Lawson - Nigella Fresh

Copyright 2003, 2010 Nigella Lawson

Photos Petrina Tinslay

Landscape photos Art Directors and Trip Photo Library

FORMERLY PUBLISHED AS FOREVER SUMMER 2003

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 1500 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

The Library of Congress has catalogued the original print edition of this book as follows:

Lawson, Nigella

Forever summer / Nigella Lawson; photographs by Petrina Tinslay.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 1-4013-0016-2

1. Cookery. I. Title.

TX714 .L393 2003

641.5dc21

2002032853

Nigella Fresh ISBN (print book): 978-1-4013-1042-4

eBook Edition ISBN: 978-1-4013-0616-8

First eBook Edition

Hardcover edition (Forever Summer) and paperback edition (Nigella Fresh) printed in the United States of America.

www.HyperionBooks.com

Ms. Lawson brings to life the sensual aspects of cooking, helping you understand not only what you are after, but also the pleasure of the journey.

New York Times

Nigella is an icon; a smart sexy woman who promulgates the idea that it might be fun or even relaxing to make time to cook again.

Gourmet

Nigellissima

Easy Italian-Inspired Recipes

Nigella Fresh

(formerly Forever Summer)
Delicious Flavors on Your Plate All Year Round

Nigella Christmas

Food Family Friends Festivities

Nigella Express

Good Food, Fast

How to Eat

The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food

How to Be a Domestic Goddess

Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking

Feast

Food to Celebrate Life

Nigella Bites

From Family Meals to Elegant DinnerEasy, Delectable Recipes for Any Occasion

In the ideal world inhabited by the chef, there may indeed be a place for the lyrical insistence on using only those ingredients that the month in hand offers up to the marketplace, but my kitchen, my home, the way I cook, resist such purist strictures. For much as I love the idea of wandering out to the shops, basket dangling from my arm, to gather each new seasons freshly ripened produce, I have neither the time to shop that way, nor the disciplineand, frankly, I balk at such loftily imposed restraints. I shop and cook much as I eat, with greedy opportunism.

Seasonal cooking is anyway better suited to those who live in sunnier climates. The rest of us need to make the most of what warmth is offered, and much of the time this has to emanate from the kitchen rather than from the skies outside. Summer, then, is an idea, a memory, a hopeful projection. Sometimes when its gray outside and cold within, we need to conjure up the sun, some light, a lazy feeling of having all the wide-skied time in the world to sit back and eat warmly with friends. I am not talking about creating some overblown idyll of perpetual Provenal summer, but of extending that purring sense of sunny expansiveness.

Summer food, even when eaten in deepest winter, contains within it the idea of simple cooking. But the best recipes are never blueprints, only ideas hungrily mooted. The ones in this book have come to me the way they always do, plundered from friends, from family, grown out of an idea of what might go with what. As the Australian food writer Maggie Beer has written, cooking is all about osmosisa mental note made about a flavour combination or a technique, a memory of a dish. Cooking is not just about applying heat, procedure, method, but about transformation of a more intimate kind; none of us cooks without bringing our own character to bear on the food in front of us. Just as the recipes that follow have been toyed with, changed, fiddled with to become my food, so I expect them to be remodeled in your own kitchen.

I have only one rule when I decide what to put in, what to leave out. However successful a kitchen experiment might seem to be, if I dont feel the urge to cook something again, and soon, I ditch it. The one-time spectacular is not my style, nor ever could be. And, if at any time Im still wondering if this or that particular recipe is worth keeping, I set myself a scene: a friend, a reader, a fellow mother at the school, is coming up to me, telling me that tonight shes going to cook my If Im not filled with impatient, evangelical enthusiasm at the imagined exchange, if that recipe doesnt inspire that same, unwavering, bossy confidence, then out it goes. I want to write only about the food I love, and I want you to love it, too.

Life has its difficulties, why add to them in the kitchen? And for all that my title archly conjures up that starlets gushing hopefrom the premiere scene in Singin in the Rainthat if Ive brought a little cheer into your humdrum little lives, it aint all been in vain for nothin, it is not because I believe there is nothing but endless, unclouded blue sky in Nigellaland, but because I still believe the kitchen is not a place you escape from, but the place you escape to.