The Wild Gourmets

When the apocalypse comes, this is the book I'll grab and take with me into the wasteland that was the world. Unsurprisingly I picked this up at an Exclusive Books sale. It's a fantastic book, though I've not made a single recipe from it or, in fact, used it at all.

Ever wanted to know how to make a tent or catch a rabbit (sorry Phillygirl) or generally do those things that there's no real need for in this day and age? This book will tell you how. It includes a variety of recipes to cook with your foraged and hunted food. If I ever do serious camping, this is the book that I'll take with me.

My one objection to it as a survival guide is that it relies on nearby farmers for dairy products and suchlike, which you won't be able to get when the zombies come. Also, it's a British book and, unsurprisingly, is geared towards foraging your way around England. Not much use when you're on the other end of Africa, but it's still a fantastic book.

Good Tempered Food

I picked this up (at an Exclusive Books sale, what a surprise!) because I have this image of myself in my head. It's an image of a highly domesticated woman who spends hours in her kitchen and garden, being domestic. It's not who I usually am, but every now and then I manage it. This book helps.

There are a multitude of recipes in here that I'd love to try, but just haven't gotten around to. There are others that I'm waiting to make until I've got my first million (ten clementines to make jelly? Really?). And there are others that I've made many times already. Poor Man's Potatoes. Greek Potatoes. Caraway Rolls. That chocolate dessert, the name of which escapes me right now.

If you love to cook and (even only occasionally) have the time to spend over it, then this is a book for you.

Real Family Food

I think I pick up all my cookbooks at the Exclusive Books sales. This one I picked up after paging through it and deciding that there were quite a few things in it that I wanted to try. I don't usually think very much of television chefs and yet, thanks to Exclusive's sales, I now own two books written by such people. This one appealed to me because it really is food that I am likely to actually make (and I have, some more than once) with flavours that I (mostly) enjoy. There are some things I can't imagine ever making (Bubble and Squeak is at the top of this list), but it's full of decent, simple recipes. There are some more complicated recipes (make a note - you want to make the Pumpkin Gnocchi hours in advance. Seriously). One of my favourite features of this recipe book is the colour coding. The colour coding takes the form of a robot (traffic light, for you foreigners). Green means you can eat the dish as often as you like. Orange dishes should be eaten no more than three times a day and you can only have one red dish per day. A handy guide to how healthy each recipe is (though what the red dot beside the lemonade recipe means is beyond me - one glass per day? One batch per day? It has to be diluted, so the dot is really unhelpful in this instance). It's also liberally peppered with anecdotes and information on how he deals with his kids in relation to food and eating habits. Possibly something parents might be interested in.

[On an unrelated note: Blogger needs an undo button. The number of times I've accidentally hit backspace and deleted the picture instead of delete to remove the space above the text is uncountable!]

Riverford Farm Cook Book

Another Exclusive Books sale book. This is a particularly lovely book because it talks about each vegetable/fruit in alphabetical order describing how to grow it and store it. There's information about different varieties and just an enormous wealth of information that I would never have come across any other way. In addition to the information on the food, there's little snippets about a variety of other things.

The recipes are divided up, on the whole, according to the major ingredient and are presented after each item's entry. I was really excited to try a number of items in here and I finally have. The major excitement was the Chocolate Courgette Cake (those are zucchinis for any Americans). My resident American tells me that it tastes slightly like Zucchini Bread (apparently similar to Banana Bread, only with courgettes). The GuineaPig gave it a huge thumbs up, along with the rest of the dinner from this book.

This is a book I definitely recommend. As an archaeologist I object to organic farming because it requires you to dig up naturally formed phosphate. Not only is this far more expensive, it's (in my opinion) much worse for the earth than just making some phosphate in a lab. Besides, phosphate is made out of bone, so phosphate miners tend to dig straight through bone-beds, which just gets my scientific hackles up. So, I generally tend to ignore all the 'organic' this and that and just use whatever is available locally. I'm in favour of local produce, where possible (and given that it's generally better for the environment, though there are exceptions), just not strictly organic food. Organically farmed food that uses fertilisers that don't include organic phosphate is much more palatable to me, sadly wholesale mining is required for food to be labelled 'organic'.

Anyway, the point is not for me to rant on about the pitfalls of marketing around the organic movement, which is a good one in theory. The point is for me to say: buy this book. It's full of fantastic recipes.

200 Four-Ingredient Recipes

I have elected to abandon my 'one post a day' rule. I will now be posting whenever I damn well feel like it. This means that I will post when I finish a book, when I'm bored (I have an enormous back log!) and probably every morning.

My big sister gave me this book for Christmas and I've used it quite a few times. It has some lovely recipes in it, though it will insist on considering 'salt and pepper' as one ingredient and occasionally forgetting that 'water' is a fifth thing. Being of the totally easygoing nature that I am (no, really), I don't mind it occasionally getting confused about the exact amount that 'four' represents. I would also like to point out that if you look at the word 'ingredient' for any length of time, it starts looking very very wrong. If anyone knows the etymology of it, please share.

This is a highly recommended cook book, quick (and sometimes not so quick - read the instructions for the soy-marinated chicken carefully), simple recipes that taste fantastic.
Tonight I'm making chilled chocolate and espresso mousse (except with weak coffee not espresso as the Wendy is allergic to caffeine) and roast chicken with lemon and cheese (or something).