s/d: cookbooks!

but thai food is my favourite food; i might have more patience than others

I think I've already promoted it here, but Steve Raichlen's "Miami Spice" is a little gem.

I also really like Deborah Madison's original "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone" (haven't seen the updated version). It is my go-to when I come home from the farmer's market with something I don't have a clue what to do with.

"Rice & Curry: Sri Lankan Home Cooking" is great for weekday curries! As long as you have access to fresh curry leaves you are all set (I go to a Sri Lankan market, but I also see them at Indian grocers and large international grocery stores like Grand Mart, Lotte, etc.)

I'll rep for Rick Bayless's Mexican Everyday, which I just gave to my mom for Christmas. His more authentic book is very good too, but the former is great for people with less access to all the ingredients and less time on their hands to screw around making sauces that take all day to prepare or pressing tortillas and the like.

yeah, I got this one a few weeks ago and everything has been really solid that I've made so far.

I promised to get a colleague who a) can't boil and egg and b) lives in Serbia a basic cookery book.

What would be a good, simple, Italian-leaning, not-particularly-adventurous-with-ingredients option? Nigella Lawson?

*an egg

marcella hazan, as vaunted upthread, might be a good bet. I've only learnt her recipes second hand from my brother who is a devotee, but some very simple & extremely delicious stuff which is v satisfying to cook

Thanks! I will investigate.

Delia.

maybe even Jamie Oliver?

i reckon nigel slater 100 per cent. real fast food is like a paperback, really basic, cheap good dishes, it's like "how to cook" but still has some brilliant recipes, basic use of herbs and spices, all the foundations.

maybe the 30-minute cook or real cooking if you want something a bit fancier. think real fast food actually has how to boil an egg, or close to it anyway.

he cooks across cultures p well and he goes through store cupboard stuff and that kind of thing. the paperback real fast food (like the shape of a novel) might be a bit low key as a gift, is the only thing, dunno if it comes in a nicer form.

I do love Real Fast Food but it's got no pictures, which I think of as being useful for a beginner.

thats true... some of his books have photos tho. and i agree w/ localgarda they are great

i don't find pics mad useful personally, though i got a copy of claudia roden's italian book recently that was a small paperback and the size of the pages compared to the complexity of the recipes has ensured i've barely opened it. don't think real fast food has this problem.

i guess i just find i've prob used the slater books more than any others, especially when i was first beginning to cook a lot.

Delia's complete cookery thingamabob was my bible when I first started out; a decent size to prop open on a worktop, and easy-to-follow instructions for pretty much everything you might thing of. Like a book of platonic essence recipes.

Slater's probably my favourite overall. Jamie Oliver feels like a younger, hipper, slightly less sophisticated version of him. I love Ottolenghi too but he's fiddly as fuck.

yeah ottolenghi has way too many ingredients always. he did a piece in the guardian last year that was like "lol i know i always have too many ingredients so try these shorter recipes!" and it was still way too many ingredients.

i don't mind cooking something that takes time and effort, i have no real upper limit on it especially if entertaining. but for the amount of ingredients used i never want to cook any of ottolenghi's dishes.

i might argue real fast food not having pictures is actually a plus bc it deemphasises set-piece cookery. as for many it was my genuine total beginner book too and in retrospect what it was rly good at was just nudging u to appreciate that an extra 5% effort is nbd and can be v rewarding

interesting to think about whether and in what ways it might seem dated now

last several years of slater are bad btw dude fell the fuck off

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Things-Eat-Lucas-Hollweg/dp/0007364075?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

big fan of lucas hollweg who was the (scandalously deposed for gizzy bloody erskine) sunday times cookery guy now waitrose magazine columnist (probably for best as he is an awful toff who should never be on tv). like slater but much more refined and low key creative in engaging encouraging ways, very well considered recipes, never too many outre ingredients, totally underrated

yeah true about slater, even his recipes in the paper, once a must-read, are kinda weird now, i liked his old knack of taking stuff that's in vogue and tweaking it for your store cupboard but the recipes just seem a bit weird now.

must take a look at hollweg. there isn't much in the papers i rely on anymore, but i tend to just improvise simple things a bit more in the last year, with nice ingredients.

ottolengman gets a cliche bad rep at this point imo... his books are still really good, only getting better in fact. his recipes are the best possible version of the given idea but they give you plenty of room for compromise if u don't use them like a car repair manual

still yet to see a fucking aleppo chilli in my entire life tho

if u want a hollweg testimonial i once attended a bbq thing an ex of mine i hadnt seen since was at and i'd noticed she'd brought along one of the salads out his book which i knew she did not own at the time of break up. the fury inside of me that day

florence knight i also like in that general vein, small notch up in terms of difficulty/being arsed though

i like the us website serious eats - it can be pretty simple and good, among all the recipes for burgers or ribs or whatever.

yeah the kenji-lopez-alt-ctrl-delete science bits there are v interesting occasionally. his method for making store-bought mozzarella not be a big ball of used chewing gum is a lifechanger

i just bought his book! i haven't spent much time with it yet tho

there was a big collection of his summer grilling recipes recently and it was awesome, like quick aioli, 5-minute marinated chicken breast, grilled asparagus, loads of really good things you can make after a normal work day when you want to do something else with your evening as well as cooking.

damnit i forgot to spread the word that the Cooks Illustrated "The Science of Good Cooking" was part of Amazon's silly Prime Day yday (albeit at like $19 instead of the regular $25 so nothing crazy)

I am v excited for it.

Our cookbooks stayed in boxes for a few months after we moved house, but now they are free! I feel like I've been cooking the same things every week, looking forward to getting back in the what's cooking? game.

http://i.imgur.com/03Lqm3X.jpg

That Roden book of Jewish food is excellent.

yeah it's one of the best

Got my bf Ruby Tandoh's second book for Xmas and her knack for unusual but completely amazing flavour combinations is just great

haha initially missed the "my bf" part of that post and was like "whoa 2017 must've gotten really weird if lex is cooking now" :)

i miss my cookbooks, they are all boxed up in our attic since we moved. we're renting right now and looking for a house so i probably won't unpack them until we move again

still love food but can't cook! xp

this ruby tandoh lady is new to me. looks like she can cook but in her spare time she crusades against a healthy eating strawman or something?

the wellness/clean eating trend is definitely not a strawman, it's kind of ubiquitous and she's usually quite specific about who she's targeting (the hemsley sisters, deliciously ella etc etc)

spent some time w/ meera sodha's 'fresh india' over the weekend. v agreeable and undemanding, think i will enjoy

most recent acquisition is francis mallmann's seven fires which deserves a mention on here. i had never heard of the guy but i guess he's basically the most famous chef in argentina as well as a genuine-seeming example of the poet/adventurer/most-interesting-man-in-the-world type who happens to be able to cook.

it's billed as a grilling book but it's actually an intro to extremely aggressive open-fire cooking that none of us will ever be in position to do combined with a useful selection of original recipes that represent argentine food as a spanish/french/italian/german fusion cuisine. charred sliced fennel and zucchini with parmesan. tomatoes and olives with burnt ricotta salata. simple grilled shrimp with spaetzle (flavored with more parm and scallions). potato salad that uses toasted almonds for depth. tons of fresh oregano. did i mention he loves burning stuff? this book has lots of super-simple flavor combinations that i've never seen anywhere else.

it also has a recipe for cooking a whole cow over an open fire (you need a winch and 4 able-bodied adults from the look of the photos) which may be useful for the incipient apocalypse.

O_O

here's some mallmann content for ya:

https://vinepair.com/articles/francis-mallmann/

his chef's table was awesome. just cooking giant fish over fire in patagonia. I think he was one of several chefs that did pit cooking in that first season, as well.

some people really hate argentine cooking and it sounds like it'd be a struggle if you didn't want to eat a lot of meat all the time, but that looks entertaining. reading about things I could never or just won't ever cook can be a lot of fun even if it's not of any practical use.

I got Seven Fires as a gift from my Aussie bro in law (who likes to dig holes in the ground and cook things over fire). I was worried that that is exactly what it would be, but was pleasantly surprised that many (all?) of the recipes include grill and/or oven instructions.

My partner has just bought Thug Kitchen, subtitled Eat Like You Give a Fuck. The contents are titled 'track list'. Sample text: "Whisk together the flour and water in a big bowl until a batter forms with no chunks. Did you already fuck it up and it's all chunky? Start that shit over again." It has some good recipes but I don't know if I'll be able to read them with my eyes rolled all the way to the back of my head.

:/

ya i can't handle sassy cookbooks

when i was vegan a long time ago this book called "veganomicon" was all the rage and the instructions were all sassy and i couldn't deal

the only conversational instructions i can tolerate are Julia Child's and even then she sticks to the goddam point

most others can gtfo

some black marker may be called for.