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Eating In: Food to share from the e’cco kitchen Philip Johnson, ISBN 978-1741967494, Murdoch Books, RRP $59.95

This is one book I have been eagerly awaiting since I received the blad from the publishers several weeks back.  New Zealand-born Johnson and the crew at his Brisbane bistro create more than a hundred meals for people each day.

“We love to feed people, it’s in our blood!” he says. And it’s the same at home. The effort of preparing delicious food to share  makes it all worthwhile when people come to the table to talk, laugh and indulge.

This is a book of 120 starters, mains, sides and desserts to pick and mix for an e’cco experience at home, or Johnson has drawn up some menus to use as a guide.

Whether it’s an Asia after dark occasion, a spring lunch, cocktail hour , a big night in, winter warmers or a Middle Eastern feast – and those are just a few – Johnson’s menus are exciting fare.

How about this for a laid-back Christmas dinner?

Parmesan wafer stack with lobster, watercress and lime mayonnaise
Iberico ham with burrata, rocket, vincotto, tomato fondue and toasted ciabatta
Whole rainbow trout baked in sea salt with salsa verde
Cherry and Drambuie semifreddo

Johnson’s recipes are not quick slap ‘em on the plate jobs. Some have fairly long ingredients lists, but then many of the dishes have several component parts, including accompanying vegetables. For example there's an open spatchcock pie, eschalots, peas, mushrooms, tarragon and brandy cream - nearly 30 ingredients, including homemade chicken stock.

Other recipes are reasonably simple once all the ingredients are prepped and laid out for orderly progress.

Having of the vegetables an integral part of a dish makes for well balanced flavours. The dishes are attractively plated and this really is a splendid book for the dedicated home cook who wants to lift their game to another level.

After drooling at length over Philip Johnson’s previous dessert book, Decadence, it’s great to have even more luscious sweetness from the chef. Picture a lemon and white chocolate mousse with lemon curd, served simply in a shot glass, pretty cherry soufflés with chocolate sauce, invidual chocolate, rum and almond pithiviers or a flourless chocolate cake with glossy poached rhubarb and a scoop or raspberry sorbet.

The various sides are also inventive. I love the idea of steamed broccolini, green beans and sugarsnap peas with salted lemon served with white anchovies and toasted almonds. There’s roasted fennel with kipler potatoes and pancetta, spiced pumpkin with spinach and harissa salad and a delicious looking cabbage salad with feta, mint and chilli.

Photography by Jared Fowler and styling by Emma Ross make this an eminently beautiful book.

Grillhouse: Gastropub at Home Ross Dobson, ISBN 978-1741967142, Murdoch Books, RRP $39.95

Fill the fridge with a selection of ales and whit wines, open a bottle of red, slap a copy of Grillhouse on the bench and turn your home into a gastropub.

This latest book from  Fired Up author Ross Dobson features a collection of all-time favourite bistro-style dishes.

The starters are popular dishes like crab cakes, potted prawns, beef carpaccio, mussels, pork terrine, chicken liver pate, scallop mornay.

The usual suspects are in the grilled section – steak with béarnaise or with green peppercorn sauce, t-bone with bercy sauce, spatchcocked chicken, grilled tuna, beefburgers, pork skewers, lobster thermidor, posh surf and turf (fillet steak with small lobsters).

The baked section includes dishes that have stood the test of time – veal parmigiana, smoked fish pie, beef Wellington, ribs, beef burgundy, pork belly with apple sauce, steak and kidney pie, beef and Guinness pie.

There’s nothing prissy about the sides either – macaroni cheese, potato gratin, chips cooked in duck fat, bacon, tomato and herb bake. You get the drift?

Many of the desserts can be made or partially prepared ahead and there are plenty of crowd-pleasing favourites.

This is a great book for a relaxed weekend with mates. Nothing too taxing to make but rather friendly, tasty food. If Dad likes cooking,, buy him a copy for Father’s Day and cross your fingers he’ll get the hint.

Beer: A Gauge for Enthusiasts Greg Duncan Powell ISBN 978-1741968132, Murdoch Books, RRP $29.95

Greg Duncan Powell puts in the hard yards. He has sniffed, sampled and scored no less than 174 beers for this latest edition of his book. Many are from Australia, others are imports. They range from mass market brews through to those delightful little boutique beers.

In the two years since the first edition, he notes there have been many developments in Beerville, the most notable being the emergence of the “blonde”.

“Ev ery bar and bottle shop throughout the country is now full of blondes. Notmally a pub will benefit from this sort of things, but these blondes are cold and soulless. They’re pure, they’re naked, they’re platinum, they’re classic, they are low-carb beers – the fastest growing trend in this wide brown land.”

He says this follows a similar phenomenon in the US where “lite” beers dominate. But while Australians lead the obesity stakes, he reckons “it’s time to stop blaming beer” and that consumpotion here has actually dropped. His advice is “forget the blondes, eat less junk food and drink real beer, You’ll actually lose weight!”

Right, well this will be the book to bone up on in preparation for stocking the beer fridge. I am only an occasional beer drinker these days but I must say that beers have come a long way since my misspent youth in the watering hole next to the newspaper where I worked. I quite enjoy browsing the beer collection at the specialty shop at my local market and drawing on the knowledge of the proprietor to help me gather an interesting half dozen.

This book will certainly help me make a list of beers to look for. A good selling point is the photo of the beer bottle next to each review. It’s useful to know what you’re looking for.

The reviews are succinct. There’s a short general comment followed by the alcohol content. The good and the bad are dealt with and there’s a recommendation on what the beer is best for – things like “long, quiet ones,” “hot pies on cold days,” “mettwurst sausage and sauerkraut,” “being trendy”. The colour, condition and carbonation are discussed, what characteristics the beer’s aroma has, then its performance on the palate. All a beer drinker needs to know.

Serendipitously, this book is out in time for Father’s Day.

Heston's Fantastical Feasts Heston Blumenthal, ISBN 978-1-4088-0860-3, Bloomsbury, RRP HB $55

I think there’s a touch of the child in Heston Blumenthal when it comes to food. Who else would conjure up a fairy tale feast or a Willie Wonka feast?

Or maybe it’s a touch of the mad chemist. Did he spend insomniac nights dreaming up the Gothic horror feast before dawn crept through the heavy night curtains? Let’s look at that menu.

Jekyll & Hyde’s Bubbling Potion of Transformation Gin & tonic with granita, green gin spheres and effervescing gin aroma Dracula’s Little Bites Beetroot and blood civet of spelt with nitro-frozen horseradish cream, charred pickled beetroots, fennel salad and deep-fried, impaled, garlic butter snails Hestonstein’s Monster Seventy-two-hour ribs, heart of pine spinal column, deep-fried brains within a brain, bone marrow served-in-the-bone, deep-fried crispy eel bones The Gourmand’s Graveyard Edible gravestones, soil, coffin and breasts

Of course, he doesn’t just sit round home doing his thinking. He plunges into the literature for inspiration. A fizzing, smoking, sinister Jekyll and Hyde cocktail involves the laboratory approach.

He then heads for Sibiu, once the capital of the principality of Transylvania for atmosphere. But his local helper, trawling through old cookbooks, hasn’t had much joy coming up with old recipes involving blood. However, he joins preparations for a winter feast involving pork butchery and its assorted by-products.

His hopes were raised by the sight of a bowl of blood which eventually became a sausage when mixed with other ingredients, though “it looked much like a black pudding’ and tasted pretty much like one, too. Not enough thrill factor for his horror feast guests.

After experimenting with Sibiu's legendary leech recipe, which wasn’t that appetising, he settled for snails.

Blumenthal’s experimentation has been well documented in the highly successful second series of his TV programme Feast and this book tells the story of the development of each fantastical dish and includes the recipes for those who might want to call on their friends to help with the catering..

While we may not all be up for jelly beans made of cock’s testicles, some of the recipes are doable if you don’t belong to the “Life is too short to stuff a mushroom” brigade. Speaking of which, Blumenthal paints enoki mushroom caps red and dots them with white chocolates to disguise them as fly agaric. The Gen Y crowd are probably itching to give it a go.

Matt Skinner's Wine Guide 2011 Matt Skinner, ISBN 978-1742660455, Murdoch Books, RRP $24.95

This isn’t an encyclopaedic work but rather an interesting  collection of 250 wines for drinking now or cellaring. It is aimed at suiting all occasions and budgets. And, yes, “every wine that appears in this guide was tasted by me prior to being included,” says Skinner

It bounces around Australia, across the Tasman, through Chile, France, Spain, Italy. The chapters cover fizz, white, pink, red and sweet and the wines are listed by weight, from lightest through to heaviest. If you know your own palate and preferences, it’s easy to find the sort of wine you’re likely to be happy with among a collection that rocked Skinner’s world and blew his socks off in the past year..

With little to celebrate in many quarters, it’s been a rough year for bubbles, he says. But this has served to the advantage of the wines people have traded down to like Spanish cava, prosecco from Italy and top-end sparklers from Australia and New Zealand.

Chardonnay was the impressive one in the whites but there was also the emergence of some exciting new styles – “most notably a handful of Euro-influenced locally made white blends containing three or four different grapes and often incorporating some older oak in a deliberate attempt to create wines with genuine texture and intensity.”

Pink is the new black and Skinner has found 16 we should be trying out over the next year.

New reds are emerging from surprising regions, and the next generation of gutsy winemakers are delivering a staggering collection, he says.

The collection ends with a tidy little collection of the often under-appreciated sweet and fortified wines.

There is no scoring of the wines. Perhaps suffice to say it’s a collection of wines Skinner enjoyed and if you’re trying to broaden your wine-drinking horizons, here’s an approachable guide to get you going. And if you’re bored with your usual choices, you’ll find some good fresh challenges in Skinner’s list.

The only quibble I have is that some of the wine bottle photos are a little muddy and might have benefited from Photoshop tweaking. And the font used for the recommended retail prices is slabby and difficult to read at the point size used.

Light of Lucia: A Celebration of Italian Life, Love and Food Luciana Sampogna, ISBN 978-1741965087, Murdoch Books, RRP$69.95

Luciana Sampogna has run the Cucina Italiana cooking school for a dozen years, the past seven in Sydney, teaching more than 4000 students a year. She was trained under the renowned Italian cookbook author Marcella Hazan and the 85-year-old artisanal bakers, the Simili sisters. With a track record like this, one can expect her to known how to impart her knowledge of her native cuisine.

I expect I am not the only one to have secret wish that I was Italian. I love the food traditions that become an integral part of life, the regional cuisines dictated by the landscape, the passion and enthusiasm for food, the annual rituals of preserving seasonal food to use throughout the year.

At least with cookbook authors like Sampogna, we can live vicariously and get an insight into the Italian kitchen. As one would expect from a cooking school veteran, she explain the intricacies of her recipes so that the novice can quikly get a grasp.

The book includes family portraits, illustrations, beautiful food photography by Natasha Milne and one woman’s story of her journey through life. The design is in sympathy with the theme and nestled inside is a tempting collection of 120 recipes.

Fine Family Cooking Tony Bilson ISBN 978-1741969894, Murdoch Books, RRP $39.95

Tony Bilson starred in a recent episode of MasterChef and this new edition of his book was a feature of the challenge.

The book was first published 15 years ago and includes more than 300 recipes that will set family cooks on their own voyage of discovery through a repertoire of fine recipes for producing restaurant quality meals for the domestic table.

The reader is led through the various providores’ establishments learning how to buy with confidence from the fish market, the fruiterer, greengrocer, butcher, poulterer, game supplier, cheese shop, delicatessen, patisserie and wine merchant. There’s also a good barbecue primer.

This is an excellent book for someone needing a good all-rounder. Bilson’s name is synonymous with Australian cuisine and it’s good to see an update of this classic.

Complete Guide to Food for Sports Performance: Peak Nutrition for Your Sport Louise Burke and Greg Cox, ISBN 978-1741143904 Allen & Unwin, RRP $35

Two of Australia’s leading dietitians and nutritionalists provide a simple guide for athletes wanting to ensure maximum benefit and peak performance from training.

They look at the nutritional needs for different sports. Whether you’re into aerobics, boxing, cricket, golf, running, squash, swimming or another sport there is plenty of analysis on basal metabolic rates, the energy cost of activity, the carbohydrate components of food, protein-rich foods, recommended daily intake of vitamins and minerals – all those things the serious athlete wants to know.

Individual chapters discuss nutrition requirements for and the common issues associated with individual sports.

Inevitably, this will be a book to pick your way through, identifying the chapters that apply to your particular needs.

It’s readable, well thought out and deals with training, working up to an event, fuel needs during competition, addressing issues like keeping hydrated, recovery.

This is the third edition of the book and it has been updated and expanded.

Recipes My Mother Cooked: 100 Home Cooked Recipes from the Nation's Favourite Foodies and Personalities ISBN 978-1742373317 Allen & Unwin, RRP $$29.99

While recipe fads come and go, most serious home cooks have a collection of often-made dishes and baking that are forever associated with them.

In this book many names from the Australian food scene talk about the dishes their own mothers used to make – the recipes that made home “home”.

Damien Pignolet says his mother Elsa was blessed with a fine palate and an overwhelming wish to please her family and guests. She was “a brilliant soup cook” and he shares her Split pea Soup recipe.

Stefano Manfredi’s mother Franca’s tortelli di zucca was the best he’s ever eaten. Peter Kuruvita shares mother Liselotte’s stuffed capsicums, with her own notations scattered through.

Nutritionist Catherine Saxelby’s mother, Anne Switala was Polish and a natural-born cook. Although she cooked by eye and years of experience, rather than from a recipe, Anna taught her daughter her version of Bigos or Polish hunters’ stew “no doubt slightly adapted to our Australian climate".

Ian (Herbie) Hemphill picked up his love of herbs and spices from his mother Rosemary, the first Australia to have a book published about herbs. One of her recipes shared in this book is for Fennel seed sausages.

Doreen Pearl Ackerman, mother of Maggie Beer was a really good cook, even in times of hardship and while Maggie never learned to cook from her mother “I did learn to shop with Mum, to choose what was best ad freshest… I didn’t learn how much I had learnt by osmosis in my childhood”.

In all, 38 people share their mother’s recipes, 100 of them. It is a touching glimpse of home and family times and the comfort of a meal cooked by Mum with love.

A lovely book for Mother’s Day and 5% of every sale will be donated to the McGrath Foundation to help place McGrath Breast Care Nurses in communities across Australia and to educate young women to become breast aware.

 

The Real Food Companion Matthew Evans, ISBN 978-1741967203, Murdoch Books, RRP $89.95

Those who have been glued to TV watching Gourmet Farmer on SBS recently will welcome this new book from the star of the show, Matthew Evans.

While we can’t all have a little farmlet in Tasmania and lead the rural good life, we can at least tootle round the local markets meeting the producers, growers and food artisans and leaf through this stunning volume for inspiration.

The book begins quite touchingly with a prologue directed at his unborn first child (Hedley has since arrived).

“What matters with food, as in most things, isn’t quantity, but quality. If we must eat meat then what matters is how an animal is reared, how it is handled and that it is used efficiently. Then, of course, what matters if you inherit my intolerance for poor flavour, is how it tastes. What matters is how the land is left after we eat, and just how good each meal is that we take from her soil.”

Evans learned to cook at his mother’s apron strings “as I hope to teach you”. And he has tried to condense what he has found out about food in one place – this book.

While Evans junior may not be wielding a wooden spoon for a little while yet, many of us can immediately make good use of The Real Food Companion. Be warned – it’s not a book for snuggling up in bed with on a chilly morning.. It’s one of the new breed of door-stopper cookbooks that need to be settled firmly on a flat surface and then leafed through with relish.

Those of us who were lucky enough to grow up in families where our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles all had thriving garden will remember sweet baby carrots plucked from the earth and given a quick wash under the garden tap before being popped in our tiny hands. And peas popped straight from the pod, warm and sweet.

While city living and tiny sections has removed that joy for many people, we can still at least try to be one step away from the source of our produce and become familiar with how our food is made and grown but shopping at farmers’ markets or at least buying from a shopkeeper or stallholder who knows the grower, even if we don’t.

So, given that we’ve acquired good flavoursome ingredients, we’ve picked up some of the producer’s enthusiasm as we learn about how and where they were grown, it’s off to the kitchen with our Real Food Companion ready to hold our hand.

Whether it’s a therapeutic chicken soup, a cheesy batch of biscuits to have with drinks, a coq au vin made with a local white wine, a sharp rich lemon curd, braised lamb shanks, or a pure pork cassoulet, the satisfying ideas keep coming. Reading the author’s mate Ross’s high-top pork pie recipe reminded me how good this sort of fare is.

There are traditional dishes, recipes influenced by the various ethnic groups around us, yesterday’s food, today’s food. Evans thoughtfully discusses issues like the ethics of wild game, sustainable seafood, oyster farming, grain-fed beef, raw milk – no ranting, just useful information.

This is an encyclopaedic work spanning 576 pages. It’s a cookbook, a resource, a guide. Dedicated foodie or novice cook, it’s a very appealing book, particularly enhanced by Alan Benson's fine photos.

I Want to be a Chef ISBN 978-1741967852, Murdoch Books, RRP $29.95

You can’t get your kids into the kitchen early enough. Standing alongside my respective Nanas at the kitchen table “helping” is one of my earliest memories. And I loved taking a ringside seat when my mother was baking.

As I grew older there were little tasks I could manage. I took great pride in my contributions and the resulting food always seem to taste that much better because I’d helped make it.

Now with so many cheffy programmes on TV kids are getting more and more exposed to interesting food, preparation methods and so on and this is a good title to get them started.

It begins with the important basics – reading through the recipe, organising ingredients and equipment required, preparing tins or moulds, getting the prepping chores like peeling, chopping, grating, opening tins, measuring ingredients all out of the way before moving on to the business of cooking.

Kitchen safety and hygiene are important and should be taught early. It’s also essential to have an adult on hand to supervise and answer questions.

A core requirement is making food the child is going to enjoy and there are more than 100 recipes in this attractive book to choose from.

Sections cover breakfasts, lunchtime and snacks, dinnertime and something sweet. Some are suitable for the school lunchbox and this can often be a good way of getting a picky eater to discover some of those “loathed” ingredients can actually taste pretty good.

Parents and carers may need to spend a bit of time on the job during the first kitchen adventures but if children are encouraged to give everything a try there’ll always be a sous chef or two ready to make their “signature dish” . And if they’ve learned it all correctly, they’ll know how to clean up after themselves.

The Age Cheap Eats 2010 edited by Nina Rousseau, ISBN 978-0-14-301177-4, Penguin, RRP $24.99

When it comes to food, Australians have a variety of bibles and Cheap Eats is the one to carry if you're navigating the lanes, alleyways and suburban streets of Melbourne in search of nosh that comes in under the guide's $30-a-head limit.

Since the last edition there has been some closures, some new kids on the block, and a few former star players have missed selection as price increases have sent them over the $30 limit.

The good news is this is still a well-packed guide for sorting out venues for those weekend brunches, ethnic hits and great coffee. Included are more than 500 reviews (including more than 100 new eateries).

There are champions in their class as the review team has sorted out the best city and country cheap eats, the best bar, breakfast, pizzeria, caffeine hit, vegetarian dish, world food dish, communal table and best posh eat. And a new member of the hall of fame has been annointed.Even Matt Preston has been dangling his cravat in the coffee and given his favourite caffeine hits.

A must-have for the serious foodie, even those who don't need to mind the pennies.

Wholefood for Children Jude Blereau, ISBN 978-1741966787, Murdoch Books, RRP $45.00

One of the biggest challenges for any parent is ensuring their children develop good eating habits and are well nourished. Children require fuel to play, grow and learn and this book is designed to provide a guide to ensure good eating patterns are established.

There is an introduction to the wholefood kitchen which includes plenty of good information on dairy produce, eggs, meat, fish, vegetables and fruit, nuts and seeds, legumes, soya beans and soy products, whole grains, fats, oils and so on. Special diets are discussed – vegetarian, dairy-free, gluten-free, wheat-free.

Foundation ingredients encountered in the recipe collection are covered and then it’s on to the recipes proper. These are wide-ranging and begin with baby’s first solids. As the little one’s digestion is able to cope with more variety, other recipes are introduced leading through to the age of seven.

As the child gets older and moves on to a more varied diet, the recipes are for sufficient quantities for two or three adults as well as the young one.

There is plenty of variety, the recipes are tasty and, hopefully, tempting for youngsters and there are quirky ways of working vegetables into the diet – so often the stumbling block for many. There’s a rustic tray-baked vegetable tart, a pesto chicken and vegetable pilaf, corn and zucchini fritter and plenty more excellent ideas.

New parents, while keen to do their best for their baby, are often given well-meaning but conflicting advice. I can see this book being a very useful source for sensible information, answering many questions and explaining when it is appropriate to introduce certain foods into the diet, based on the growing child’s ability to process and digest them and the need for fuel as youngsters become more active and energetic.

Meals in Heels Jennifer Joyce, ISBN 978-1741965520, Murdoch Books, RRP $39.95

If you yearn to be a dinner party diva but instead seem to spend most of the evening toiling in the kitchen, this will be the book for you. London-based American food writer Jennifer Joyce takes the line that the more than can be prepared ahead, the less chance there is of missing out on a good conversation.

Each recipe has a plan of attack – what can be made up to a couple of days ahead, the day before or the morning of the dinner party. What steps need to be taken just before serving, ideas on presentation, what to serve alongside. Prep times and cooking times will also help with planning a menu so there aren’t a string of things to do at once.

Chapter cover canapés, starters, mains, stews and roasts, barbecues, sides and sweets.
All the dishes can be made ahead and each has a delicious wow-factor so you can impress and indulge your friends. While there are no dashing photos there are some delightful sketches of relaxed divas on top of their culinary game.

What’s the food like? Try lemongrass and lime prawn skewers, spinach salad with quail eggs and warm cider dressing, Persian chicken with walnut and pomegranate sauce, profiteroles with salted caramel sauce, chicken dhansak for a big crowd, make-ahead chicken and chorizo paella, beef, Guinness and mushroom pot pies, steak tartare with sourdough toasts, five-hour fall-apart leg of lamb, rhubarb cinnamon tarts with oat crumble, Goan tomato and coconut fish curry, mini beef Wellingtons.

Seasonal menus and assorted ethnic themes will help hosts to put together dishes that complement one another. This will be a very helpful addition to any dinner party diva’s kitchen library.