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kevin ashton (474)    
kevin ashton   
wannabetvchef
Posted Sunday, November 02, 2008 (18 days 2 hours ago.) Viewed 4 times.
When I heard of Gary's new cookbook, I was to say the least a little sceptical.
365 recipes is an incredible number of recipes to pack into one book.
To put it another way I've been writing a weekly recipe column for just over 5 years.
So I have produced around 260. I do a photo shoot of 4 dishes about once a month. To come up with ideas, cook and make notes weighting all the ingredients as I go is a lot of work. Now of coarse Gary has people to help, never the less he put this recipe packed book together in just 12 months.
Gary Rhodes begins his book by singing the praise of his personal assistant Lissanne Kenyon. All serious celebrity chefs have a personal assistant, it's the only way they can co-ordinate their busy schedules. It was nice to see Gary recognise her worth publicly.
He then loosely explains his thoughts behind the book that he wanted create a cookbook that was a source for everyday ideas, and that he does use certain convenience foods to cut the preparation/cooking times, and he wishes the reader to use the book as a starting point for ideas as much as a cookbook.
Next is a useful section called Cook's Notes, which gives the reader about 10 pages of useful cooking, preparing, storing and even buying notes.
Getting to the recipes themselves Gary interestingly breaks the book not into Starters, Seafood, Main course etc. Nor does he segment the book using the seasons.
Instead it broken into the following sections; Breakfast & amp; Brunch,
Midweek Lunch, Afternoon Tea, Simple Midweek Suppers, Weekend Eating and Special Occasions.
The book is nicely rounded off with two other sections one that covers Potatoes and Vegetables and the other section in on sauces.
The book offers a wide range of dishes from a simple macaroni cheese offered in the afternoon tea section all the way to sauted scallops with ginger spring greens and passion fruit hollandaise.
I expected to find mundane and reparation to pad this book and achieve its huge recipe count instead I found Gary's inspiration and thought process constantly offering interesting and intriguing ideas. With a list price of 25 for it 480 pages this cookbook offers more that good value for money.
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Posted Sunday, November 02, 2008 (18 days 2 hours ago.) Viewed 3 times.
If you ever spent any amount of time in Dublin then you're bound to have heard of
Cornucopia. It's a well-established, much-loved vegetarian restaurant. Open 1986 by Neil and Deirdre McCafferty. Situated on Wicklow Street it has a warm inviting feel and a lot of loyal customers.
Several weeks ago as part of this review I had intended to pay the restaurant an unannounced visit, I was curious to find the source of this well written cookbook. Unfortunately events conspired against the visit, so at this time my longing is still just that. Fate has a way of twisting and turning and I found that my sister planned a last minute trip to Ireland with her husband. With this news I manage to convince her to try the restaurant out, and she did. Lynn and Ray both concurred about the wonderful food and warm inviting welcome.
This book is in fact a collaborative effort from members of staff, ably lead by writer Eleanor Heffernan. This was in response to the many requests over the years from customers for a Cornucopia Cookbook. Eleanor has worked within Cornucopia as a waitress, manager, chef, and translator for seven years. Her intimate knowledge and love for its philosophy shines through. That warmth resonates throughout the 460 odd pages of the book and it's recipes. To say this book was merely a cookbook would be to seriously undervalue it's content; it is in fact a glimpse into Deirdre McCafferty's life. Your taken on her journey of how she came to own and operate this bastion of real food.
Reading this book took me on my own journey, back to my first trip to a wonderful vegetarian restaurant in the 1989 in the English Lake district. I was amazed how interesting and delicious a vegetarian meal could be, that I'd ended the meal without a sense of lacking, rather a sense of new possibilities.
After an interesting and thoroughly readable introduction, the book is then broken into sections, soup, salads, main courses, breads and desserts. Each section begins usefully with an introduction which an engaging mixture of re-telling Cornucopia folklore and general advice and tips about the subject. Many of the recipes cover two pages, sometimes three. The first page talks about the philosophy or story behind the dish. Then the second and sometimes third is the recipe itself. These are not overly complex recipes, just lovingly well explained ones.
Each recipe is usefully labelled, vegan, glutin-free, wheat-free, yeast-free and so forth which indeed is a useful feature but I wanted the focus of this review to be about possibilities. You see, I'm still an avowed meat eater and always will be as long as I have teeth but these days I too can enjoy without sense of sacrifice a vegetarian meal once or twice a week. Next time your in a bookstore seek this book out and take time to read a recipe or two.
You probably have a friend just like me, who has a bookcase full of cookbooks and yet strangely enough they use the same 4-5 time and time again. Those favourite books are well thumbed through and are the first recipes to be looked at when seeking inspiration. This book could perhaps join that select small group and become well loved and much used………… which is all any cookbook, could hope for.
The book is available on most online stores such as Amazon. It is available from our website www.corkuniversitypress.com and is available in Waterstones in the UK.
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Posted Sunday, November 02, 2008 (18 days 2 hours ago.) Viewed 97 times.
We all like a fright from time to time, whether on a scary ride at the amusement park or in a horror movie. Here are some scary facts that I hope scare you into waking up!
War of the Worlds One thing is for sure: we are not eating the same food our grandparents ate. Science continues to invade our diet in the wrong way. I have no objections when good husbandry, is used to develop a better more abundant crop yield, after all things like that have moved farming forward for centuries. Where I draw the line (that some people like to pretend is blurred) is when some so-called clever boffin uses a chicken gene to cross with a tomato to create a tomato that has longer shelf life. These mad scientists often use world hunger as an excuse for their excesses. But none of these "breakthroughs" have done one jot to improve the plight of the starving people of the 3rd world. On the contrary, GM seeds are almost always non-reproducing thus causing the poor farmer to go back each year to the seed producers for 100% of his seed. In-fact many GM seed companies force the farmer to sign a contract committing him to buying again and again from these people. Hasn't the western 1st world raped and pillaged the African Continent enough?
Why can't we spend money on developing their irrigation, and give them free seed for those prepared to farm the land and so they can feed their own people.with dignity.
Sleeping Giant
America often embraces new technology, which in some cases can put them on the cutting edge of science and for which I applaud them. This "Can Do" approach has much to be admired in this jaded world of ours.
The down side of this whole hearted approach is when the trusting American consumer blindly believes that American companies would never do something to hurt its own people.
Pandora's Box
That blind trust is now being tested to the limit when on January 16th the FDA approved the sale and use of meat and milk from cloned animals. No labeling is required, since they have deemed the clones to be identical to non-cloned animals. This not science fiction.
it is really is happening, but I wonder if I was to do a straw poll across America how many people would be aware of this fact?
I thought back to another scientific contribution to our food chain. Remember DDT? In 1948, a Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of its use as a pesticide. Farmers around the world applied it indiscriminately to increase food yields. Then, in 1962, the biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. This ground-breaking book outlined DDT's potential carcinogenic effects on humans, and its negative impact on the environment.
Finally, in 1972 the US banned its use. Today, in spite of numerous research publications defining DDT's health and environmental hazards, it is still being used in some parts of the world. Will cloned animals and GM crops follow in the footsteps of DDT?
In A Shopping Aisle near You? Again I want to point out in America that many Genetically Modified grains are used in food stuffs and unlike many European countries no labeling is required. What will the long term effects of these GM Foods be? Currently in the US, 89 percent of all soybeans, 83 percent of cotton, and 61 percent of corn are genetically modified varieties.
I would rather see the FDA take the same route as parts of Europe. Even under extreme world pressure due to trade agreements, many European regions have chosen to say no to Genetically Modified food and this is why many American grains currently have a European import ban placed on them.
I am angry as hell and I'm not going to take any more!
A famous line from a movie.but are you? Are you?
Currently we show science far too much respect given its chequered track record.
We need to offer a more robust healthy skepticism, a re-introduction of common-sense in our lives. These scientists should not be allow to do any thing they like just because they can. If they reject normal ethical or morel standards then tighter legal control needs to be placed upon them.
Even many scientists argue that there is more than enough food in the world and that the hunger crisis is caused by problems in food distribution and politics, not production, so people should not be offered food that may carry some degree of risk.
When it comes to playing with DNA in our food chain, it should be "guilty until proven innocent" instead of "innocent until proven guilty." Acting hastily in the approval of genetically modified food products is no way to sustain a planet.
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Posted Friday, October 24, 2008 (26 days 21 hours ago.) Viewed 12 times.
Why are bees disappearing?
This is an important global story rumbling on in the background, barely getting the news coverage it deserves. With the wars is Iraq and Afghanistan, and then this global financial crisis, surely the problem of a few dead bees can not be of equal importance?
Well let me ask the question in another way; with the recent rises in food prices, you wouldn't want a global food shortage would you? That really would remind us all the fragility of life on this planet. Experts reckon that if the world's bee population disappears our ability to grown enough food would be seriously threatened.
Even in this high-tech era farmers throughout the world rely on bee pollination for about 80% of all food crops. Imagine a world without any fruit that grows on trees?
The Story So far
The first alarm was sounded in autumn 2006. Honeybees are disappearing across the United States, with half of the States affected and beekeeper losing 30 to 90 percent of colonies. The problem seemed to fizzle out in the first half of 2007 and then came back with a vengeance. The bees simply vanish relatively suddenly, with little or no dead adults in or near the colonies, leaving behind the queen and a few young. This growing problem has been named "colony collapse disorder" (CCD). Since then, CCD has been reported from Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and the UK, where one of the biggest beekeepers lost 23 of his 40 hives.
The Threats
Bee colonies are facing a mounting threat from mites that infest their hives, various bacteria and even climate change. Some scientist have suggested a link to between the rise is Genetically Modified crops (GM) and the decline in the world bee population.
Man's technology also seems to also have a deleterious effect on bees. German research has long shown that bees' behavior changes near power lines. Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. It's thought that the radiation emitted from mobile phones somehow interferes with a bee's natural ability to navigate.
The possibility that GM crops in North America is contributing to the decline in honeybees so far hasn't been given much serious consideration by scientists even though the timing of the honeybee decline appears to coincide with the widespread deployment of GM crops. GM crops are engineered to tolerate herbicides, so the farmers can more heavily spray their crops with pesticide. . The biopesticide toxins produced aren't thought to be toxic to bees, but are toxic to butterflies, moths and beetles. Nevertheless, in some instances, the toxins have been found to kill bees or modify their behaviour.
I have been reading about this subject for sometime before I decided to share my concerns, I'm not trying to be alarmist nor am I a scientist but clearly the implications are scary. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left".
There are a growing number of reputable reports on bee population decline. Here are a couple of links, I do hope you'll read further.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/the-big-question-why-are-honey-bees-disappearing-and-what-can-be-done-to-save-them-813971.html
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/MysteryOfDisappearingHoneybees.php
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