COOK, EAT, REPEAT: Ingredients, Recipes, and Stories - by Nigella Lawson
To vote, click the knife-and-fork icon on the comment below that corresponds to the book of your choice. You may vote for only one book. If you wish to change your vote, click the icon again to remove your “like,” or leave a comment to let me know. Please do not reply to the ballot comments. To start a discussion about the books, reply to this post. We ask that you vote with the intention of cooking along and reporting if your choice becomes our COTM.
Voting will close on August 24, at 10am EDT.
Remember, there is still time to cook from our current selection, Flavors of the Sun.
To vote for COOK, EAT, REPEAT, click the knife and fork on the lower right of this comment.
5 Likes
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot eating & cooking in Northwest England)
4
I don’t play on this thread but have to say I really hope Cook, Eat Repeat gets selected. Only to see if the experienced cooks here find the book as irritating as I found the TV programme. Possibly the most irritating cookery series I’ve ever watched. I am convinced that Lawson was chucking in the surprise ingredient each week entirely to see how much she could get away with. A complete exercise in taking the piss, IMO.
Oh, boy, what a ringing endorsement! Can you give a more specific example? I’m really curious now. We’ve had a few people consistently nominating this book for quite a while now. I’m hoping some of them have actually cooked from it and can chime in. Is it really annoying?
OK, just looking through the recipes on EYB. I mean, there is the whole anchovy chapter. And then the first recipe after all the anchovy ones calls for banana peel. In a curry. I have actually cooked with banana peel. Once. Haven’t felt the need to repeat.
I figured you had already cooked from it or at least read it. Haven’t you been nominating this book for months? You might have a look through the EYB recipe list (linked from title in OP). There are some recipes with simple ingredients. There is a lot of rhubarb. Which is fine, I like rhubarb, but I can’t get it this time of year. And a lot of the recipes call for “forced rhubarb” which I have never seen. Also not a very veg-friendly book (anchovies everywhere), but I can work around that. Anyway, not a book I would buy (I’m not a big Nigella fan even at her best), but there are multiple copies available at my local library. Hmmm… all the copies are available.
Nigella.com has 32 recipes from this book available. I really want to try the Chicken In A Pot with Lemon and Orzo but will probably have to wait several months until I don’t feel like I’m living in the bowels of hell to turn on the oven.
Here’s a direct link to the recipes. Only the ones with photos seem to actually be available.
2 Likes
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot eating & cooking in Northwest England)
15
Bear in mind, Lawson is British and primarily writing for a British audience. Forced rhubarb is common here. It’s big business in the north of England (mainly in Yorkshire which is the county next to mine). It’s rhubarb grown entirely in the dark so tender stalks are available early in the year.
A couple of months ago I requested that my library purchase I Dream of Dinner because it was showing potential as a COTM. I received it two days ago, and it’s much more than I expected. The concept isn’t new (minimal ingredients for maximum flavor), but I think some of her approaches and methods are. There’s a lot of room to expand or improve recipes just because you have the time and ingredients to tweak something – basically it’s full of ideas to either build off of or make as-is. Last night, for example, a recipe for cauliflower with harissa and cream caught my eye. I had cream to use up and plenty of everything else. I tweaked a bit and got a great dish that the family loved but I never would have come up with otherwise.
Anyway … that’s me making the case for the one book that I have in my possession.
About that cauliflower: it’s at least the second time I’ve bought cauliflower to make the turmeric-pickled version from Flavors of the Sun but got distracted by another idea.
Yeah, I DREAM OF DINNER is a super exciting book. I’d love to cook from it together. I am a Nigella fan, but we’ve done several of her books, which isn’t to say we can’t do another one, but I’m just not as excited about it currently.
I also put I Dream of Dinner on my iPad when it looked likely to become COTM. I haven’t made anything yet, but I agree that there are a a lot of good ideas in there.
