Kitchen Aid, cook books etc.

So at the weekend I weakened and bought a new blender, a Kitchen Aid one (KitchenAid KSB5BBU Ultra Power Blender) on sale at £79.99, down from £109.99. Last night we set it up and Kate made a vichyssoise soup using some of the organic veg from our box delivery. Sooo good. Kate blends quite a bit, but I was always put off by our old hand blender. Now I can see a whole new world of recipes opening up to me.

Last night I finished reading Spoon, by Alain Ducasse. As of today there are two copies up on Amazon.com at $228 and $1891. I have no idea why so much since it's on Amazon.co.uk for a rather more reasonable £16.50 (vs £25 list). Sadly, I'd not actually give it house room, even for £10.

Only a couple of recipes floated my boat (the cod with cod brandade being the stand out). Ducasse offers up several recipes based on the same gimmick of serving two or three takes on the same ingredient in one dish. If you want recipes with three types of tomatoes, or two of cod or eggs then it might interest you. Sadly too much space (IMHO) was given to "non-recipes". I really don't need to know what quanities of pulses might make up a raw salad and I don't think that constitutes a good use of a page. Also the book, which admittedly is rather old now, is full of the worst pictures of Spoon patrons (the French outlet I think) and pictures that have little resemblance to how the recipes turn out or would be served.

Now I'd love to read Ducasse's Grand Livre De Cuisine. As Amazon says: "providing 700 recipes from French and Mediterranean cuisine that incorporate 100 basic ingredients and use 10 major cooking styles. Each dish is described in full, with recipes for accompaniments included; complete instructions for plating the entire dish are given as well. An extensive appendix offers an encyclopedia of ingredients as well as basic recipes (sauces, stocks, compound butters, and so on). Written in collaboration with five acclaimed French chefs and illustrated with more than 1,000 photographs and original drawings". But based on Spoon I'd be very nervous about parting with £100 for it. Not half as p**sed as I'd be paying $228 for Spoon though...

Far better value was Mayonnaise, Hollandaise, Bernaise - a £10 book of sauce recipes, one to each page for 200 pages. I can't wait to get stuck in, esp. with the Kitchen Aid to help me out.