~~ 2 ~~ (How to Eat - Nigella Lawson)

Member Name:

Product:	How to Eat - Nigella Lawson
Date:	04/09/01 (170 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: -

Disadvantages: -

If you love cooking but get the urge to hide under the kitchen table when the latest celebrity chef cries 'Julienne the celeriac!' then Nigella Lawson is probably already your domestic goddess. Her two previous books, Chef'o'lard and How to Be A Domestic Goddess have established her as a food writer who combines innovative and delicious recipes with an utter lack of pretension.

Emphatically a cook and not a chef, she encourages us to celebrate home cooking rather than mimicking restaurant offerings which are very stylish but reduce the host(ess) to a quivering wreck. Nigella Bites (the expanded version of her second Channel 4 series) themes its offerings around the occasion, the feeling and the amount of effort that you're prepared to put in. Enticingly titled chapters like 'Comfort Food,' 'TV Dinners' and (my favourite) 'Trashy' cater to the urge to luxuriate in the cooking process, whip up something in five minutes when you stagger in from work, or pig out on homemade junk food. As ever the instructions are crystal-clear and tell you all the short cuts: bitter-orange ice-cream can be made in 10 minutes flat without the benefit of a machine, and there's a miraculous dinner for twelve which involves no more than putting everything in the oven and leaving it to its own devices.


Four stars rather than five because it's packed with rather fewer recipes than its predecessors, but there's plenty here to make it worth your while, including the innovation of a space for notes at the end of each chapter, inspired, Nigella explains rather touchingly, by the dog-eared and much-annotated copies that people bring her at book-signings. And, like Domestic Goddess, it's lavishly illustrated, not just with photos of the food but with plenty of La Bella Nigella herself, meaning that (in this household at least) one of us looks at the food pics and the other at the author; we both get to eat the results. Everybody's happy.

Summary: