Posted on 17/10/2016 in Autumn
Cooking’s been on hold recently while my kitchen has been transformed and decorated. It seems to have taken more days to put everything back than to actually decorate it! But I am absolutely delighted. I have de-cluttered and organised and now have a kitchen worthy of any interior design magazine.
During the revamp we have been without modern cooking appliances and so I really have spent every day wondering “What the Heck’s for Supper”! It’s incredible how moments like this can make you become a very inventive cook and, with a little discreet cheating along the way, we have survived. But there’s no excuses now, Autumn recipes start with a vengeance next week and even scarier thought is that Monday is to be spent knocking up a thoroughly Norfolk Christmas feast ready for the December issue of the EDP Norfolk magazine.
Whilst escaping the dust and chaos, I snuck off to The Book Hive in Norwich to discuss cookbooks with the owner Henry Layte. As always, there’s a mixture of cookery ‘must haves’ and a few I’m not so sure about!
One book that particularly grabbed my attention is Joanna Blythman’s What to Eat. It is an intelligent, well informed look at food and a common sense approach that promotes well grown and produced ingredients which, of course, are seasonal and local. Others that found their way into my shopping basket were…
Sarah Raven’s The Great Vegetable Plot, I use Sarah Raven a lot as my kitchen garden guru especially for research and ideas, her Garden Cookbook and Food for Friends & Family are two of the best seasonal cookbooks I know.
I picked up Richard Bertinet’s Pastry on the owner Henry’s recommendation and Anna Hansen’s The Modern Pantry Cookbook reflects her life and travels across the world . Not cooked anything from them yet but I am loving thumbing through the pages! Information on the Book Hive can be found on my Favourites page.
