Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Oliver, Jamie. Jamie at home: cook your way to the good life. Hyperion: 2007.

Not much one for celebrity chefs until we started watching cooking shows, I have turned out to be a food voyeur. I love cooking shows. I am a fan of certain chefs. And yes, the Naked Chef, Jamie Oliver himself, has a fan in me. Specifically the series Jamie at Home, which I am anxiously waiting for on DVD so I can watch it again and again and drool at his garden and his kitchen and his amazing outdoor oven.

While waiting, though, I will satisfy myself with the most excellent (and enormous) Jamie at Home: Cook Your Way to the Good Life. It's full of delicious-looking recipes, and notes about the produce and meat used in the recipes. A food voyeur like me doesn't really need it to be a functional cook book. Just pretty and tasty-looking. Which it is.

It is also functional. The kofta was the "Grilled lamb kofta kebabs with pistachios and spicy salad wrap" on pg. 44. It was just as easy as the recipe made it sound, not to mention straightforward and very tasty. I would reproduce the recipe here, but I'm not sure that I'm allowed. Copyright and all that.

A warning: if you find books that are written extremely informally, this may not be the book for you: "However, my favorite thing to do is boil them for 10 minutes, toss them with some good olive oil, salt, pepper, a little swig of red or white wine vinegar, woody herbs like thyme and rosemary and some smashed garlic, and roast the little monkeys at 350 F until they're lightly golden, with intense flavor. Come on Eileen, now we're talking!" The monkeys in question are carrots and beets. Mm. Monkeys.

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