Nesting and Nourishing

I'm going to get the book news out of the way, and then I am going to talk about cooking and cookbooks a lot. Also, a "recipe". Be told!

Book news:

Ask Cassandra and Love, Laodice are out in paperback! The cheapest place to buy them (and the place that gives me the most royalties) is unfortunately Amazon, but you can also ask your local indie bookseller to order them in; the paperbacks are not Amazon-exclusive.

Here, they are modelled by Monroe the cat, friend and boon companion to a lovely reader:

He's unimpressed that there are no cats in either book and frankly he's got a point.

I cannot really convey how much I love autumn in Christchurch - the blazing colour as the trees change, the incomparable bright blue of the sky, the abundance of figs and feijoa, the gelatinous comfort of slow-cooked meat falling apart, and the tender joy of wriggling into bed every night with my electric blanket on low, a warmth that will stay with me through the night.

Tall trees, turning rusty orange, reaching up into a pale blue sky tending to twilight pink at the horizon, while a full moon rises to the right.
Walking by the autumnal river with a full moon gives me those witchy feelings, like maybe I should start growing herbs I can't eat.

Anyway, it's real good.

The school holidays start tomorrow, and for me that means digging in and writing the bulk of a book over seventeen days. But because woman cannot live on writing alone, or at least if she tries she kind of loses track of things like "what day is it?" and "when did I last wash my hair?", I have other projects in mind too. Most of these are food related1. I am on some levels a simple creature.

I love a good cookbook, and by that I mean not a mere collection of recipes, but a book that is thoughtful about food, and offers great recipes. I know a lot of people prefer the internet, but Googling for recipes was chancy even before the increasing shittiness of Google. It's not so much the interminable recipe blog essays-before-recipes–most of those are banal or cliched, but I can just jump-to-recipe. It's that the recipes themselves are so often unhelpful or just bad. A vegetable soup recipe that starts with "take two cans of pea soup", baking recipes that use volume instead of weight, recipes that instruct me to use ingredients or products that are difficult to source or very expensive in New Zealand, brownies recipes with walnuts... it's a crapshoot.

The problem, I say immodestly, is that I can cook. I know what goes with what. I can usually adapt a recipe to work for me. But I don't want to spend half an hour looking up instructions and figuring out substitutions to cook something worse than I can manage out of the fridge and the pantry and my own head.

A good cookbook will have a lot of good recipes in one place. A great cookbook will have a coherent philosophy of food and skillful writing to express that philosophy. Boring introductions on blogs that cycle through the same SEO-friendly adjectives (scrumptious, yummy, juicy, etc) make my day a tiny bit worse. Essays and introductions by people who know how to cook and write nourish both my palate and my intellect.

And cookbooks are often objects of beauty in their own right; heavy, sturdy, lavishly illustrated, beautifully bound, and if you're really lucky there will be a couple of ribbon bookmarks. They're pretty much the only books I acquire in physical form these days. I used to think that buying cookbooks was kind of a waste of time - I might buy a whole book and only use one or two recipes. But if I'm adding one or two recipes to the rotation that I will cycle through for the rest of my life, that's a pretty good use-to-cost ratio. Still, unless I'm already ride-or-die for the author, I'll hit the library first to try before I think about buying.

These holidays, I am reading (and cooking from) two library books. The first is Helen Lui McKinnon's Tenderheart: A Cookbook About Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds, an excellent book about food, grief, family, and how you can do damn near anything with broccoli. I was introduced to it by the Culture Study Cookbook Club, so I have homework to make something out of it anyway, but this is delicious homework, and also I will fully ignore that obligation if I feel like it.

I'm also cracking into Comfort, by Yotam Ottolenghi, Helen Goh, Verena Lochmuller and Tara Wigley. The introduction doesn't pull any punches; a page and a half in it offhandedly assures the reader that they live in "a batshit-crazy world" and then goes on to gently dismiss diet culture, assuring readers that comfort food is "something we should never feel bad about". Thank you; I will take that over a thousand blog posts which try to assure me that these low-fat, low-sugar, low-taste healthy muffins will taste even better than the real thing. Do these people think I'm an idiot?

Sweet potato (kūmara) rendang from Tenderheart; bright pop colours from Comfort, which I do indeed find comforting.

My recommendations:

It's hard to generally recommend cookbooks, which are based in something so perfectly subjective as our taste. I tell people I'll eat almost anything, but in reality:

  • I like vegetable-focused, meat and fish inclusive savory dishes.
  • I like fruit, spice, and chocolate-focused sweet dishes.
  • I easily bake, roast, and fry, but find steaming too fussy.
  • I own but have never used a candy thermometer.
  • My favourite lunch is Big Salad With Carb.
  • My favourite dinner is Something Ladled Over Carb In A Bowl.
  • I love the complex flavour of low-heat chiles (ground chipotle, my beloved) but have the actual-heat tolerance you would expect of a white woman named Karen.
  • My freezer is too small to store much.
  • I leave plating to the professionals.
  • Olives, pineapples and celery are gross, and everything is better with lemon.

And with those tastes in mind, here are the cookbooks I most love, all of which violate those preferences at some point:

  • Snacking Cakes and Snacking Bakes by Yossy Arefi. If you search "snacking cakes" on Amazon you will find dozens of stupid AI books, but Yossy Arefi is the real deal, and she is absolutely not kidding about one bowl and ten minutes prep for most of these recipes. I have this in ebook, and because the add-and-mix is the same for most recipes and I'm very familiar with it now, all I really need to do is flick to the ingredients list on my phone, propped on my salt cellar.
  • Small Victories by Julia Turshen, which is fantastic for practiced home cooks and absolute beginners. Another ebook-purchase, and I don't own this in hardcover only because I could not get my hands on it in NZ without paying ludicrous shipping. I have taken out the library copy so many times I recognise some of the fingerprints.
Complete with my haphazard approach to bookmarks.
  • A Quiet Kitchen and More From A Quiet Kitchen, by Nici Wickes are simultaneously the loveliest single-person cookbooks and wonderfully reassuring and realistic on perimenopause, going solo, isolation and generosity to the self. If you cook for one or two a lot, I cannot recommend these more.
  • Cook Me, by Sam Parish. a) best beef burger recipe I've ever eaten, b) Christchurch shout-out, and c) I love the organising principle of this book, which focuses on three ways to cook the same basic dish - a beginner-friendly, no-time/low-effort version, a reliable stand-by for when you've got a little more energy, and a bougie version for when you want to pull out the stops/impress someone.
  • Always Add Lemon, by Danielle Alvarez. I make one recipe from this book consistently, and it is the beef ragu with pappardelle and an egg yolk, except I do not make the pappardelle or add the egg yolk, and yet if there were a single recipe worth buying a book for, it is this one. She is correct about lemon.
  • Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, by Samin Nosrat. Famous for good reason. For anyone with an interest in the science of how thing taste good, or wants to make their own thing taste more good, or wants someone enthusiastic and curious to guide them through a journey of tasty discovery.
  • The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z, by Tamar Adler. If you are ordering this from your indie bookshop, learn from me and be careful to specify the cookbook - there is an essay collection by Adler called The Everlasting Meal. That is very good also, but it is not a weighty tome of things to do with leftovers, organised by the kind of leftover (stale bread, mashed potatoes, last bit of yoghurt, cooked rice, leftover cookies, burnt meat etc). If you, like me, often start a meal by thinking "what do I need to use up from the last meal?" this book is non-prescriptively perfect.
  • Homecooked, by Lucy Corry. A seasonal cookbook written around the seasonal ingredients found easily in New Zealand? Be still, my patriotic heart.

A "Recipe":

Wash and cube some potatoes - I allow two medium or one large potato per serving and typically make four-six servings. Wash and quarter a lemon, cut out the central white bit, pick out the seeds, and slice thinly into little lemony quarter-circles. Throw on a tray, douse with a good glug of oil, salt and pepper, and any woody herbs - rosemary, sage, thyme, oregano - that you like. Roast at 200-220C until done (golden and browning in bits, tastes good when you try a bit)

Eat with whatever else you have going on that day - chicken tenders, leftover bean salad, sauteed greens, tuna, poached egg, garlicy tofu etc etc etc.

THEN, and this is very important, do not eat ALL of the lemon-roasted potatoes. Save two servings or so in the fridge (for up to a week). Wait until you have some leftover greens or capsicum or some such (or chop up some onion and garlic, sauté, season, and then throw in some greens, frozen is fine. Or pull out the frozen peas/corn/whatever). Turn your oven to 180C. Then tip the potatoes into a hot pan, wait for them to start sizzling a bit, and add the greens/other vegetables. While you are waiting for the potatoes to warm up, briskly stir 4-6 eggs and about a quarter cup of cream together, seasoned to taste (more eggs = more cream, fewer eggs = less cream).

Two choices here, depending on whether you cook with an oven-safe pan or not.

Option A: Oven-safe pan. GREAT. Pour the egg mixture over your warmed veges, let it set a little bit on the sides and bubble a little in the middle, and then put it in the oven for ten minutes/until it's cooked. Slice and eat with whatever condiments you desire.

Option B: Not an oven-safe pan. Get a dish you can bake in, preferably ceramic, but I'm not your boss, and tip the veges into it. Pour the egg mixture over, put it in the oven, and leave it there for ten minutes/until it's cooked. Now you have to wash two dishes, but it's probably worth it.

Every time I eat this, I want to make more lemon-roasted potatoes so I can make it again.

I hope you are all finding plenty to nourish you!

That Healey Girl is the newsletter of Karen (or Kate) Healey, a romance and speculative fiction author who lives in Ōtautahi, New Zealand and shakes plots loose by wandering along the river. Please feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone you think might like it!

1Although the Baldur's Gate 3 patch with the new subclasses is coming out this week, which is just rude.