This lengthy blog essentially descends into a desert island discs of cook books as I move home.
It's been a funny year but one of progress. I realise however that I have not been posting very frequently. When I am back at Oaklands I am trying to savour every minute with family and the property - doing things and seeing friends. When I am overseas life is carved up into times of boredom (which is my fault) and times involving administration and packing up but interspersed with jolly times of travel (Lisbon and Vienna so far this year and South Africa and New Zealand to come). I have got my head and heart around semi-retirement or a sabbatical or whatever this early departure from work is and I have a good plan for my transition back home to the UK by the beginning of April 2023. Before then I have loose ends to tie up including the small matter of our other family home of almost 14 years in Dubai.
This week really has got down to the crunchy business end of things with the packers from Crown coming in tomorrow to take everything into storage. I am moving into a flat with a few things and then seeing out the rest of the year with a smaller footprint in Dubai. The dog has gone home to Oaklands and Darlene our maid is all packed up. I run her to the airport for a flight home on Thursday as she has decided to call time in Dubai as well.
Packing and throwing stuff out is quite cathartic really - as long as you get it done in time ! I would recommend Mari Kondo's book on tidying and organising your life "Spark Joy" if you have any trouble with too much stuff. The woman will have you rolling your pants into little neat packets arranged with the dedicated precision of a Shinto Monk with OCD. So I am into a three way sort of my "stuff" now - stuff to go into medium term storage to arrive with me when I repatriate, stuff just to expunge or chuck out and a life boat of a few clothes, books and toys to be set afloat with me for 6 months in my odd transition.
I realised today that I should keep close a few cookbooks because when I am tuned into them they really do uplift the quality of my life. They are an antidote boredom. But which ones and why ? I managed to get down to just seven cookbooks to line a shelf in my new one bedroom flat and realised that I should perhaps have not repatriated one or twi pieces of inspiration too early.
Appetite by Nigel Slater
I can never be without Nigel Slater's truly classic and enriching book. It is not a recipe book. It is a book about cooking and how to be a good cook.
It is fairly typical in that it begins by covering equipment.
He is delightfully whimsical on the kit point as in a postscript he also encourages the purchase of the best equipment possible to make the washing up an enjoyable ritual. There is a beautiful stall at Ludlow market that sells all sorts of home brushes and I now have a couple of flowery water jugs sporting wooden washing up brushes above the kitchen sink at Oaklands. I added to them recently with a couple of bottle brushes from a gift shop in Leominster. I have to say I don't quite get the same thrill from washing up a pan as Nigel clearly does - but there is time. For me the washing up kit is aesthetic !
Getting back to business Nigel's writing provides a tool kit or a map of basic meals for the kitchen. He starts with the importance of ingredients but also touches on the joy of shopping for them, choosing them and how they look and how they make you feel. He draws in the thrill of growing a few things yourself. This is a book to read and not so much a book to dip into for recipes. After you have read it I think it can become a life long companion for your cooking.
Nigel helps you to learn groups of recipes and a way to think about certain foods rather than giving instructions in the form of single recipes. When the cooking does start it comes more as as unfolding of ideas. A simple spaghetti dish worthy of any student becomes a treatise on pasta, the recipe mutating into a number of dishes leaving you free to just well... cook pasta ! He talks about the smell of cooking as well as the end result. He writes beautifully. This book is far more practical than his diary series which are really a food diary and shopping log and talk to a randomness of eating what you want as you wander through the year. Again an approach but not a compact lesson in cooking like Appetite. A Cook's Book follow a similar musings format but again without the clusters of recipes that make Appetite a joy. The Real Series have again all been packed in lieu of this one book. It is Nigel at his best if you need to know how to cook rather than just to read about the joy of cooking.
One of my favourite sections is about gratin dauphinoise. Potatoes, garlic, cream and butter - Fat and Carbs for the rest of us. "Smear the dish generously" implores Nigel - "Please don't be tight". All 200 ++ pounds of me is right behind you mate ! As ever a dozen variations are unpacked including the diet version which seems to involve stock rather than cream as the unguent. If you don't feel like getting thin you can try the addition of smoky anchovies or bacon tucked between the layers of potatos - hidden treasures in a vat of fat. Is it is side dish or a mid-week supper ? It is both and something to elevate any potatoes found in the fridge drawer before the next weekly shop. This class of dish will work in one of those little ceramic or enamal oven dishes for one or two. The book is worth the purchase price for just those few pages on "a creamy, unctuous potato dish" alone.
The lessons go on - how to cook lamb on a grill and what to serve it with. It begins with a green sauce that I use all the time in different forms - garlic, lemon juice, woody herbs (I also add parsley) salt and olive oil. A dozen options for a lamb chop follow.
How to really treat yourself to a steak. Just a few tricks to learn - how to judge if it is done ? How to make a bernaise or a simple "ju" by deglazing the pan with a glug of wine and pouring the juice back over the steak. Just typing this up has my mind exploding with ideas for my last supper in Al Barsha. I would suggest that for any young person who wants to learn to be a half decent cook and have some confidence with food then this book is a wonderful place to start. It is the polestar for my mini-cook book shelf.
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat
Next into my line up another set of lessons or treatises rather than a book of recipes. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life. I heard that during a Blue Peter appeal special in the 70's and it has stuck with me ever since. I also had a client for a long while who asked for "tools" and not "opinions". This book follows those two mantras.
Life gets a little more technical with this book and tends towards the alchemic. This is all about what makes food tasty and how to enhance its flavour. It works on these four themes - Salt, Fat, Acid Heat and you can come back to it over and over again to learn something new. It approaches food through techniques and flavour rather than just through components. Bear with me. I have posted about this book before I think in the context of cooking my first homegrown squash. The notion then was that standing the squash cubes in heavily salted water for a hour actually makes the squash taste sweeter. You can lifts out for example the essence of any food by ensuring that it is seasoned correctly with salt.
If the theory does not grab you and make you want to start brining chickens and layering fats then the illustrations in this book are charming. I watched a series of hers on Netflix and she explains how she has worked with the illustrator to come up with a very clear style of writing and most of all teaching. She is a great story teller as well as teacher and describes how she begged for a job at the French Laundry in California (a high end restaurant) and was then intrigued or appalled at first to see the chefs throwing handfuls of salt into food rather than pinches or twists in a meagre way. This was how she started her journey of trying to understand why food tastes good or doesn't.
There are beautiful and simple illustrated lessons in the book on how to chop or prepare vegetables and what different terms mean.
There is a flow chart on what to do with a chicken dependent on how much time you have before the guests arrive !
There are wonderful fold out wheels, like colour wheels from decorating or gardening books but instead based on the spices or ingredient sets for touring the world of food flavour...
... and other wheels for how to couple them with the correct fats or acids. For a geek like me who likes charts and maps I was immediately drawn in by this book. Most importantly I have applied it to my food. There are simple lessons to uplift my cooking that work.
Why make an angled cut on a green bean ? The Greater surface area is going to assist if you want to get the food seasoned correctly and quickly - it also looks good.
Don't just throw the beans then into a pan of slightly salted water - dunk them in water as salty as the sea for a good hour. The beans will not get too salty. A small additional amount of the saltiness will go into the bean by osmosis and the bean will taste sweeter. They will not end up as salty as the water. The flavour of a simple green bean is uplifted by the addition of salt, water and time.
Vegetables from the pottager at Oaklands deserve special treatment so I will be doubling down for the next 6 months in my flat on learning how to treat them well.
Which brings me to my fellow Essex man Jamie.
Jamie at Home by Jamie
Jamie is actually a chef by training but he is another food writer or influencer who has moved away from just giving us recipes to giving us ways to think about food. Sometimes it's hard to separate Jamie from a "Lifestyle" - he runs around on a vesper while he talks about pasta and at times he has plastered pictures of his children in the media covered in tomato or chocolate sauce. I wondered about him for a while but have settled on a belief that the man is good and wants the best for Britain's diet.
His book Jamie at Home (I wonder if anyone will ever be known and remembered as just Neil in the UK ?) talks about growing your own food and then how to cook it. Its a book organised by seasonal availability which I like and a celebration of making the most of food that you have grown or have been given over the fence, freshly shot by your neighbour. It covers outdoors cooking and like many of his books how to present and share food. I think he is very much about how food *looks* as well as how it tastes.
Tomato salads in Jamie world come on an oversized plate and are fresh, scattered with red onion and basil, a good salt, the best olive oil and are colourful and full of texture - reds, oranges, greens, yellows - smooth or ribbed. The man gets that food is sensuous. Its a tomato riot with Jamie.
He also gets that food should be fun and shared. Food explodes onto tables where the glasses don't match the water jug - blue or bottle green from a charity shop. The plates have four different patterns on them - or everyone is served from one giant plate. Tracing influences in food is interesting. Mrs C and me like to bring home giant platters these days from overseas trips to pile up salads or pasta dishes on. Its all the post-Jamie zeitgeist. He has never used the word table-scaping but its where the cultural world has ended up now in the Sunday supplements. I read a piece by a Conran recently which told me everything about what the food was on but nothing about how it was cooked. It is a bit like the appearance of bunting in middle class campsites during the glamping craze.
I don't believe though that a bohemian cutlery and dish selection can make food taste better if you don't understand how to cook. Jamie can obviously cook and I will therefore also accept his treatises on what a fun table should look like. I found myself buying little dishes covered with sardines in geometric patterns in Lisbon recently. Mrs C has her eye on a big Melanine plate in Leominster with an Octopus on it but lets not get onto to the too intelligent to cook and eat debate tonight.
At heart Jamie is all about food tasting well perhaps foil wrapped and straight from the coals and the ingredient being fresh and home grown. No table scanning here. This is another themed book rather than just a set of recipes. It could have been called the Good Life.
Hugh is Missing
As I set out to study to be Tom Goode I guess if I had not already airlifted them to safety in the UK then Hugh Fernly Whittingstone's River Cottage series would have been hard to part with tomorrow. This is really where my heart began when it comes to the whole idea of small holding and "downsizing" and self-suffiency. Hugh on Meat is a must read as is Hugh on Fish and Escape to River Cottage was the original new inspiration for the downsizing self sufficient smallholder. You can go back to the 70's manual Self Sufficiency or vowel much the Good Life or war-time manuals prior to that. I will leave those books (or that movement ?) over for a whole other post. The River Cottage TV series from the end of the last century on channel 4 was where it all started for me ! Jane and I have been dreaming about how we could once day escape to the country and grow our own food now for 30 years. She is there now and I will be there soon. By the time I was in my early thirties I knew I was destined to be taking pot shots at squirrels and pigeons and wondering whether a local river had free crayfish up for grabs. Hugh or River Cottage is now a brand a lot like Daylesford but it began as a simple idea. Why don't you leave London and go and start living ?
Back to my seven books for the flat. This is becoming a long post but a good one for me as it is serving as a reminder of the why as much as the how of Oaklands.
Curry Easy Vegetarian by Madhur Jeffrey
Every shelf needs an Indian cookbook - I was torn between this or her other Curry Easy book with meat in. 2023/2024 is going to be the year where I attempt to feed myself. I think that basically means a lot of pulses and vegetables as I dont think we will have room for more than a few chickens and perhaps the odd pig if I am lucky. I am also a bad shot at the moment. I have decided that a barrel of flour, chickpeas and rice will not be cheating on my "No spend year". A few spices and just add vegetables and the bulk of Indian cooking is at my fingertips. There are dozens of vegetarian Indian restaurants in Dubai and it is a cuisine I have come to like a lot.
Both Madhur Jeffrey's Curry Easy books were a great friend during lock down in 2020 and then the UK red travel light induced separation of 2021. I have made curries before that have taken 6 hours from the grind and roast of spices to the final serving. To me they taste no better than a Dal from this book which will take two interventions of 20 minutes or so as it bubbles along. A Dal is perfect earthy comfort food to soothe and warm an evening. Black Kale turned sharply in a hot pan in oil with mustard seeds, garlic and ginger is delicious.
I always know a book is taking on a the role of becoming a friend when I start to write in it. At first I thought it was wrong to write in books. I hated buying second hand law textbooks at college which had been scribbled in. I now love to scribble in my own cookbooks ticking off a page when a recipe has been fun or something has worked well or I have leant something.
The simple annotation here - "Dhal 1 !" - with two dates and "Nice" makes me smile when I see it. I irrregularly have "curry week" adding a dish or a pickle to a growing collection in the fridge night by night. By Wednesday I have a banquet on the go.
Its not all success with my cooking - at least 20 % of meals go wrong but as someone said on a forum I follow the other day "if you aren't f*cking up regularly you are not really learning" - or words to that effect. A little scribble to calibrate was noted below. "Possibly need to wash and cook for longer ?" Was that the Chickpeas or me I wonder ?
Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz
Now I haven't gone far down my fermentation or preservation journey although I have posted about it before on Our Few Acres. I am now the proud owner of many Kilner jars, pickling stones, salts, vinegars, and a pickle packer. Sandor Katz or Krautz as he prefers on occasion is one of the voices on the goodness to be had from fermented food. I am coming back to this whole food arc in the not to near future.
Aside from dealing with gluts of vegetables and saving food I am also just in love with a good pastrami sandwich with sauerkraut and gherkins. I started my fermenting journey with Sauerkraut. Fermenting vegetables is neither hard nor time consuming. You can soon end up with some pretty produce in rows of jars in a cold pantry after a couple of afternoons of prep followed by two weeks of bubbling. The general rule is 3 % salt by weight of vegetable or a 3 % brine (salt/water) if you are going down the dunked gherkin route. I have yet to get into Kefir and fermenting dairy. Jane had some on the go once donated by a friend - I tried but declined regular infusions,
This type of exercise in making food is above all a great escape into tactile learning. When instructions are provided as verbs - "Squeeze" and "Pack" - you know you are just meant to have a go. I was at Ludlow food festival last week before flying back to Dubai and Daylesford had a "Director of `Fermentation" on the stage. I want to be Oaklands Director of fermentation and that will of course include some booze at some stage. If you haven't made it you can't drink will be the rule next year ! That should lower my unit intake or stop me drinking altogether. I have a long way to go on this journey. Not just fermentation but preserving and pickling generally. It is that time of year - Jane is making jam and if I was at home now I could be lining up bubbling Kilner jars for the long dark Winter to be eaten by our wood-fired stove. Eating Kraut illuminated by a fire lit with logs I have cut myself - like some super sized yocal Hobbit with excellent gut health.
Two more books then back to the packing.
Tacolicious by Sara Deseran
Tacolicious is a successful West Coast Mexican restaurant and their cookbook really gets into a deep dive on how to build the flavours of Mexican food.
I discovered the Cool Chilli Company in the UK in the last few years for gift giving one Christmas. We will often now both stock up on bags of exotic chiles or jars of Anchiote paste or Mole. I don't just have cookbooks in my lifeboat - I have an escape larder ! I hope the new neighbours like the smell of Mexican food. If I get sad being in a flat I am afraid food will be the answer.
Again a book used well and often and in particular during the big lockdown and flight separation. "Had a go 9th May 2020". I can remember the afternoon which begain with me thinking "what's the point of cooking just for me " and ended up with me really like Mexican food. Well building skill can be done alone and then the results can be shared. Cooking alone is not wasted time. Better to make mistakes on yourself first.
These simple instructions on how to make your own "chilli" are an essential for me. I love the way it assumes you have collections of different Chiles or favourites and please note the "e" and the "I" thing - who knew. Chile is a fruit and chilli is the spice mix. Spending an hour grilling leathery strips of Chile and then grinding them up with Mexican oregano and cumin seeds to make chili powder is a joy. Marinade some chicken in orange juice and the chili powder then smother on some more before you grill it. Squeeze a lime over the burnt edges of your chicken before you serve - I think Mexican food is worth a deep dive. I will need a green house as I need to grow my own chiles now.
Dishing Up the Dirt by Andrea Bemis
Finally back to a farm. This book has an inscription "This is us at Oaklands. Well, maybe a little older ... much love Mrs C - 2019". Many of my cookbooks have a little inscription. We must have given dozens of cook books to each other over the years ?
This is a US book - I forget where they are based but Tumbleweed Farm is an organic vegetable farm I think in either the mid-West or the Pacific North-West. I love the farmers market, organic and local food movement that has spread all over North America. When we have been in Vermont or Vancouver we have dialled into it. Andrea begins that "Food is Medicine and Community is Everything". Now I don't like a lot of people that much so I don't think I will ever be starting a food bank or building a barn with non-power tools like Harrison Ford in Witness. I'd happily take a red cabbage round to Shirley's next door though if she fancied one or some asparagus once my crowns are planted. We are very English - we keep ourselves to ourselves. Friends are always welcome though at Oaklands.
We had a recent trip out to see someone else's garden in the National Garden Scheme. The theory is that you open up your garden for charity. I can see us doing that and me leaning on a fork chatting about my onions in a few years time. I chatted to this guy the other week in his garden about his espalier apples - he had been working in the Middle East as well through his career - he chucked me a discovery apple which was very nice. We were very English though and hardly got much further than swapping first names. We should look them up - nice people. I expect we may next see them in eight years wandering around our garden when we open it up. Or we could ask them to drop in.
Back to the cookbook. It starts without a medley of different sauces to make vegetables a treat - a different approach to Samin Nosrat's careful seasoning and salting. You simply tip a US inspired home made organic sauce all over your green beans. I started with Dijon Tahini dressing - that got the thumbs up again in 2021. Any recipe that begins "Taylor calls this Hippie Ranch Dressing" - see garlic cashew herb sauce below - could put out you off. Taylor looks like an even taller Adam Driver in denim overalls twice or three times the size of Andrea. I think I am definately twice the width of Jane now so my cook book might not have too many pictures of me pottering around the pottager.
So those are my seven books coming to my new kitchen. I have started thinking about writing more about food on our site when I get back. All I would then need is a cover for my own book. I have been practicing the fly insert with photo.... Neil is a former lawyer better known these days as a prepper and self-sufficient BBQ cook and naturalist. Neil put Mexican style squirrel and fermented Kale on the nations tables - yes just the "Neil" - no surname necessary. Unlikely.
The seven books will soon be in the back of the Pajero to be taken from Al Barsha over to the flat in the Greens Community. "Greens Community" - Andrea Bemis would be proud. We are heading in the right directions "friends". If I ever get packed.
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