Warwick Ben - Nigella bites

HOW TO EAT

THE PLEASURES AND PRINCIPLES OF GOOD FOOD

HOW TO BE A DOMESTIC GODDESS

BAKING AND THE ART OF COMFORT COOKING

FOREVER SUMMER

FEAST

FOOD THAT CELEBRATES LIFE

NIGELLA EXPRESS

GOOD FOOD FAST

NIGELLA CHRISTMAS

FOOD, FAMILY, FRIENDS, FESTIVITIES

KITCHEN

RECIPES FROM THE HEART OF THE HOME

ABOUT THE BOOK

With the success of her two bestselling cookery books, How to Eat and How to be a Domestic Goddess, and her first television series, Nigella has become a household name, symbolising all that is best, most pleasurable and least fussy about the place of good food - both making it and eating it - in our lives.

Now shes back with this ravishing new book to accompany her second Channel Four television series, Nigella Bites. Full of mouth watering recipes, including all those featured in her new television series, Nigella Bites offers some recipes which are exciting twists on old favourites, others which are new and different, and all of them characteristic of Nigella and the ethos of her TV series - uncomplicated, original, fresh, and perfect for the way we live today. Theyre easy to produce after a busy day at the office, fun to linger over at weekends or to make with the kids, delectable to read about, dreamy to look at and delicious to eat. Included here are recipes for All-Day Breakfast, Party Girl, TV Dinners, Trashy Food, Slow-Cook Weekends, Rainy Days, and a host of other daily delights. Nigella wants her readers and her viewers to enjoy the pleasures of eating and cooking. With her, how could anyone resist?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nigella Lawson is the author of bestselling books How to Eat (may just be the best cookery book ever Daily Telegraph), How to be a Domestic Goddess (British Book Awards 2001), Nigella Bites (WHSmith Award 2002) Forever Summer (images of warmth and Mediterranean climes Time Out), Feast (a voluptuous and delicious piece of food writing Guardian), Nigella Express (no. 1 bestseller with over 1 million sales), Nigella Christmas (everything to make your Christmas sparkle Independent) and most recently Kitchen (another blockbuster hearty and wholesome Daily Express) which, together with her successful TV series and the Nigella Quick Collection app, have made her a household name around the world. She lives in London with her family.

PREFACE

To tell the truth, I didnt intend to write another book so soon. Not that this is by way of an apology: I am too evangelical about the food I like eating (and cooking) not to want to present the recipes from the new series of Nigella Bites to you, taking advantage of the extra wittering space a book allows. But Ive wanted, too, to borrow from the other medium, so this book is slightly different from my previous two: there are more pictures and the chapters inevitably take their shape and content from each programme in the TV series.

In truth, there isnt a conflict. Ive always felt that food is nothing if taken out of the context in which its eaten, and the programmes and consequently these chapters - are arranged according to the sort of cooking we might want to do, depending on our life, our timetable and our mood. But, please: these are suggestions only, not inflexible command. Life is not so rigidly constructed, and I might well want to cook something for a weekday dinner that Ive earmarked here for a Sunday lunch, and presume you might, too.

Anyway, even if themes, the focus of these chapters, are varied, what remains constant, and so what links them, is taste. I dont mean taste in a food-snobbish, status sense (please, I am just not interested) but the tendency towards certain techniques (for me, that means easy ones) and certain ingredients. Restaurant chefs rely, to a greater or lesser extent, on innovation and novelty; whats more, they are generally less constrained by ordinary domestic concerns of budget or storage space. They can buy a bottle of some special liqueur for one particular recipe; we are unlikely to. So, you might well find that certain ingredients crop up repeatedly. In the same way, when a little bit of stock is needed, Im not going to instruct you to start boiling up bones left, right and centre, just for the purist sake of it, but rather suggest you use the shop-bought stock-concentrate I use myself. The point is, this is the way we cook at home. And for all that this is, frankly, the book of the television series, I am neither a chef nor a performer: none of the recipes here has been specially constructed for broadcast or publication purposes: this is the food I cook, the food I eat.

LIST OF RECIPES

OVEN TEMPERATURES

NOTE : Eggs, where specified, are large (and preferably organic and free-range); all butter is unsalted, and salmon and meat organic, for preference.