I love cookbooks, but honestly, rarely use them. I have a whole repertoire of meals stored up in my head, and am constantly coming up with new ones, which results in rarely needing a recipe. In the past year, I’ve been heavily reliant on the online Taste database for finding recipes, but I’ve been feeling lately that despite the immense number of recipes available, many of them are bland an unreliable. Perhaps it’s the traditionalist in me, the reason why I hope that paper books are never replaced entirely by digital texts, but I really love cooking something from scratch using a recipe from a cookbook that I’ve never used before.
For Christmas, I received from my parents a rather hefty cookbook from the Marie Claire collection, named Seasonal Kitchen, by Michele Cranston. It’s brilliant! The book is divided into a section per season, and so far I’ve only looked at the Summer section, preferring to keep the others a surprise for when each new season rolls around. I’ve cooked three things from the book so far: a chicken & peppered peach salad (p121) which tasted much like a chicken & mango salad and was really refreshing (and would’ve been good with the addition of couscous or quinoa); a cherry tomato, chorizo, basil & feta salad modified from a salad suggestion on p148; and the barbecue butterflied chicken with a chilli tomato sauce (p165), in which an immense free range chicken purchased from the butcher down the street (which, despite the fact that it is meant to be one of the most highly regarded butchers in Perth, has taken me 13 months to finally step inside) was cooked for a total of almost 50 minutes on the heavy stove-top grill plate we bought earlier this week using vouchers received for our engagement.
The result was chicken that literally fell off the bone and was so incredibly moist. I served the chicken atop baby salad leaves, cous cous cooked in chicken stock, and topped with leftover tomato-chilli marinade and fresh reduced fat feta (although Persian feta would, of course, have been exceedingly more awesome).
It was delish!
