I know there are a few cooks on here and I'm curious to know who's cooking best suits your tastes?
Are you a very quirky and experimental Heston Blumenthal?
Are you a lover of healthy, organic and fresh ingredients like Jamie Oliver?
Maybe you're quite refined in your French/British cooking like Gorden Ramsey?
Or maybe you like all the delights of the sea like Rick Stein?
I would say I am normally like Nigel Slater, simple, fresh, quick and honest. Not really restaurant food, and I like it that way. Although I do have my Gordon Ramsey moments.
So what about you?
Le Dragon.... great food. his cooking style really suits me . Garden is full of herbs, fresh chilli's and tomatoes so i do have some good ingredients and always have plenty of butchers mince, sausages and chicken around, so after meaty stuff!
Tearing up basil with your fingers looks good on TV, but try doing it for real and the results are disappointing to say the least. It's fiddly to the point of giving you sore fingers, takes forever to tear up enough of the damned stuff to do anything useful, you often miss bits and end up with long strips that aren't very nice to eat, and the results don't look as pretty and rustic in the flesh as they do on the screen! There, got that out of my system.
Oh c'mon, we're talking about tearing up leaves here, not some cooking technique that takes years to perfect! The point is that he can make a big thing about how great it is on TV because all he has to do is tear up a couple of leaves and garnish one plate. In the real world, if you've got a big pile of basil leaves in front of you that you want to use in a meal for several people, then tearing them up in such a way that they are actually useful and presentable is no longer such a cool, easy-going activity. It's a nuisance, and in the long run it's impractical. The main reason for the rant was that it took me a couple of years of slavishly tearing up basil leaves for numerous meals to realise this!
Can someone recommend me a nice simple recipe book, no sweet stuff though. I tend to try some of the books but a lot do assume you have baby yak milk stored away or a bats slipper, just odd ingredients. Is there anything that gives you a core list of stuff at teh start and then each recipe is based around those ingredients so i dont have to drop 70 quid in asda every time i want to cook a new recipe
