Weekend Cooking/Cook the Books: Call of the Camino by Suzanne Redfearn

 

One of the beauties of being involved in a book club is that some times you find yourself reading books that would otherwise not have crossed your reading radar. Some times, they don't work for you (Land of Milk and Honey, I am looking at you!) but some times they do. Call of the Camino is not a book that I recall hearing about before it being chosen for the current selection of Cook the Books. The question is did it work for me or not? Read on to find out!

When journalist Reina Watkins' nemesis at work is unable to make the start of a walk along the Camino that he was supposed to be doing for an article, she jumps at the opportunity. Not only is it a chance to get one up on Matt, but walking the Camino is something that she has always been interested in because her parents met on the trail years before. They both died when she was young, so armed with her father's journal, she is hopeful that it will help her understand her parent's story, and her own history. 

Because it is very last minute, she hasn't done any training and she only has her trusty Doc Martin's the first few days are very trying for Reina, but as the trek continues she begins to understand the call of the Camino - why so many people have been taking this pilgrimage for so many years. When she hears that Matt, her rival, is hot on her trail, she is determined that this time she will be the one who writes the better article, especially given her personal connection.

Interspersed with Reina's story, we hear her mother's story. Reina always thought her mother was Portuguese but it turns out that she was from Andorra. Caught up in the middle of a historical family feud, Isabelle chooses to join the Camino to escape from danger. Ill-prepared, she hopes that the mantra of the Camino, the Camino will provide, is true for her. 

The third voice in the story comes in the form of Reina's father's journal, and it is through this, and then a coincidental meeting that Reina learns more about Isabelle.

As readers, we are witness to the trials and tribulations of both women, from injuries to soreness, fatigue and danger. On the plus side there are the characters that they meet along the way, other pilgrims who are sharing in this significant journey, and it is this camaraderie that affected me the most.

I do know several people who have done the Camino. One of my friend's dads has done it three times, and her brother went with him one time and ended up meeting his now partner who lived in a different country. I definitely know that it changes lives, and we saw that with both of our main characters. Can I see myself doing the Camino? Not really. I do more steps when I am on holiday that I do the rest of the time but still, this kind of strenuous walking sounds too far, too far for me! I did, however, enjoy reading about it! And I would be more than happy to go to Spain at some point!

When this book was chosen, I immediately thought that I would be choosing some Spanish recipe. I did hope that something more would have jumped out of the text to help me decide. I thought about tortilla, but to be honest, I thought someone else would have chosen that to make.

Instead, it gave me the opportunity to pull one of my favourite cook books off the shelf. I say favourite, but it's a favourite book to look at. Even though I have owned it for years, and I posted about it for Weekend Cooking back in 2012, I don't believe I ever did get around to cooking from it! That changed this week.

The thing I loved about this book is that it gives you food history, regional specialties, spotlights ingredients and producers. It is an amazing book to look at and I love the dust jacket I have on my copy. The colours just pop! One thing I did find a little interesting was what wasn't in this book. It was originally published back in 2012, before the world went crazy for Basque cheesecake, alternatively known as San Sebastien cheesecake, and there is no recipe in the book for it! Just thought that was interesting!

I was hoping to choose a recipe that had been mentioned in Call of the Camino, or that at least came from the regions that the Camino passes through. In the end I chose this recipe for two reasons. One, there was a mention of roast chicken towards the end of the book, and I liked the fruitiness of this recipe, given that it echoed the part in the book where our characters stumbled across La Casa de los Dioses (The House of the Gods) where the walkers can help themselves to fruit. In the book it mainly talks about the watermelon, but I really, really don't like watermelon so I am going with apples and grapes.

In the intro to this recipe it mentions that in Asturias Reineta apples are used but the Golden Delicious variety is a good substitute. Asturias is one of the places that the Camino passes through so this recipe works as a regional dish. We ended up using a different variety of apples as there were no Golden Delicious at the supermarket.

It was an interesting recipe. I am not sure we would make it again. You can see the grape juice has kind of caught a bit, but the chicken itself was very moist, and it was interesting to have the apples and grapes with chicken. We would normally pair cooked apples with pork. We served it with roast potatoes as I wasn't really sure what else to serve it with.

The next selection for Cook the Book is called Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal. Not sure what to expect with this one. I guess I will find out when I read it!

I am sharing this post with Foodies Read, hosted at Based on a True Story.

Roast Chicken with Apples and Grapes (Pollo con manzanas y uvas) - Claudia Roden

Serves 4-6

5 Golden Delicious apples
Juice of ½ a lemon
1kg white seedless grapes, destalked
1 x 1.5kg chicken
Salt and pepper
3 tablespoons olive oil
75g butter


Peel and core the apples. Cut one in half or into quarters, so the pieces will push easily inside the chicken, and the rest of the apples into 8 slices each. Drop the slices into a bowl of water acidulated with the lemon juice to prevent them from discolouring.

Blend half of the grapes in the food processor and collect the juice by pressing the mush through a small-holed sieve with a wooden spoon. Discard the skins left in the sieve. You should get about 250ml of juice. Stuff the chicken with the halved or quartered apple and put it in a baking dish. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and rub with 1 tablespoon of the oil. Turn the bird breast side down in the baking dish and pour in 125ml of the grape juice. Roast in an oven preheated to 190°C/gas 5 for 45 minutes, then take the chicken out, turn it over, pour the remaining grape juice over it and return to the oven. Cook for another 30 minutes or until the chicken is brown and caramelized and the juices run clear when you cut into the bird between the leg and the body with a pointed knife.

While the chicken is roasting, heat the butter with the remaining 2 tablespoons of oil in a large frying pan. Put in the drained apple slices and the remaining grapes and sauté over a medium heat, turning over the fruits and shaking the pan gently until the grapes are soft and golden and the apples tender and caramelized. It can take 20 minutes. Transfer to a baking dish with their juices and reheat in the oven when you are ready to serve.

Weekly meals

Saturday - Out for dinner
Sunday - Roast Chicken with Apple and Grapes (new)
Monday - Baked Gnocchi (new)
Tuesday - Enchilada
Wednesday - Molten Pumpkin Pasta Bake (new)
Thursday - Out for dinner
Friday - Takeaway

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book reviews (novel, nonfiction), cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs, restaurant reviews, travel information, or fun food facts. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. You do not have to post on the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page

Weekend Cooking: Around the World

A few weeks ago, I reviewed Meliz's Kitchen by Meliz Berg and I mentioned I really like books that talk about specific places and cultures. I love reading the introductions where they talk about going fishing with their grandfather, or cooking with their favourite auntie or whatever the story is. So today I thought I would talk a little about some of those books that I have in my cookbook collection.

Now, not all of them are written by people who come from the country or region, but the ones that aren't are written by people who have grown to love that particular culture.

The Food of Spain by Claudia Roden - I have had this book on my shelves for years, and I am not sure I have ever cooked anything from it, but I do distinctly remember looking through this and loving it! Time to take a stroll through the pages and the regions of Spain!

Norteña by Karla Zazueta - This is my latest addition, and features the cuisine of Northern Mexico. I find it interesting that this is so specifically about just the north, but I guess that Mexico is a big country with lots of different specialities across the country.

Trullo by Tim Siadatan - This is an Italian cookbook, and I must confess that I haven't spent a lot of time in the pages of this one!

Yiayia: Time Perfected Recipes from Greek Grandmothers by Anastasia Miari - So many delicious sounding dishes in this one. I was surprised though that there are not recipes for Moussaka or Pasticcio in this book! I will keep on the search for the perfect recipe.

Rice Table: Korean Recipes and Stories to Feed the Soul by Su Scott - Moving away from Europe temporarily, this is obviously Korean food. We have made a few things out of this including Kimchi fried rice, and some really delicious roasted baby potatoes. I must make them again!

The Italian Pantry by Theo Randall - This  book contains one of our favourite meatball recipes. We made it again this week and it is so good.

Meliz's Kitchen by Meliz Berg - Somehow I managed to not include this book in the photo even though this is where my pondering started today. Never mind. This book is all Turkish-Cypriot recipes and we have cooked quite a few things from this book.

Do you have a favourite cookbook about other parts of the world?

Weekly meals

Saturday - Chorizo and Potato Soup Stew
Sunday -
Monday -
Tuesday - Out for dinner
Wednesday - Butter chicken
Thursday - Baked Ratatouille and Beans
Friday - Out for dinner

You might notice that I have a new button for Weekend Cooking. I actually have a couple of different versions which is nice! I really like them. I did however want to give Melynda from Scratch Made Food who made the button that I was using for a few years. Thanks again!

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book reviews (novel, nonfiction), cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs, restaurant reviews, travel information, or fun food facts. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. You do not have to post on the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page

Weekend Cooking: The Food of Spain by Claudia Roden

A few months ago I reviewed a cookbook by Spanish Australian author Frank Camorra. In the comments to that post, Fay from Read, Ramble mentioned that a Spanish cookbook had just won the International Association of Culinary Professionals award in the International category. A quick check of the library catalogue and it was mine. Well....not mine mine, but temporarily mine!  It should give you a good indication of how much I liked this book when I tell you that this book is actually on it's way to me as we speak because I ended up buying it!

First off, this is a huge book! At more than 600 pages long there is bound to be something for everyone in terms of the recipes. Really though, the thing that makes this book stand out from others I have read is that it is much, much more than a cookbook! In fact, in the first 120 pages there is not a single recipe included. Rather there is a fascinating breakdown of the food history of Spain, the way that the Jews and the Muslims influenced the cuisine of the different regions, the influence of classical French chefs and more. In addition, each region within Spain is examined with details on the kind of food that you might expect to find.

Really though, the most important measure of a cookbook is how often are you going to cook from it. I was talking to someone the other day and they said that on average most people only cook 2 to 3 recipes out of any one cookbook. While I haven't cooked anything from this one yet, I did bookmark lots of recipes that I might consder making at some point or another.

I was reading this in bed at night and took a couple of Instagram photos. Hopefully you can see from this photo just how many little bits of paper I had used to bookmark a recipe, and this was only when I was about half way through so there ended up being lots more. It was a bit of shame to have to pull them all out just so I could return this one to the library.

Once you get past the food history part, Roden takes us through a variety of different types of food, but even within the recipe pages there are feature pages that might talk about a particular type of ingredient or a place, and sometimes even features pages on the people that she has come to know through the process of researching this book, people she ate memorable meals with, chefs, ordinary people and more. There is so much information in this book. I can totally imagine myself pulling this book off the shelf and browsing for just a few pages and finding something I had either forgotten about or that jumps out and catches my attention this time around.


If there was one minor niggle with this book it is in the fact that none of the photos that were included in the book included any details of what it was that we were looking at and some of the photos were a bit boring really. If it wasn't for that very minor criticism, this really would have been a perfect cookbook!

When my copy comes, which should have this gorgeous cover, I already know that there are a couple of recipes that I will share for a future Weekend Cooking post. I didn't realise until I was ordering that Claudia Roden is also one of the authors who has been given the Penguin Great Food treatment, so I ordered that book as well. I can also definitely see myself exploring more of Claudia Roden's cookbooks in the future.

In the meantime, if you want to see a few examples of the kinds of recipes that you will find in this book, there are some recipes that can be found on the Guardian website at the following link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/mar/18/spanish-recipes-exclusive-claudia-roden

If you have any interest at all in Spanish food, I would highly recommend that you take a look at this exceptional cookbook.

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. You do not have to post on the weekend. For more information, see the welcome post.