cookbook addict

Blogging is proving very comfortable these days, when I seem to make recipes that have been blogged or posted somewhere else and I choose the right language to share them ie no translation effort on my part. Today's recipe is no exception, you will find it here . The book it's taken from, Slow Cooker Revolution , is not very recent but it is my new slow-cooker reference. I normally use the internet or the crockpot blog , because the book I bought when I first got my slow-cooker is useless, and it's useful to have guidelines for recipes because eyeballing it sometimes result in disaster... As you can guess, America's Test Kitchen have produced a book so detailed and geeky that you can trust it with your eyes closed. It is quite meat-centric and American-oriented, but it provides hours of reading fun and many valuable tips on how to get the best use out of the pot. This soup is my first recipe out of it. There's this slightly dangerous recipe for Fagioli al fias...

Sometimes the girls want to help me cook (cook, not bake which is an entirely different process I think). It's a good thing, you know, to want to both help and prepare healthy food that they're -hopefully- going to eat afterwards. So if we have time ahead, we do this. You really need a lot of time if they're going to peel, then chop veg and quality control every step of the recipe. They tend to eat up all the carrot peel so I make sure to buy organic ones. You also need to hover like an eagle and make sure no one's going to cut off a phalange or something. Channel your inner angel and muster all your patience too ;-) In a bid to make them eat veg and try and teach them about the country we live in, we decided to make Bouneschlupp , literally a "gulp of beans". It's a soup made with green beans, potatoes, carrots and sometimes sausage or bacon, but remember we eat mostly vegetarian these days. It's very easy but I did turn to my Luxembourgis...

We've been having a very cold but bright autumn after a late and short Indian summer. From 25C + during the day, we're now waking up to -4C and having to scrape the ice from the windscreen every morning. Friends, it already feels like winter. Anyway, we're keeping warm with more birthday cupcakes (the following are the same as last year's , I just use less icing sugar than Billy does)  and soups, and gearing up for Halloween. We went apple picking and are now munching our way through over ten kilos of locally and responsibly grown fruit. Someone at work brought in Carrot and coriander soup out of a tetrapak, and I quite liked the idea of combining those flavours. Carrots are probably among the cheapest organic vegetables so I very often grab a bag while shopping, to make grated carrot salad or soup or use in whatever else I am making. I looked up soup recipes online and came up with the following. You could up the coriander or use coconut milk in place of ...

People who have given up on Bill Granger a while ago will be in for some surprise/shock if they were to open his new book. Gone are the days when everything was white, from the furniture to the clothes his family were pictured wearing (I actually wonder how that went with three small kids but that's another story). In Holiday, there is colour everywhere, and because the theme is rather autumnal/wintery, the photos have been shot in a house that is obviously not Bill's, where the furniture is antique-looking- dark woods, leather armchairs, dark floor tiling... That's not to say his recipes have changed, there's still a summery section to the book with beach photos and picnic recipes, but there's more of a French twist here and there, red wine stews, mussels, lots of comforting puds with lashings of sauce...most of them quick, rather light and full of flavour-Bill's signature. Holiday is pretty much the wintery companion to Every Day , both books being really s...