Cook books/ Food

I made another highly successful truita today, the third one, and a smaller size...still excellent, except I forgot to add the salt. Whatever.

Learning to cook local dishes is one of the things I love about living here, I can make a reasonable paella now, not a brilliant one, but a reasonable one. I make a wicked fideu (noodle) dish. The truita? TOMA! Then there is that stunning lemon cream, which I gave you all the recipe for, and I am just going to have to make THAT again, very very soon.....the beans cooked with pernil....oh, I am making myself hungry hungry.....wild asparagus, artichokes.....

Next I have to work on a Crema Catalana.

I have always loved to eat food from all around the world, and with small kids and limited budgets that meant learning to cook it ourselves. Living on the boat with limited supplies lent another entire dimension of creativity to the endeavour.

So, I got some great cookbooks, fortunately before we left to go sailing, they helped a whole lot when I was inventing. Except for the unfortunate pumpkin surprise soup. It was surprisingly terrible, and suprisingly embarrassing when complete strangers came to dinner. As an aside, lemon and tofu don't mix well either, especially with cheese, that was another experiment that didn't work. Looked, smelled and tasted a lot like barf. The two worst meals I ever made in my life.

Back to the cookbooks. Some were gifts and some were requests and some I bought myself.

This post found it's genesis in a comment I left in someone's blog.....sorry, I cannot remember whose.....but I thought it was worth a post. I love to eat, so I learned to cook.

I also love to travel, and these books tell you something of the country as well as the food.

My favourite cookbook, oh heck, what's a favourite, goodness, but one I love is Honey from a Weed by Patricia Gray, http://www.amazon.com/Honey-Weed-Cooks-Classic-Library/dp/1558215433 , which I simply adore, it is still trapped on the boat, but next year....indeed this summer. The book is subtitled, 'fasting and feasting in....Catalonia, Italy and ????' She is the wife of a sculptor and they live where the marble is, and cook there.

On Rue Tatin by Susan Hermann Loomis is good; she's an American who went to the Cordon Blue in Paris, then moved to a run down old house in, oh, heck, somewhere in Northern Francish..... and she does cooking classes too! She tells the story of their move and the house and having a kid, with recipes!

Then there is any book at all by Jeffory Alford and Naomi Duguid, they are more than cookbooks, but contain enough background info and travel log that they are great to read as well as great to cook out of. The recipes are also really sound, you can make the food well, the first time....LOVE THEM ALL.

M.F.K. Fisher is a BRILLIANT writer and a brilliant cook and she has great books, dry, witty and harsh, filled with great food. She was buddies with Julia Child! She is little known which is honestly a shame, they are great stories to read and filled with good recipes as well.

That's my tale for today.

I'd rather talk about food than the animal invasions we are suffering in the house in Toronto coupled with the possible sleeze bag animal control guy who is maybe trying to scam us. Ho hum.