The River Cafe Cook Book by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers. This book is the original River Cafe cookbook. In many respects, in the same way that Ruth and Rose brought an ingredient-driven simple yet high-quality restaurant food movement to the UK, this book brought a new way for cookery books to be. It championed beautiful photography with great stories of where the recipe came from or how it was inspired, with the odd tip here and there.
We cooked Maiale al Latte: Pork Cooked in Milk (super tasty even if the curds in the sauce are a little tricky on the eyes) which we served with Patate al Forno Con Aceto Balsamico e Timo: Potatoes with Balsamic Vinegar and Thyme – this was a fantastic potato recipe, Fagiolini alla Parmigiana: Beans with Parmesan- kind of like a carbonara of beans, Carrots Dada – these are a great little recipe of carrots with garlic and olive oil – lovely.
On Tuesday night, we did Pollo Spago: Chicken Spago with Patate al forno con Pancetta: Potato and Pancetta Gratin. Wow. Chicken Spago is a recipe based upon what Ruth and Rose ate at the famous Wolfgang Puck restaurant in LA. This is essentially a boned or spatchcock chicken stuffed with garlic and parsley. We cooked it on the barbecue and served it with the quite fantastic Patate al forno con Pancetta: Potato and Pancetta Gratin. Both potato recipes have been great this week and ones we’ll do again.
Saturday brought a rather good Penne al Amatriciana, one that was with a little chilli. This was a really great example of Amatriciana and again is something we will try again. Saturday night in our house is usually steak and chips, and I typically make aioli or some sort of chip dip to go with the steak that we cook on the barbecue. For a change, we tried Almond Aioli, which was pretty good but probably should be made with 50% olive oil and 50% veg oil or perhaps entirely with rapeseed oil. It made an interesting change from our usual aioli but maybe not one that we will rush back to.
The final recipe of the week was the Chocolate Nemesis. Having failed miserably last time we made this (from River Cafe Easy), I was determined to give it another go. Well, it was at least sliceable this time rather than a gooey mess that we had a few weeks ago—the suggested cooking time of 30 minutes definitely needed to be way way longer.
Its been an interesting few weeks with the River Cafe but we’re now heading for a change with Jamie Oliver and Jamie’s Italy.