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So it's a-stormin' out in Chicago today: snow, sleet, wind and everything a MN girl could ask for.

I haven't cooked in what seems like a dog's age*, but apparently that doesn't stop me from buying cookbooks and for the last two days I've set aside my regular reading and been carry Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Dairies on the train with me. I tried to buy this book about a year ago but it hadn't come out in the US yet so I was very excited to randomly find it in the shitty bookstore by work yesterday afternoon.

This is the cook's equivalent of Elizabeth Zimmerman's Knitter's Almanac. Some days he just describes what he's cooked in a paragraph combined with observations on the weather, the garden, the people he saw on the way to the market...and then some days he gives an actual recipe (or as Elizabeth would call it a "pithy recipe").

Reading this makes one as hungry for meat and cheese and potatos and cream as reading a Bourdain book makes you hungry for dumplings and noodles, but crikey, if I ate this much cheese, cream and butter every day I'd be having even more trouble fitting into my clothes than I already am! Many of these dishes, given the current regimen, I'd only get to eat a spoonful or two before I had to stop eating and wait until the next meal...

Why would I read a luscious food book like this when I'm only eating 1500 calories a day? Self flagellation? That said, I have marked a few recipes to try out in the "near future" (using the broadest definiton of that term possible), such as the chickpea and sweet potato curry, a lemon-frosted pistachio cake, and pumpkin-tomato laksa.

One of the (many) funny things this book makes you think about is the difference in temperance & season between the UK and, say, Minnesota, as part of his point with this book is eating what's available to you seasonally. Here's a great example: in his January 8th entry, he begins The first rhubarb appears with impeccable timing. Just as you want a fresh start to the year, along come the pale pink stems of the most tart and clean-tasting fruit to cleanse and invigorate...

We had one of the largest rhubarb patches I have ever seen in our yard in Lake Bronson and I can guarantee you you're not getting fresh rhubarb in January in Minnesota when the ground is frozen solid and covered in several feet of snow. We would still have plenty of it in the deep freeze, but not GROWING fresh.

He's a very funny guy because sometimes he cooks intricate meals with unusual spices and specific timing, and sometimes he has just rice and beer (or a bowl of beans and beer) and everyone gets drunk because they didn't have enough food (I am paraphrasing but that IS one of the actual entries!). And his attitude and honesty about what he thought is great. He'll buy something saying "what a bad idea, I"m going to regret this" and then report back unflinchingly on how wrong he was and how well it turned out (or the opposite).

Here's another passage I love to introduce a leftover chicken/rice salad: I don't normally do rice salad. The words stir no passion in me. But there is rice pilaf left from yesterday, too, and the marriage seems inevitable.

Someone recently did a meme about what authors do you own more than one book by even though you've never read anything by them? I was too lazy to actually LOOK at my bookshelves, but off the top of my head, I own three Mark Helprins somehow and have never read him. But that's as far as I got on my list.

However, if you switch the meme around and think about cookbooks and whether you've cooked from them, I can name those off the top of my head. This is my second Nigel Slater that I have greatly enjoyed reading, but so far I haven't cooked from either one. I own three Jamie Oliver's yet have produced nary a Jamie Oliver meal. Three Nigellas, only one of which I have used (but I LOVE that one - the baking one Domestic Goddess).

On the other hand, two Sheila Lukins, both used for several recipes, and two Marcella Hazans, both used MANY MANY times with stains to prove it, I am a huge fan of her recipes, and two or three books by Maida Heatter, the queen of baking, that I have only cooked from sparingly (her cream cheese brownies are to die for!) but that's mostly because I didn't buy the books until after I was living alone and it's very very dangerous for someone with this enormous of a sweet tooth (which I blame on genetics, thanks Dad!!) to bake when there's no one around to share it with. I could easily finish off an entire batch of cookies on my own, and still be searching the house for chocolate after that.

I have a great Maida Heatter story. She was at a dance or some social event when she met her husband, and as he reports it, she said "oh would you like a brownie" and pulled out of her handbag one of her homemade brownies that SHE ALWAYS CARRIED WITH HER. And that was that. How adorable, right? Another MH anecdote, she said it drives her nuts when she sees TV Shows giving lists of how to manage stress and it's all you know light candles, do yoga, breathe deeply and she said she just starts yelling at the TV: BAKE COOKIES!!!! BAKE COOKIES!!!!

She's right, at least for me. There is nothing like the smell of cookies in the oven to make all the stress in your life just vanish. But again, I cannot bake cookies every day. I'd be 8000 pounds.

And speaking of cookbooks I love, I only own one Deborah Madison book "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone" but EVERYTHING I have made from it (I think I've tried about 12 recipes?) is absolutely delicious. Odd combinations of spices (cinnamon & capers in the same dish?) but every one I have tried has turned out piquant and delightful. (And obviously you don't have to be a vegetarian, these could all be used as side dishes if you wanted some meat on your plate.)

AND NOW I'M STARVING. Back to Nigel, and June, and fava beans from the garden....

*Note my disappointment that the "regular" dictionary does not define a dog's age, yet it does define "dog days" (the period between early july and early september when the hot sultry weather of summer usually occurs in the northern hemisphere [damn, that's a pretty specific definition isn't it!]), "dog in the manger" (a person who selfishly withholds from others something useless to himself) and "dog'sbody" (british naval slang for a pudding made of peas or for a junior officer).

oh and HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO Ms. "I'm just sayin'" Claudia. Many happy returns.

Posted by Duff at December 01, 2006

Posted by: claudia at December 1, 2006 09:32 AM

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