Is it ironic that the mark of a really wonderful, well-loved cookbook, is when you don’t open it anymore?
My first real cookbook was Jamie Oliver’s Naked Chef. It was a first-apartment gift from a friend of my mother’s who was living in London when rakish Jamie had just burst onto the BBC scene back in 2000. The spine of the book is so faded you can’t read it anymore in a line-up of cookbooks. I have not made every recipe in there, but I have probably made most of them with varying degrees of success, and what I have learned in the intervening decade is that most of the Naked Chef is just…well, it’s just cooking. It isn’t glamorous, it isn’t complicated, it’s just food that you make that tastes good that you can put on the table and eat anytime.
I realized the other Sunday, when I pulled down old Jamie to check on a roasting temperature, that some of the boring food I make pretty much weekly — roast chicken, meatballs in sauce, asparagus or broccoli with cheese and other goodies — are all variations on recipes I first tried from the Naked Chef. Now I can do them half-asleep with a toddler pulling on my leg. And I do them my own way: I make turkey meatballs instead of beef-pork-veal; I mix up the seasoning on the chicken depending on what I have on hand; “asparagus with interesting melting cheese” is now “whatever veg comes in the CSA tossed with melting cheese and hopefully some sundried tomato and garlic”…So I guess it would be safe to say that Jamie Oliver sort of taught me how to cook. Sort of. And that’s why I love him and always will.
When my husband and I were living in London there was a rash of stateside weddings which we could not attend, due to limited travel funds. My go-to wedding gift during those years was a duet of British cookbooks, one for every night, and one for grand occasions: Jamie’s Dinners and Feast. (Funny enough, I personally don’t own either one!)
Since we had children, people have started giving us family cookbooks: my bible, Cooking for Baby; Ina Garten’s Family Style; Family Meals; Essentials of Slow Cooking (All-Clad slow cooker was the best Christmas gift ever for two time-strapped new parents) or The Art of Braising. It is these I turn to now when I need inspiration (for better or worse, events calling for Star Chefs Entertain at Home are few and far between!).
And so it happens that my next culinary challenge is the perfect mac n’ cheese…perhaps with some cauliflower or broccoli puree mixed in, sneaky-style. The eggplant parmagiana was good enough for company, and home-made pizza dough is always a hit, when we can find the extra hour for the dough to rise. Frenched rack of lamb it ain’t, but as Jamie would no doubt point out, the very very best meals are invariably the ones you eat with family.* (Awww.)
* Unless “family” is going through a plate-throwing phase…but that’s a post for another day!
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