understand there are still more to come.
I have received a book I have been searching for, admittedly half-heartedly, for years - Robert Carrier's A Taste of Morocco. But I am told there are more to come - they just did not arrive in time. The missing Robert Carriers. My Carrier collection is more or less complete.
He is, of course, long gone, or as my younger son so bluntly said, "dead as a doornail", and so his books are out of print, but they are such a delight, and this one I remember specifically not buying when it came out because it was expensive. Well I thought it was expensive at the time, though, of course it was not. Lesson - buy things you want when you see them - if you can afford them of course - for they may disappear.
So coming soon are Great Dishes of Spain and Cooking for You.
They are a very varied bunch and I so look forward to reading them. In fact I have skimmed one already - Food and Wine Magazine's Best of the Best, which purports to be the best recipes from the best cookbooks of the year. I think they do this every year and this one may date back to 2016 and being an American publication it has an
American bias - though Yotam Ottolenghi's Jerusalem was in there and also Hugh Fearnly Whittingstall on fish. I have to say that at first glance the most enticing recipe in the book was an Ottolenghi chicken dish. And it was also interesting to see how many of the books were about sweet things and sandwiches. Some of them looked pretty good though.
But I won't go on about it - in the next few weeks I intend to do a post on each book. So just a summary here and I will leave you with a very simple recipe on the title page of the chapter on Provence in Provence to Pondicherry. It was just so Provençal. We had a similar dish many years ago and it was divine.
Scatter 2 tablespoons soft goat's cheese with Herbes de Provence, top with heaped teaspoon of lavender honey and a good grind of black pepper.
Christmas done. Hope yours was as good as mine. Now what to do with the leftover turkey.
