Buch lesen: «Cooking Outside the Box: The Abel and Cole Seasonal, Organic Cookbook»

Introduction

If you’ve bought this book thinking I’m somehow related to Delia Smith or have some “Fat Duck” palate for mixing bananas and worms, I want to come completely clean and apologise profusely. Someone in the marketing department obviously got carried away. With some basic dishes I am a complete failure, and even my 11-year-old Jessica continually trumps me in the toast, spaghetti and boiled egg departments.

But before you start clogging up the returns department at Amazon, or boycotting Waterstone’s thinking you’ve been sold a dud, I do have one thing over most cooks in that I have spent the last 18 years of my life working with the finest organic farmers, cheese-makers and artisan bakers, who produce a range of beautiful and delicious food that makes your average supermarket look positively cold-war Russian. Furthermore, for all these years I’ve been responsible for choosing the weekly vegetable shop for some extremely talented cooks (and a few chefs) across Britain who were just a bit fed up with the air-freighted, plastic-covered, plastic-looking, and plastic-tasting, produce being offered to them after the demise of their local greengrocer. The challenge for me and for Abel & Cole has been to keep the variety of organic foods coming month in, month out and, as word has caught on, to show the less adventuresome cook (like me) how to prepare, store and cook all the wonderful food on offer in the UK throughout the seasons.

The farmers I work with deserve 100% of the credit for my cooking inspiration. They invariably have a hundred-and-one serving suggestions for their much-loved and much-nurtured produce. I wanted to pass these ideas and recipes on to my customers, and so began the Abel & Cole weekly newsletter with headlines like: “The thing in your box that looks like a brain this week is celeriac.” And the great thing about our customers is that they have always reported back on what works and what doesn’t, and often send in recipes of their own. So grew a great bank of knowledge which I am now sharing with you.