Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This
week the theme is Favourite Words. I thought that I would tie this theme into the fact that it is National Cookbook Month so I have been focussing on cookbooks during this month as part of Weekend Cooking. I am therefore choosing words like bake, cake, kitchen and associated words as my words!
I recently joined a Facebook group which is a monthly cookbook group. This month they are cooking from any Australian Women's Weekly cookbooks. These are just two of the AWWC cookbooks I have. I posted about the Birthday Cakes one here.
Nadiya Hussein come to prominence as a result of winning Great British Bake Off and has gone from strength to strenght. I have shared recipes from Nadiya Bakes here and from Bake Australia Great here.
Donna Hay is one of Australia's best known celebrity cooks! I have shared several of her recipes over the years. Marian Keyes is a really well known author. She shared how baking helped her with mental health issues. Here's my review.
I currently have Beatrix Bakes out of the library!
Moving now to the word kitchen because this is where all the bakes and cakes happen! My review of Kitchen Counter Cooking School can be found here.
Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This
week the theme is Back to School. Our school year runs from late January to mid December so it is an unusual time for this theme for us but I am going to stick with it.
So, here are ten books which feature schooling relating words.
Kalahari Typing School for Men by Alexander McCall Smith - the fourth book in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series
The School for Heiresses - This was an anthology featuring Sabrina Jeffries, Julia London, Renee Barnard and Liz Carlyle. It's such a shame that Liz Carlyle doesn't write any more. Her books were fab. (review)
Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn - I did a joint review with Beth Fish Reads for this book which was so much fun.
The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister - This book made me want to take cooking lessons! (review)
Charm School by Nelson De Mille - I read this book back in the early 1990s, as well as several other books by this author. This was a Cold War spy novel. Not sure it would hold up too well now, but I did enjoy his books a lot at the time.
Poison Study by Maria V Snyder - I could have chosen any of the Study trilogy really. (review)
The Piano Teacher by Janice Y K Lee - love the cover of this book!
Teach Me by Olivia Dade - I read this book earlier this year. It won't be my last book by this author.
French Lessons by Ellen Sussman - I don't remember much about this book but to be fair I did read it 11 years ago.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R Covey - I did this as part of a leadership program through work a few years ago now.
When we recounted the trip back home, we both measured the days in meal and countries: lunch in Monte Carlo overlooking a white sand beach populated with beautiful topless French women (crisp salad Nicoise thick with anchovies, roasted whole fish with fennel and tomatoes); in Barcelona, a late bite just off Las Ramblas (spit-roasted rabbit, broiled mussels with garlic and parsley sauce); the hike to a hillside cliff for hot, sweet tea above Tunis (sugary date-heavy Tunisian pastries); a bit in an ancient square in Palermo, Italy, after being overcharged by a crafty seventeen-year-old Sicilian cart-and-buggy driver (handcrafted pizza with fresh tomatoes, grilled squid with sweet fennel sausage); and, finally, the best past vongole (pasta with clams) of my life high above the harbor on the island of Capri. (page 120)
Doesn't a passage like that make you wish that it was you who had that experience (although I suspect I might have chosen different meals)!
I have been pondering over the last couple of weeks exactly why it is that I enjoy reading foodie memoir type books. I think it is because they are aspirational! I wish that I could be there, or if I have been there that I could go again! Or maybe it is just that I wish that I could write about the places I do go or have been!
It's the same with TV cooking shows. I love watching TV shows where they shoot at different locations, or even better in different countries. I love watching as they visit gorgeous castles, or fabulous beaches even though it tortures me because I know that I won't be going anywhere exotic, or even just different, any time soon!
When I look back over my reading this year, there is a decisively French feel. I just finished reading An Immovable Feast which is all about an Australian man's life in France (review will be up in December) and Lunch in Paris about an American woman moving to France. It's also not just memoirs that give me this feeling - even well written fiction can deliver these kind of emotional longing. Die for Me by Amy Plum and Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins both had me wishing that I was with the characters in Paris! It's not only France though. I remember longing to visit Tuscany for months after reading Under the Tuscan Sun.
It's not only the travel aspect though. It's also looking at recipes or images of food and thinking that it looks fabulous and I wish I could do that or eat that! Gorgeous cakes and dinners that just have the mouth salivating just by looking at them!
Why do you enjoy reading foodie books, whether they be memoirs, cook books, novels or magazines?
I have a few newsy type items to share before finishing off this week!
Firstly, I need to announce the winner of the giveaway of The Kitchen Counter Cooking School! Congratulations to
Bookfool
I will be sending you an email shortly to get your details and get your prize on it's way to you.
Secondly........my oven (kind of) got fixed this week! There are still some further repairs to be done, but I can at least turn it on manually. It turns out I probably could have been doing this all the way along but didn't know how! In fact, I am cooking Apple Crumble as this post goes live. I must have left dozens and dozens of comments on other people's Weekend Cooking posts saying that I would try a recipe if only my oven was working. Now, I have no excuses!
Thirdly - I am contemplating starting a new feature within a feature. I have mentioned before that my son is very keen on cooking at the moment. He is doing Food Technology at school and so is bringing home some food each week, but he also likes to do some cooking at home. As a result I was thinking about sharing our learning to cook experiences in some of my Weekend Cooking posts. I was trying to think of a clever and catchy name - he seems to like Adventures of a Little Chef so we may just go with that! I am however a bit concerned that I will announce this and suddenly he won't be interested any more! I think the first post will go up next week!
At the moment I seem to have quite a stock of ideas for Weekend Cooking posts! Hopefully I will remember them for those weeks that I can't think of anything that I want to write about!
Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads and 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, fabulous quotations, photographs.
The author of The Sharper Your Knife tells the inspiring story of how she helped nine others find their inner cook.
After graduating from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, writer Kathleen Flinn returned with no idea what to do next, until one day at a supermarket she watched a woman loading her cart with ultraprocessed foods. Flinn's "chefternal" instinct kicked in: she persuaded the stranger to reload with fresh foods, offering her simple recipes for healthy, easy meals.
The Kitchen Counter Cooking School includes practical, healthy tips that boost readers' culinary self-confidence, and strategies to get the most from their grocery dollar, and simple recipes that get readers cooking.
I am very pleased this week to have teamed up with Candace from Bethfishreads.com to bring you a discussion about The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks by Kathleen Flinn. In addition, I share a glimpse into my last shopping trip and my pantry, and there is also a giveaway at the end of the post!
Lots going on this post, so lets get started! Candace's thoughts are in purple and mine in black! Also, don't forget to head over to Bethfishreads to read the second half of the discussion! Enjoy!
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The idea for this book came when Kathleen Flinn started chatting to a woman in the supermarket after watching what she loaded into her shopping trolley. I must say that I would be totally mortified either if a stranger did that to me, or if I was thinking about doing it for myself. We briefly contemplated taking photos of our own shopping trolleys and that was even mortifying!
Definitely. No way I was going to start spying on people. Flinn was gutsy.
During the course of the book we are introduced to nine different cooks. Could you relate to any of them?
Not really. Not even the cooks who were close to my age. I think the main difference is that I grew up in a family of cooks and helped out from a young age. I also took home ec in junior high and high school so I was baking and cooking simple dishes by the time I was 12. The students in the book didn’t really know anything.
I could relate to a degree. My mother is, and always has been, a terrible and unimaginative cook so we never really grew up enjoying the cooking process. We did some home ec at school for one year but it didn’t really stick with me!
I am a lazy cook. I can cook but I prefer the find a new recipe, go to the shops and make it kind of weekend cooking - not Monday to Friday cooking! I often get home from work and think oh, I am far too tired to make something from scratch, and that’s assuming that we didn’t stop for takeaway on the way home. I do have some of those packets of pasta side dishes etc in my cupboard but I am tempted to at least to give a couple of the pasta suggestions a go.
Oddly enough, I’m a lazy cook too. But for me that means I don’t make recipes that require a lot of clean up or all-day fussing. Once you get a few skills, however, there are quite a lot of dinners you can make in under an hour from scratch.
Brave enough to photograph the pantry, not
shopping trolleys though!
If Kathleen Flinn was to look in your pantry what would she find?
I took a photograph of my bounty from the farmers’ market and a few things I filled in with that weren’t fresh. In my refrigerator one would find unsalted butter, various hot sauces and condiments, cheese, orange juice, rice milk, dried fruit, and sometimes yogurt. My freezer has frozen vegetables, shrimp, lamb, nuts, chocolate chips, and maybe some chicken, pork, or beef.
My shopping this week is actually pretty good for me! There are probably two reasons for this - firstly, because I knew that we were going to take photos and secondly, I took a list and actually stuck to it!
My son watched the videos that are available and he was definitely ready to try a couple of the recipes - Pomodoro in particular (see below). Not too long ago we tried to make a recipe from a four ingredients type cookbook which was similar but it was bland, bland, bland. It will be interesting to see how much of a difference those extra couple of ingredients make.
One of the really interesting things in the book was the passage about recipes that appear in magazines and how they sometimes cut ingredients because there isn’t enough room to print them in full or because the recipe is going to appear in a certain month or season. I am almost always disappointed by recipes that use only 4 or 5 ingredients.
I watched a few of Flinn’s videos and have to say I was more excited about them than I was about the book. I think anyone could learn some basic dishes by watching her videos.
Relatively good trip to the shops this week!
For me one of the interesting things I found was thinking about things like what all the extra ingredients are in packets of food (cake mixes, pancakes mixes, side dishes etc). My son loves pancakes and so we always have some of those bottles of shake and mix pancake mixes and just looking at the list there are nine different ingredients and some of those are actually things like flavours and raising agents so there could be a lot more than nine. Pretty sure that there are less if I was to make them from scratch. We might have to try!
I think this book suffers a little bit from a lack of direction and therefore my reaction to it varied quite broadly. For example, there is a chapter about where she goes on a cruise to teach. The first part focuses on a romantic dinner with husband which I didn’t think needed to be there. A bit later there was a small section which talked about the meals they had and I wanted to be there with them. Such different reactions even within just one chapter.
I totally agree. If you truly wanted to learn to cook, you would have a difficult time working your way through this book. It’s really more like a memoir than a guide. I was often left wondering who the audience was. I found a tidbit here and there interesting or new but as an experienced cook, I didn’t find much new. Some of the advice was definitely solid -- like learning cooking techniques and learning to taste.
Other aspects were good in theory but even someone like me (works from home, experienced cook) wouldn’t do. For example, I’m happy to buy low-sodium organic chicken broth rather than make my own. And although I am perfectly capable of cutting up a chicken (and so is my husband) and I know it’s cheaper, I’m just as happy buying only the parts we really like -- despite the cost.
I think the cutting up a chicken chapter really needs to be a visual explanation rather than a written explanation. I would like to see a video of that one!
I only have a small freezer and so the idea of making stock and storing it, or even just bags and bags of bones is impractical. I think that there is nothing wrong with using short cuts like bought stock if that is what works for you and your lifestyle.
Are you interested in reading this book? Thanks to the good people at Viking I have a copy of the book and also a magnet (see right).
The rules...
- US or Canada only (no PO boxes please)
- leave a comment and don't forget your email address or Twitter ID so that I can contact the lucky winner
- the contest closes on 3 October at Midnight Australian Eastern Standard Time. (one week from today)
Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads and 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, fabulous quotations, photographs.
