Food, Cookery and Recipes

Gesine · Post by **Gesine** » February 8th, 2006, 12:37 pm

Peter wrote:This site's having a bad effect on me: I was watching someone eat some tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce and started husking "... she stepped back, with a gasp ... under the door, faintly visible in the dim light, pallid worm-like shapes writhed slowly in a sticky pool of .... was it blood? " I had to stop myself going on.

LOL - I do that when I'm into a book I'm reading (quietly or aloud)...

And LOL again - this reminds me of the first time I was in the UK, on a school exchange - 'my' family in Bristol had spaghetti (tinned, of course!) on toast a lot. When I got back, my mother asked me what I'd enjoyed eating most. Answer: custard slices and spaghetti on toast... she was aghast. (Germans don't understand the concept of tinned spaghetti, let alone spaghetti on toast!)

thistlechick · Post by **thistlechick** » February 8th, 2006, 12:52 pm

Gesine wrote:(Germans don't understand the concept of tinned spaghetti, let alone spaghetti on toast!)

I'm sure Americans don't either... what exactly is tinned anyway? would you like some potatoes and rice with your pasta and toast? =P

Gesine · Post by **Gesine** » February 8th, 2006, 1:20 pm

Hey - hey! Stop dissing one of my favourite teenage junk foods! ;) I actually like carby staples together. Even the Italians (very civilised in terms of food, you will agree) do it on occasion - there's a dish from the mountain region that puts pieces of potato in the pasta sauce. Forget what it's called, but it's great. Very wintery.
Spaghetti on toast... well... it's not that different from beans on toast. You do have beans on toast?!

thistlechick · Post by **thistlechick** » February 8th, 2006, 1:25 pm

Gesine wrote: Spaghetti on toast... well... it's not that different from beans on toast. You do have beans on toast?!

No, we tend not to eat food on toast... toast is generally a breakfast food that is eaten with spreads like jam/jelly, butter, peanut butter... though my mom used to make cream chipped beef on toast.... and there are some sad examples of food on toast from the 70s in these weight watchers recipes: http://www.candyboots.com/wwcards.html

I think we need to split this discussion off into the Off-Topic forum hehe

Peter Why · Post by **Peter Why** » February 8th, 2006, 2:17 pm

How about interesting cookery books and recipes? My favourite cookery book at the moment is Trattoria by Patricia Wells, pub Kyle Cathie Ltd. There's a gorgeous recipe for caponata, which is a little like a cold (room temperature) ratatouille, but flavoured also with celery, olives, capers, wine vinegar, a little sugar ... and, what made me think of it, sometimes has cubes of cooked potato in it. A wonderful, powerful, rich, sharp, sweet mixture of flavours and textures.

Or, if you like really spicy foods, in one of Madhur Jaffrey's books there's a wonderful ... room temperature again .. street snack which she calls spicy chick peas, which starts off as very strongly spiced chick peas in tomato and onion sauce, and is then kicked over the boundary after the cooking's finished with the final addition of a mixture of lemon juice, finely chopped onion, finely chopped green chilis, and grated fresh ginger.

thistlechick · Post by **thistlechick** » February 8th, 2006, 2:21 pm

There are several cookbooks (as we call them in the US) in PG .... we could have a lot of fun reading those aloud *grins*

LibraryLady · Post by **LibraryLady** » February 8th, 2006, 2:24 pm

Yes, we may call them cookbooks, but the Library of Congress calls them cookery books, as I'm sure you are aware, being a librarian who has doubtlessly fielded tons of questions about where are the cookbooks and what the heck is cookery?

thistlechick · Post by **thistlechick** » February 8th, 2006, 2:25 pm

LibraryLady wrote:Yes, we may call them cookbooks, but the Library of Congress calls them cookery books, as I'm sure you are aware, being a librarian who has doubtlessly fielded tons of questions about where are the cookbooks and what the heck is cookery?

*nods knowingly*
but at least now we know where the term "Cookery" as a subject heading came from hehe

LibraryLady · Post by **LibraryLady** » February 8th, 2006, 2:26 pm

Of all the Dewey numbers burned in my brain, 641.5 certainly burns brighter than most!

kayray · Post by **kayray** » February 8th, 2006, 2:37 pm

Another use for toast besides breakfast is in the making of sandwiches. Henry and I are fond of homemade bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches on lightly toasted sourdough bread. Yum!

Ewwww, canned/tinned pasta... when my husband and I first got together he was addicted to Chef Boy-Arr-Dee canned spaghetti... I tried it once and found it entirely inedible. GROSS.

Antique cookery books are a scream. "Take butter the size of an egg..."

Gesine · Post by **Gesine** » February 8th, 2006, 2:44 pm

LOL, you librarians are funny... :)

Cookery books - yes, _Trattoria_ looked good, though I haven't cooked anything from it. But I love caponata - any chance you could send the recipe over? I used to have a whole stack of cookbooks, but gave most away with all my other books, and then started taking them out of the library.

I kept my favourites - Slater, whom I adore, and one beautiful Italian cookbook with photos from all the different regions, a Rick Stein for fish, and a couple of other ones.

Julian Barnes published an amusing little book, a collection of articles he wrote for a column somewhere, about cooking - it's one of his hobbies, and he takes it very seriously. He's on the nerdy end of cooking and follows recipes religiously... very funny passage where he goes on about some descriptions cookbook writers use, like Slater saying "a steak as big as your hand" - Barnes then wonders about whose hand - his wife's hand? Slater's hand? The butcher's hand?

I love cooking, eating, reading and talking about food and food stuff... as you could see, I even get excited about something as mundane as tinned spaghetti! :)

thistlechick · Post by **thistlechick** » February 8th, 2006, 2:55 pm

Kara, thank you for clearing up my "tinned" spaghetti conundrum... I had forgotten about Chef-Boy-R-Dee .... my mom would make something called goulash with the Chef's canned spaghetti that would make any decent Hungarian barf at the thought of it... one of the main ingredients was ketchup *rotflmao* .... however, my mother is a superb cook and can even make canned spaghetti taste good =)

pberinstein · Post by **pberinstein** » February 8th, 2006, 4:48 pm

It's interesting that all this food stuff came up because I was just wondering if we should have some sort of regularly scheduled group cooking session. Not that I cook much, but I might be inspired to try some new recipes. What I mean is that we contribute recipes and then all try the same one at the same time.

Sounds pretty ridiculous in a way. OTOH, could be amazingly fun.

Say, Hugh, how about this? We each podcast and/or write about our experiences and gather them into a special Librivox cookery (see, Betsie?) book.

kri · Post by **kri** » February 8th, 2006, 4:52 pm

That would be so fun!! My fiance and I love to cook, so we could definitely contribute some recipes. This might make cooking exciting for us again, and help us forget that it requires doing dishes.

kri · Post by **kri** » February 8th, 2006, 5:05 pm

My fiance had an idea that we could all do the same ingredients and cook something up. That would be interesting! Then post the recipes of what we made.