Life on a Plate: The Journey Of An Unlikely Chef - Hardcover

Owen, Sid

9781846051739: Life on a Plate: The Journey Of An Unlikely Chef

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1846051738 ISBN 13: 9781846051739

Publisher: Century, 2007

From everyone's favourite Eastender comes a surprising departure: a cookbook, filled with lip-smacking recipes lovingly learned, created and developed over years of harbouring a serious passion for good food and seasonal cooking.

While most of us associate Sid Owen with Eastenders, I'm a Celebrity... and Bad Girls, what is little known is that, since childhood, Sid has been dedicated to expanding his culinary repertoire and learning as much as he can about food and cookery. This journey has taken him around the world, and even led him to buy and manage a restaurant in the south of France.

Here, Sid presents a collection of mouthwatering and inspiring recipes made from the freshest ingredients - and all easy to prepare. Sid also tells us why it is that food and learning to cook became so central to his everyday life.

Life on a Plate contains over eighty of Sid's recipes - each reflecting his love of great cooking and revealing something of the man behind them.

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Review:

Why should you pick up Sid Owen's Life on a Plate? After all, the character that the actor played in the TV soap EastEnders was virtually clueless, always a couple of steps behind everyone else in apprehension. And although it was an acting performance, it's hard for us (having not seen him in other things) to dissociate the actor from his witless character. But, as this book proves, that would be a real mistake -- as Life on a Plate is something of a revelation. The subtitle, The Journey of an Unlikely Chef, says it all -- we may blink at the concept of Owen as a chef, but it transpires that from an early age, the actor had assiduously devoted his time to extending his knowledge of food and cookery from a variety of cultures, always enlarging his own culinary repertoire. Like the character he played, Owen lived on solid but uninspiring Cockney fare: boiled gammon and sausage, mash, fish and chips. But after acquiring a taste for five-star restaurants and ambitious foreign travel, Owen attempted to assimilate cookery knowledge from the South of France to Thailand, and from America to the West Indies.

The collection of recipes in this book shows that his efforts paid off handsomely, and the highly attractive food on offer here really does show a remarkable range (there is a recipe for high spicy salmon with pak choi and chilli noodles that will have your tastebuds going into overdrive). Of course, the actor’s cheeky persona is part of the mix here (baked Dorada Spanish style is subtitled ‘posh fish and chips’), but after reading Life on a Plate, many people will be hoping that Owen leaves intellectually challenged Cockney characters behind to go on telling us how to produce food as glorious as this. --Barry Forshaw

Book Description:

Growing up with a passion for good food and inspired cooking.

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