When my son first started showing an interest in cooking in his
mid-teens I gave him a cookbook by Nigel Slater. Slater's
attitudes encompass all of the cooking things that make sense to me -
use what you have on hand, understand simple ingredients that taste
good together, toss things in and don't worry about it and if you make
a mistake don't spend the whole dinner apologizing. Dinner is
about sharing, not about showing off (although there are many who would
disagree with that). This new book by Slater entitled Kitchen
Diaries follows a year of his cooking and has the hallmark of those
earlier books but with the added idea that he wouldl use local
ingredients in season when he could and that he would avoid
supermartkets as much as possible. Kitchen Diaries is a beautiful
book filled with all kinds of insights about eating and cooking and
thinking about cooking. Slater isn't a fussy cook and that is one
of the great strengths of this book. There are a lot of recipes
and most of them have very few ingredients. He does assume that
the people who use his books know their way around a kitchen, so he
doesn't go into exhaustive detail about how to do things, but that's
okay - if you are a beginner, you can figure it out. Really.
Unfortunately I don't live in the same place as Slater so I can't
follow his dinner suggestions by the calendar. His March 19 diary
exaults in the first alfresco dinner of the year - I live in Canada and
March is still ski season. The photographs are beautiful and show
simple food that looks like someone made it rather than some food
stylist putting the photo together. My one quibble with the book
is that the photographs aren't labelled so you don't know which recipe
it is depicting, but that's a minor fault. I've tried a bunch of
these recipes and they are simple, straightforward and taste
great. What more can you as for at dinner time? Buy at Amazon
