James Beard Foundation Award- and Taste Canada Award-winning author
Laura Calder is back with Kitchen Bliss, a warm, funny, and pragmatic
collection of stories and recipes that reveal how cooking, feeding, and
home-keeping can magically restore balance and calm in our out-of-sync
lives.
During the years of the global pandemic, Laura Calder, like many home
cooks, found herself being drawn into the kitchen and becoming
reacquainted with the power that the room can have to restore us when
the going gets tough. In Kitchen Bliss, she reflects on how and why
the kitchen and the dining table have held such an important place in
her life and indeed taught her about happiness.
In her inimitably wise, warm, and quirky voice, she shares stories about
everything from her shattered childhood fantasies about Sultana cake, to
a gastronomically disastrous camel safari, the perilous vicissitudes of
daily dishwashing by hand, and how she identifies (positively, if you
can believe it) with ground meat. Stories and musings on Emily Post's
concept of a "Little Dinner" (for eight, a mere bagatelle!),
unsatisfying adventures at cooking school, hopeless kitchens and how to
cook in them anyway, and the English aversion to warm toast are all
accompanied by recipes to soothe, inspire, and delight. Nothing too
fancy here, just perfect recipes for dishes like Disgustingly Rich
Potatoes, Salted Caramel Ice Cream, Hainanese Chicken Rice, and The Full
Quebecois Breakfast. Come for the stories, stay for the food!
Laura has spent her life considering the life-enhancing pleasures of
food: cooking, eating, and feeding. The pandemic gave her a new sense of
urgency to share what she has learned. She says, "Life isn't always a
candy shop of delights, pandemic or no pandemic. Often we find ourselves
in uncomfortable places and we must learn to create sweetness for
ourselves out of whatever it is we've got--and that sometimes can seem
like nothing but a whole lot of lemons. Well, at least that's a start!
We all know where to find the lemons: in the kitchen."
This is a delightfully entertaining book full of memories, insights,
good advice, and humor that will inspire readers to get in the kitchen,
tie on an apron, and discover their own form of kitchen bliss.
