Clarkson Elizabeth - Everlasting feast: a treasury of recipes and culinary adventures

CHAPTER TWO
bacon & egg pie

CHAPTER THREE
travelling, tasting

CHAPTER FOUR
love that chicken
roast chicken with lemon & rosemary rosemarys chicken harvest baked chicken chicken casserole with vermouth & mushrooms

CHAPTER FIVE
the waitress & the venison

CHAPTER SIX
oranges in caramel

CHAPTER SEVEN
gifts from the sea

CHAPTER EIGHT
la belle france

CHAPTER NINE
teach me to cook

CHAPTER TEN
stars of grey lynn

CHAPTER ELEVEN
pots, pans & seedy bread

CHAPTER TWELVE
tasting new zealand

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
salad days

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
fashion in food

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
crossing the pacific

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
julia & the classics

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
wine country
warm kumara & mussel salad fragrant saffron rice gremolata tiramisu

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
love a duck

CHAPTER NINETEEN
world-class

CHAPTER TWENTY
fine dining

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
herbs, lemons, salt & butter

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
eating asia

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
travelling europe

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
to market, to market

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
whats for dinner?

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
last words
salad rouge

My life is what some would call lucky, for I get to do what I love: to cook and to eat well, every day. Better still, I get to share those experiences through my blog, through tweets, on Facebook and, most satisfyingly, in the pages of the publications I write for, both regularly and occasionally as a freelance writer.

Ive enjoyed superb meals and wonderful food all around our beautiful country and overseas. Wherever I am I want to know about the food Im buying, cooking, tasting or devouring, and to acquaint myself with the stories of the people, producers and purveyors. The world of food is generous, and in this book I wanted to share the generosity, the stories and the excitement of the good food Ive shared with family and friends, at home, at our beach house, and in cafs and restaurants everywhere.

Theres never been a bigger gap than that which currently exists between the sophisticated and complex food of the worlds finest and most recognised chefs, and the family food we cook daily at home. I love both, but it was easy to decide which recipes would accompany the stories in this book. Theres nothing here thats too clever or too difficult to make. I am a firm believer in the mantra, If its easy to make, it will be easy to eat, and your family and guests will love you for that.

My 2006 book The Confident Cook was a compilation of my favourite recipes that Id cooked, tasted, tested and written for Cuisine magazine. For three years after that I continued to write recipe features and more for Cuisine, and I also started my own website/blog, where I often jotted down the recipes I created for our family lunches and dinners. In 2010, after leaving Cuisine, I had one of the most enjoyable jobs of my life when I worked closely with Judith Tabron and chef Gareth Stewart on The Soul Cookbook, testing all its delicious recipes over several months. During that process, the dinners at our home were magnificent, and the insight into the running of that restaurant was an invaluable experience.

For the past two years I have written the food column in the New Zealand Listener. It allows me to connect and share everything delicious in the food world, and also to communicate with the thousands of intelligent readers who regularly buy the magazine. Again, I feel I am really lucky as I can encourage and enthuse readers about great food products and about cooking, whether they are very good cooks or just beginners.

Both my former Cuisine followers and my Listener readers will recognise some of the recipes (and parts of some stories) in this book as most have been cooked and written since the publication of The Confident Cook. I wanted this to be a complete miscellany lots of stories, lots of ideas and tips about food and cooking, and I wanted to share some very good food.

I also wanted to share my love of flowers, which is why every chapter opens with a shot of flowers picked from my Auckland garden. (I have to confess that at my beach house the garden runs to kikuyu, karo hedges and a small but perfectly formed herb patch!)

Most of the recipes will not be a challenge to anyone who is adventurous and is willing to give cooking a go. It only takes a minute or two to read right through to the end of a recipe, and I urge you to do that before you start to shop and cook. You will then know where youre headed and have some idea of the time you will need. The other thing I urge cooks to do is to taste their food as they go. We all have different expectations about taste, and it is entirely up to you to choose how much salt, pepper, herbs, spices and other flavourings to 13 add to your cooking.

Also bear in mind that we all have ovens with temperaments of their own. My two ovens one at the beach house and one at home are both the same brand, yet each performs quite differently. The home oven is much hotter than the other, so constant watching is important and Ive learnt that the time given in any recipe needs to be regarded as merely a guide. Your nose is a pretty good way of telling you when food is cooked!

Sometimes, too, a recipe has to be adjusted because the ingredients are not available, or perhaps are out of season, requiring a substitution. Remember, a savoury dinner recipe can be altered easily, but a baking recipe is far more difficult to play around with. Baking recipes are really enjoyable chemistry, so dont get into unfortunate experiments.

Almost every ingredient in my recipes can be found in the supermarket in fact I did all the shopping for the recipes photographed in this book at my local store. If your supermarket hasnt got these ingredients, ask them to stock them. You will be surprised how quickly they respond, and if they dont, drive a little further to another, more well-informed place.

I hope you enjoy reading Everlasting Feast, and are inspired and enthused to cook some lovely food.

Lauraine Jacobs
Auckland
April 2013