Cookery books of the year

Unbelievable - my last submission to this blog was on January 4th! Amazing how little action I've taken over the past year, blog-wise.. Guess life got in the way of blogging but still - I did plenty of cooking. So - quick update of what's been cooking in my lab this past year. New cookery books? Of course, though I've been more restrained than previously - despite my fabulous new bookshelves in my study I really am running out of space. This year I have really enjoyed using the following books:

Tamasin's Kitchen Bible by Tamasin Day Lewis. It has taken me a while but I really like Tamasin's recipes. The reason I didn't immediately warm to her is that Tamasin has that slightly annoying humourlessness that her more famous brother also has, that air of taking themselves terribly seriously, which I find quite off putting. She thinks she is quite amazing and being an instinctive Dutch protestant I can't quite handle her 'tude.. But you've got to look beyond that - she is a pretty incredible cook. This book contains most of the classics (chicken pie, christmas recipes) as well as a lot of innovative dishes (a lovely navarin of lamb, chicken with almonds and honey). Her lemon tart is definitive - do as she says, put up and shut up, and you will be rewarded with the most delicious lemon tart known to mankind.

I have also continued to cook Annie Bell's recipes from In My Kitchen. Earlier entries in my blog include her barbequed sausages, and I've now also cooked her greek beef casserole with feta, stuffed tomatoes campagnardes and her pot-au-feu, amongst other things. Her recipes are so quietly confident and they work. Sometimes the simplicity of the ingredients makes you doubt the result will be wortwhile but persevere.

But the cookery book that has amazed me most is Bill Granger's Simply Bill. I have two of his earlier books, and they were nice (particularly the photos) but the recipes never did it for me. I don't doubt they work, or were good, but somehow they didn't click. This book, however, is amazing. Never before have I cooked my way through so many recipes from one cook book. They are simple, unusual and delicious. I find myself cooking things that I wouldn't have tackled before - red curry fish and sweet potato, homemade fish fingers - and each successive succesful recipe gives me more confidence to try more. Amazing! It's hard to give highlights - I think you can just cook your way through the entire cookbook and enjoy every meal, but recurring favourites are: rice noodles with prawns and lime,, beef stroganoff, ham lasagne (and I cannot urge you strongly enough to try this - it is wonderful and so much easier than the heavy bechamel version), braised chicken with lemon and honey and the shepherd's salad with feta. (The only recipe I've tried and not found a success is the spicy butternut soup - but if you read the comments in my post about the soup I did find you'll see that Mark recommends Peter Gordon's take on it. So I'll be posting about that when I justify buying his book..)

Finally, I have just bought Bill's most recent book, Every Day. The layout is a tad irritating (structured by day, so there are breakfast, lunch and supper recipes on each day) but I'll forgive Bill so much. In fact, the tone that comes through in his books is so friendly and approachable that you forgive him the apparent perfection of his life as pictured in his book. So I'll let you know how I get on with this one.

In the meantime, happy shopping! And if you are tempted to buy any of the books, please use the link in this blog as I get a kickback from Amazon if you click through from here - don't worry, it won't make me unbearably rich..