Cook, Eat, Repeat: Ingredients, Recipes and Stories

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Oh right, for Nigella to be the one guiding your hand as you make such an indulgent and warming dish. It is also not the easiest binding to keep open at the chosen pages when the time comes to get in the kitchen and cook! For Nigella Lawson it’s about turning the transitory process of cooking into a recipe written to be followed exactly. Cook, Eat, Repeat’ is a delicious and delightful combination of recipes intertwined with narrative essays about food, all written in Nigella’s engaging and insightful prose. But these recipes are also about family, about the time and energy cooks spend making magic for those that they love, about heart and soul and putting your best on the plate for yourself and for those you care the most about.

A whole big bunch of rich and yummy comfort foods - Lawson takes real pleasure in describing her recipes and just going elbows-deep into cooking, without a fret or a care. Dedicated chapters include 'A is for Anchovy' (a celebration of the bacon of the sea), 'Rhubarb', 'A Loving Defence of Brown Food', a suitably expansive chapter devoted to family dinners, plus inspiration for vegan feasts, solo suppers and new ideas for Christmas.I don't know that I've read any of Nigella Lawson's cookbooks before, so I didn't have any expectations. Within these chapters are recipes for all seasons and tastes: Burnt Onion and Aubergine Dip; Butternut with Beetroot, Chilli and Ginger Sauce; Fish Finger Bhorta; Spaghetti with Chard and Anchovies; Chicken with Garlic Cream Sauce; Beef Cheeks with Port and Chestnuts; and Wide Noodles with Lamb in Aromatic Broth, to name a few. With this understanding of the relationship between recipe author and recipe user, I did make a few of the recipes and I did adapt them as I saw fit.

As Cook, Eat, Repeat was written during a pandemic, she’s made changes to some of her original ideas about entertaining at holidays or just having friends over for a dinner party. Be patient, lift up and swirl the pan often and monitor it closely; as Tammy almost sang, Stand By Your Pan. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. I love looking at the recipes and the pictures but I especially love the reflective essays Nigella wrote for this book.I'm a vegetarian, and I was happy to see her tackling vegetarian and vegan cooking with gusto, and commenting on augmenting non-vegan recipes where possible (she is also realistic, saying she can't make every recipe vegetarian/vegan). If I could ban any phrase, it would, without doubt, be that overused, viscerally irritating, and far-from-innocent term itself, the Guilty Pleasure. Between her cookbooks, her television show, the hours she’s put in cooking, prepping, experimenting, testing, tasting, and studying recipes, she has demonstrated that she is an expert on cooking. I also suspect she has a fantastic sense of humour, and is the first to laugh at herself (or at least, her TV self), but that the general public has a hard time letting her show that (just look at how the internet imploded over her pronunciation of 'microwave').

I wish I had her patience in the kitchen to make the most of every drop, of every ingredient, of every dish. Her section on rhubarb is to die for — so many ways to simply cook and serve a bunch of deliciousness. I don’t necessarily but Nigella Lawson cookbooks for their recipes, though her recipes are very good.

Although I occasionally watched Nigella's cookery programmes, this was the first book (actually e-book) of hers I'd bought. no one should feel guilty about what they eat, or the pleasure they get from eating; the only thing to feel guilty about (and even then I don’t recommend it) is the failure to be grateful for that pleasure.

This book - her greatest since How to Eat in 1998 - is about embracing the idea of cooking as a series of soothing rituals.

but from deep within the cacophonous orchestra of my mind, the woodwind section starts up a searing wail, the cellos come in with their melancholy sob, only giving way to the brass section to end with the wah wah wah waah of the sad trombone. This book, though I appreciate her reflections particularly during a time of uncertainty - what will eating in community look like after lockdown, what will holidays look like - and this book released in the UK in 2020.