Have you been to your library today?

Have you? With all the cuts and closures threatening I hope you found the time to go down to your local branch and borrow lots.
My local library is defiantly not threatened with closure, being a new building with lots of extras in it but I felt a need to go and add my voice by borrowing to the fray. I also managed to get my man to sign up and will soon be adding he's card to my wallet.
V disappointed that the woman who signed him up knew nothing about the campaign though.
Have a good weekend reading everyone!
If you want more head over to the guardians website for live coverage of the read ins and the like.

Location:Have you been to your library?

Library and other types of loot

I've had a couple of good weeks for loot recently. I've been trying to stay out of the city as the numerous charity shops, discount bookshops and the like hold far too great a pull for my puny will power!
Soooooooo, yesterday after meeting a mate of mine for a catchup lunchtime drink I did some book shopping. Nothing, all my usual haunts were empty of anything tantalising so I hit the library with a passion. Here's what I came away with
Jekkas herb cookbook
Freshly picked- Jojo Tulloh and
On guerrilla gardening by Richard Reynolds

Not bad hey?unfortunately I didn't have the strength to drag back Sarah ravens kitchen garden cookbook or the Stephanie Alexander one but I may do that today.

Then I hit Norwich market for veg for a leek and potato with watercress soup and couldn't resist peeking in on the second hand bookstall at the back where I found
The group by Mary McCarthy, a vmc that I didn't have for £2.50
Whoop I was happy and done.
I don't know if I've ever mentioned the market before hand? It's awesome! At the front are some awesome fish stalls, one is a Rick stein food hero. Then there's a couple of fruit and veg stalls one of which is organic.
A herb and spice stall is a fave of mine aswell as a couple of family butchers and pickerings a sausage stall with the best selection including gluten free sausages.
There is. An Asian food stall which is the only place in norwich where I've ever seen holy basil along with banana flavoured pocky.
You can probably tell that I can spend a while there, oh and I forgot to mention the cheese stall and if your hungry whilst your there either go to Ron's chip stall for the best fish and chips in the city which are nicely priced or have a hog roast from the store opposite, you won't be disappointed!
I don't normally bother with the bag stalls and their ilk, but if it floats your boat you'll be in heaven.
After all this I decided to head home after popping in on a friend at work, this put in the direction of another charity shop which of course I popped my head in on which was where I found
Jamie at home for £3.95 and
A wolf in the kitchen by lindsay bareham for 1.95

A great day for books but an absolute bugger to walk home with!

My other finds last week were some evie journals from the 1930's for a pound each of which I've got four alongside some vintage patterns from the 1950's for a pound each of which I've got 5.
Overall a great couple of weeks for loot dontcha think? If anyones interested I'll try to get some pics up of the vintage items if I can get my camera to work soon.

Julie and Julia and a lil bit about Buffy

Ahhhh, so I've finished the book now and what do I have to say about it? Well what do you always say when your comparing a book to the film nine times out of ten?....the books so much better!
In fact I've only come across a handful of books that are worse then the film version- Jaws being the main one (hooper had an affair with mrs brody and the writing was abysmal) love the film by the way and have a fairly funny story about how i ruined one of my blokes gigs with that film. Oh and stephen King books tend to make amazing films but aren't so great in of themselves, ie the shawshank redemption, the green mile and the shining (cried at the first and second and pooped my pants to the last one whilst watching it on my own late at night)
So what was so much better I bet your wondering? Well to answer that I have to let you in on a few more prejudices and obsessions of mine to be fair in the cold light of objectiveness.
As soon as Julie Powell mentioned in the first chapter that she has an obsession with a certain teenaged vampire slayer I knew that I was gonna like her.
Seriously my own Buffy/ Joss Whedon obsessiveness knows no bounds. A general rule of thumb is if you like buff buff as I like to call it, I'll like you.
To me Buffy is the quintessentially perfect piece of fantasy tv drama ever created and I'm still waiting for something to fill the void that it left on tv.
Supernatural came close but no cigar, the writing isn't nearly so clever.
Anyhow enough with the Buffy talk (for now) what about the book? I personally feel that the film did Julie a bit of a disservice character wise. The film focused on her whining, crying and tantrums instead of her witty cynicism's and the like.
I didn't like her in the film much but in the book I really connected with her, she admits that that she's a terrible housewife and that she says fuck far too much.
These are both things that I do too much myself, I felt an instant connection over these aswel.
The thing that really makes you connect with her though is how lost she feels in her own life.
Most of us know the feeling of being in a crappily paid and generally crap job, knowing we want to do something else but we don't actually know what.
This is what inspires Julie to start the project and when I think about it, I'm amazed and inspired that anyone actually managed to cook all the recipes from any book let alone mastering the art of French cooking.
When I go through any cookbook there are recipes that I look at and know that straight away I won't be cooking.
I've got both volumes of Julia Childs cookbook and Im going to say that some of those recipes are damn intimidating!
Another thing that strikes you straight away is how much this book says about blogging and bloggers in general.
She started it as a way to reach out to other people, we all want to connect to others and bloggers are doing this on a grand scale.
Somewhere on the net there will be others who think like you, where you can have a meaningful conversation about whatever it is that gets you going.
The special thing about blogs is that you set the conversation and the readers come to you.
It's also lovely to see the relationship that Julie creates with the Julia inside her head, now she has the benefit of having seen her on tv and she uses her as a role model and feels that when she's channeling her that she's a better person.
It seems amusing to me that basing your idea on person from their cookbooks is rather dangerous, E David sounds ever so proper in her books. Yet she was a hard drinking, chain smoking feisty woman who had affairs with married men, awesome but I'm not sure I'd want to channel her on a daily basis.
What Julie gets from her project is hard to define in words, it's that structure and sense of accomplishment that we all crave.
She also picks up some great cooking skills on the way, and her love of food and cooking even when it's pissing her off shines through in her writing. It's also a damned funny book.
This book was to me worth the hype, I loved it and it got me out of this reading rut I've been in for so long.
For reading questions go over to lit lovers
Sorry it's been so long again I'll be back with some recipes very soon.
Oh by the way, Elizabeth David wrote a lovely blurb for the front of mastering the art of French cooking but I still have no idea if they ever actually met.

Finally

So at last I'm back in my blogging shoes and I've finally watched Julie and Julia.
The watching of this was twofold, A, I'd been meaning to watch it for a while and I thought that maybe I'd overdone the supernatural watching that I got over Christmas. If you like supernatural I'm a Dean kinda gal by the way, not one for the goody goody boys.
Annnd then I decided I needed something to inspire me to love my blog again, I've missed it but it's kinda like snogging someone again after you've been through a very long dry patch. You know you like it but your kinda nervous about doing it again, do you remember how to do it? Have you left it too long and will they be able to tell that you haven't done it for ages?
With blogging the answers yes as every-things dated, but hey I'm back.
So onwards and outwards with my thoughts on this, firstly I'm going, to say what a great idea for a blog Julie powell had!
A while ago she was getting a load of stick from other food bloggers on the Internet , to be honest it seemed a lot like jealousy to me. She is living the bloggers dream isn't she after all? I found an article on it over here at will write for food, an amazing resource for food bloggers!
Obviously the first thing that you wonder whilst watching the film is "what book would I cook from for a year?"
Nigel Slater's kitchen diaries is probably my number 1 choice although with nige's emphasis on eating the correct thing at the right moment I think that he would hate someone trying to cook like him for a year.
Probably the closest British equivalent would be good ole Delia Smith, I compare her to Julia because of how thorough they both are with their recipes.
True Delia did let us down with her how to cheat book but if I was to pick one of her books to cook from for a year I'd pick her classic cookery course book.
After a year of that you would have a very good grounding in cooking indeed.
Now one line in the film that annoyed me was Julia child declaring that there were no French cookery books available in English.
True if she started compiling her book in 1950 there wasn't much around, but in 1951 French country cooking by Elizabeth David was released. Then in 1960 David released her seminal work French provincial cooking a whole year before mastering the art of French cooking was released.
Now both these women had very different styles of writing Child was a very specific recipe writer from the cordon bleu style where's David's style was based on the everyday cooking of France and her recipes were often nothing more than creative outlines which were also able to be read like a novel.
I would love to know if these two formidable women ever met in real life, they would either have loved each other or there would have been great amnomisity, probably all from david's side as from most accounts she was a hard to get on with woman.
I feel that if anymore cooking from a book or author site should appear that it should be an Elizabeth David one as we only recently got to see how amazing her food could look in the new book at Elizabeth david's table. So if anyones reading this please? I would love to see this and would be a regular reader.
So I haven't given a full proper review of the film yet I realise, and the reason would be that the idea is actually more interesting than the film itself.
It was a perfectly pleasant film but I somehow felt it was lacking something. Some more drama or plotting maybe? Or maybe it just wasn't that suitable for a movie?
I think that it wasn't helped by the fact that I wasn't particularly taken with the actress who played Julie, she seems rather twee and doesn't seem to particularly do anything.
I haven't read the book yet but I will get round to it very soon indeed.

Eeeep, it's been 2 long

Happy New years!
Ok it's been far too long since I last posted. Since before my birthday on the 24th of November in fact so I thought I'd better give a lil update post of what I've been doing.
So for my birthday I received 2 wonderful cookbooks the new Nigella Lawson kitchen cookbook and my fave food writers book Nigel Slaters tender volume 2 which is all to do with fruit which is good as one of my new years resolutions is to eat more fruit.
I've only cooked one recipe from the first so far and nothing from the second so far which is a travesty.
I also recently bought myself an iPad which has resulted in many lost hours playing on the thing, and I promise to do a review on some of the awesome apps available very soon.
But I don't know what's stopped me from blogging, other than a complete mental block when it comes to reading, I've been finding it really hard to get into a book at the moment and even harder to get into the kitchen afterwards.
The last books I read were a series of memoirs by the wonderful Collette Rossant which will be getting a review soon I promise again.
So after so long away being away from you all I'm wondering, what are everyones new years resolutions? Or do you even have any?
I'll start of with mine, the main 2 are
A) try to give up or at least cut down on smoking, thus far I've been very grumpy today yet managed to only smoke one today. Yay.
The reasons for this resolution are many, the main ones being my bloke hates it and I want to be able to taste food properly again although I'm terrified of gaining weight!
At the mo I'm trying to find productive things to do to replace my habit, options are gardening or more crafty things perhaps?
Any advice would be very welcome.
My other resolution is to bite the bullet and actually go to the doctors this year and get tested for coeliac disease.
I've put this off for at least six months due to my irrational fear of needles as a proper diagnosis involves numerous blood tests and a stomach biopsy, also I really like cake!!
The reason for needing to get tested is the diagnosis of my youngest brother earlier this year and if an immediate family member has coeliac disease it gives you a one in ten chance of having it too, and when I checked out the symptoms I realised I have quite a few.
So that's it for now, the piccys of my cat sushi climbing in one of my Xmas presses.
I hope to hear you all soon and I promise to update again v soon.

Rue Tatin recipes

Looks awesome doesn't it? I cooked a recipe from both of the memoirs and both of them were absolutely lovely.
The first was this sausage and egg salad which I served with a baked potato for a very wholesome feeling lunch.
The second was a salt roast pork dish which made a great Sunday lunch dish. I also made a beef stew based on the authors recipe for lamb stew. I just received cooking at home on Rue Tatin from Amazon and I can't wait to try out some dessert recipes.
So here goes with the recipes.
I found the exact recipe for Brigitte's green bean, smoked sausage and hard boiled egg salad over here
For this recipe I used French menguez sausages from my local market. I will be making this again!

Roast pork with salt and spice crust

Ingredients

2 dried bay leaves ground
4tsp fresh thyme
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1/2 tsp ground black pepper
1 tblsp coarse sea salt
One 2 1b (1kg) pork loin
Fresh thyme and parsley sprigs to garnish

Mix the spice and bay leaves with the salt and rub it into the skin of the pork joint.
Let the meat sit at room temp in a covered bowl for at least 1 hour and for up to 3.
Pre heat the oven to 375'f, 190'c.
Place the pork in a earthenware baking dish and pour 1 cup water around the pork. I had some red wine sitting about so I used that instead.
Put in the middle of the oven and cook till the crackling is crisp and the meat is cooked to your liking, about an hour.
Let the meat sit for half an hour before slicing and use the juices to make a gravy.

For more recipes by Loomis check out her website.

Rue tatin

Ahhhh, I have a new reading obsession. The lovely Susan Loomis.
I found the first of this series in my local oxfam. Loving the cover and the comparison to Nigella I quickly snapped this up and started reading.
The first book On Rue Tatin covers how the author fell in love with France and finally found her dream home in Louvres and opens up a cookery school in her own home.
Now a cynic might say that this is all just a publicity book as throughout we hear her talk about the books that she was writing at whatever time in the story and it is about making her cookery school a success, so therefore we get a lot of self promotion.
If this was the aim of the book then it worked on me as she's my favourite kind of cookery writer, very chatty with background information and snippets of advice thrown in wherever it may come in useful.
I don't think this was the aim of the book anyway as this is the knowledge that we need to know how the author got to where she was.
The writing shines for me when she starts talking about integrating into the new society that she's chosen to live in and when she's telling you about her sons trials and triumphs.
Whilst reading this book I had a real urge to pack up and move to France myself such is the love conveyed in this book for her adopted homeland.
Half way through the first book I found the second in the series in a different charity shop and started reading it as soon as I'd put down the first.
Tarte Tatin just carries on the story and kept me as hooked as the first.
What I really love about these books is how Loomis doesn't just focus on what goes right for her in France. You get a real sense of the difficulties that would face you if you decided to live there.
At the end of each chapter you also get some recipes that tie in with the stories and most of them actually do.
Sometimes I get frustrated with food memoirs when you've spent a whole chapter reading about one kind of food to either be given a recipe that doesn't really correspond or even worse none at all.
Luckily these books didn't leave me feeling this way. The recipes defiantly correspond to the stories.
I liked these books so much that I don't really know what else to say about them other than read them.
I'll post the things I cooked from them in the next few days.