Cookbook Love & Food Porn

I love books, I love cooking, I love cookbooks. My obsession with cookbooks, and food in general, has gained momentum since I jumped onto the Pinterest bandwagon, and I am now prone to flooding my profile with food porn pictures (rather than the fiction I am equally addicted to). I assume that as you read this, whatever the date, my Pinterest sidebar is at least half food pictures.

Gratuitous Food Porn - blackberry shortcake

I have added some gratuitous food porn pictures here for you to peruse, maybe from now on a mouth watering food shot should be included at every page break? 

My Pinterest food porn binges relate to how I am feeling, and fall into one of two categories accordingly; bright, fresh, healthy food OR.....cake. I actually find that when my cake craving level is pushing maximum density, a good cake porn tagging binge can help release a bit of pressure until the craving passes. Likewise, checking out the vibrant, unrealistically gorgeous-looking healthy food porn can make me feel miraculously cleansed, and gives a (false) sense of wellness. The things we do for a flat stomach (anything but burpees). 

I like to pin a chef/cookbook that I am particularly partial to, and then crazily pin lots of their yummy recipe pictures (and some others I find along the way), at least this way everything relates back to books again - very much my bag. I have an extensive collection of cookbooks in real life, so it is all an offshoot of my obsessions. 

Gratuitous Food Porn - chocolate crepe cake

My favourite cookbooks: Plenty/Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi, The Green Kitchen by David Frenkiel, Veg Every Day by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hemsley and Hemsley, anything at all by Jamie Oliver, Tender by Nigel Slater, A Homegrown Table by Emma Dean, Little Paris Kitchen by Rachel Khoo and Miss Dahls' Voluptuous Delights by Sophie Dahl.

My favourite cookbooks, in terms of comfort, aesthetics and accessibility, is certainly anything by Nigel Slater. He makes me want to buy new produce, try new things, start an allotment, waste nothing in my fridge, eat cleanly and treat myself - all at the same time. Guiltless comfort - the ideal indeed. 

The type of food porn I feel like pinning, cookbook I feel like flicking through, meal I feel like cooking, fiction I feel like reading - it all relates to mood and mind set, and the right combination of any of the above, whether for comfort or for wellness, can be the medicine you require. 

The Green Kitchen - fresh and inspiring

As, for me at least, what I read and what I eat relates so closely to my wellbeing, I adore it when authors include description of food in their novels - J. K. Rowling and Charles Dickens both do this in a lovely way. The food scenes in books and films are often the most memorable! So, in the same vein, I also like to tag references to food in literature wherever I find them. This is a nice series of images depicting famous meals in literature, I particularly like:

"I tackled the avocado and crabmeat salad. Avocado's are my favourite fruit. Every Sunday my grandfather used to bring me an avocado pear hidden at the bottom of his briefcase under six soiled shirts and the Sunday comics". ' The Bell Jar' by Sylvia Plath.

It also seems that one Pinterest food porn board wasn't enough for me but (see Tea and Cake and Books), in my defence, tea and/or cake and books are a match made in heaven aren't they, never described better than my Roald Dahl in 'Matilda':

"Her own small bedroom now became her reading-room and there she would sit and read most afternoons, often with a mug of hot chocolate beside her. Mostly it was hot chocolate she made, warming the milk in a saucepan on the stove before mixing it". Lovely stuff. 

Tea And Books - Heaven

Basically, its nice to feel nice - inside and out, and the words seeping into my brain, and the food digesting in my belly, are two huge ways to look after myself. 

What To Cook:

 

'Veg Every Day' by Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall - to inspire a better, kinder, healthier outlook, and make the humblest vegetables appear beautiful.

'Tender' by Nigel Slater - to make you never want to go for the 'easy' option of processed food, and to make you realise that the 'hard' option actually isn't at hard at all. 

'Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights' by Sophie Dahl - to make you revel in the joys of homemade comfort food, to make you feel like a child in a grown-ups body and to remind you that there is nothing bad about cheesy potatoes.