Now there is a chill in the air, the nights are drawing in and fires are being lit it is time to start thinking about belly warming food. This must be our favorite time of year here at designist, sure who doesn’t love a hearty stew by a crackling fire on an evening after a hard days work?
What we like less however is having to spend too much of that precious evening time prepping or having to wash all those dishes after (sure, who does!). That’s why we are very excited about these two books Clever Batch by Susan Jane White and One Pot Feeds All by Darina Allen.
So many of us are time-pinched, cash strapped and too tired by 6pm to be able to bring much creativity to the kitchen - exactly the problem Susan Jane tackles in her new book. Her solution is really very clever. She has crammed the book full of recipes to enable us batch prepare some seriously flavoursome infused stocks, dressings - and what she calls flavour grenades - which we can store in our freezer cupboards and fridges to then liberally sprinkle into our day to day cooking to give it that extra pizzazz.
We particularly can’t get enough of her BBQ salt which seems to go with EVERYTHING, or her decadent and super easy to make (even easier to eat) salted coffee caramels. Clever Batch is all about making our kitchens to work for us and bringing flavour and variety back to our weeks.
Darina Allen’s One Pot Feeds All does exactly as it says on the tin - with some belly rumbling, tastebud tingling recipes. There is literally something for everyone in this book, whether it is getting all the family around the table and eating, impressing dinner guests or finding the perfect comfort food for a cold dark day.
Thanks to this book we even got the pickiest three year old to eat his dinner thanks to her recipe for Roman chicken and chips (with rosemary and thyme), while her one-pot mushroom pasta is already a top favorite. Or did I mention the sticky orange swirls? (we literally could go on, but maybe you should just have a look at the books).
