Forever Summer with Nigella (Hardcover)

If treadmill it is, it's one she continues to work with considerable panache. What she never lacks is poise: her effortless blend of the artless and the deeply considered does not fail, here, to beguile. Nigella's appeal is, of course, a lifestyle thing--you, too, could be at once an intelligent modern woman and an old-fashioned vamp, draped in pashminas and liable impulsively to pop off for a run down to Monte. In all this, and especially if you take her television persona into account, the food can seem a little incidental. But it is of course at the heart of the project. Nigella Lawson seems to have a knack of thinking creatively about food which allows her to turn a recipe over in her hands, as it were, give it a tweak and turn it into something livelier and fresher than it was before. So her Greek Salad marinates the red onion and omits the sapid cucumber, substituting sliced fennel. Barbecued Sea Bass is stuffed with preserved lemons (pickled, incidentally, in a usef! ully unusual way). Roast Potatoes are given in their Swedish Hasselback form (sliced nearly through, so they fan out in cooking). The section on ices is adorned with Margarita Ice Cream ("surely what angels would eat at their hen night"), while Nigella indulges her inner slapper with Slut-Red Raspberries in Chardonnay Jelly. Above all, she communicates, through dozens and dozens of recipes, the ideals of freshness, simplicity, spontaneity and immediacy, a combination it's hard to resist. --Robin Davidson

Synopsis
Fresh, innovative, versatile and delicious, it's summer all year round and from around the world with Nigella. With all the style and class of her earlier books, and a whole new concept, this is an irresistible and wide-ranging book of summery recipes which can be eaten at any time - from scrumptious Italian antipasti and Greek mezze to Spanish cuisine, from barbecues to beach picnics, from Moroccan roast lamb to Mauritian prawn curry, from the traditional strawberries-and-cream feel of an English summer afternoon to Indian-summer evenings at home, from light lunches to seductive suppers; and with a selection of unusual icecreams and melt-in-the-mouth puddings to die for. Summer cooking is relaxed cooking, for days when we want to conjure up a mood of sunny expansiveness even in the darkest months. Easy cooking, easy eating. No one wants to slave over a hot stove for hours: the