Suddenly Cooking is much more than just a recipe book. It is the quintessential anyone-can-cook book. Here, you will discover all the information you need to kick start your kitchen and make all your favourite meals regardless of your level of experience.
Leaving the family home, getting married, becoming a new parent, looking after a sick spouse, finding yourself suddenly single; these are just a few life scenarios that will often require a crash course in cooking. And that´s a daunting task for anyone to face. But it needn´t be an overwhelming one.
From now on with the help of this book, you get to determine what you eat instead of life´s circumstances dictating the menu.
Of the 120 easy-to-prepare recipes on offer, over two thirds can be made and on the table in under 30 minutes. Each recipe indicates whether it is suitable for a vegetarian diet or gluten free and there are dozens of leftover-makeover ideas to help you make the most of every meal.
This book also shows you how to turn your kitchen into a cooking friendly space, and stock up on essential equipment and utensils. There is a comprehensive and fully illustrative guide on how to take the sting out of cooking by learning basic knife skills.
And if you can´t tell an eggplant from an aubergine, then the pictorial ingredients dictionary and food name translation chart that spans Australian English, British English and American English, will help you identify all the ingredients used in these recipes and many more.
On top of all this, there is advice on how to regulate heat in the kitchen, how to store foods safely and a seasonal food chart to help you know when to buy fruits and vegetables in season, no matter which part of the world you live in.
Putting food on the table day after day no longer need be a chore. With Suddenly Cooking you can learn to cook great food without stress - real food made real easy is this book´s motto, and its promise.
I grew up in a single parent household, the sixth of seven children. I remember meal times at home often resembled feeding time at the zoo. Older siblings fought with younger siblings over whatever was put in front of them; leaving the table to get a drink of water was a risky business when greedy little hands looted food from any plate that wasn´t guarded with vigour.
You would be forgiven for thinking my mother prepared great food and that the reason for my brothers and sisters rapacious behaviour was that we couldn´t get enough of it.
But the truth is there was barely enough to go around. My mother did the best with what she had and would present us with ´meat and three veg´ when the budget would allow and at other times weird and sometimes worrying concoctions from left-overs when it would not.
As I grew older I discovered a great way to guarantee I got my share of the slim pickings and then some was to start preparing family meals myself. What I didn´t expect to discover whilst gnawing on raw ingredients and tasting dishes in heaped spoonfuls over the stove, was that I actually loved to cook. I learned that food stuffs changed in different ways depending on how I cooked them and that food was not only for filling up on but could be fun. I stopped seeing meal times as a fight for survival and more like an opportunity to be creative.
And it is these early discoveries that became the launch pad to my long term love affair with food.
During my food career I have run a small catering company, worked in a variety of commercial kitchens and successfully opened and ran my own restaurant, Emu Bar after moving to Barcelona, Spain with my family in 2003.
My first cookbook, Eat GST Free! , was published in Australia in 2001 and in 2006 I began writing a regular bi-weekly food column for Catalonia Today, the English language subsidiary newspaper of El Punt, a well known daily newspaper published in Barcelona province.
These days I dedicate all my time to compiling this Suddenly Cooking cookbook series and I have to say I´m loving every minute of it!
