loving cooking as I do there are over 300 cookbooks in my collection, and my favourites constantly change but there is always a few that stay at the top of the list. Larousse Gastronomique is always there as it’s basically a culinary bible for me on the basics of a huge amount of dishes. Charmaine Solomon’s books are permanently on the list both for my love of Asian food but also a personal connection. The Complete Asian Cookbook was the first book my mother got to try cooking different cuisines than the old-style English “Boil it 'till it’s grey” cuisine that she learnt from my grandmother. As such it was the book she used to teach me to cook, and also to educate me in the importance of following a recipe exactly the first time but make notes so you can adjust the recipe to your/other people’s tastes later. When I left home she bought me my own copy along with Charmaine Solomon’s Curry Cookbook (another favourite of hers).
Mum passed on almost a decade ago now and I inherited her cookbooks so now have two copies of each of the Charmaine Solomon cookbooks. It’s a walk down memory lane but also interesting to compare tastes when I open both copies on a recipe and see what her notes were compared to mine. Cookbooks are like time machines to me - I’ve been collecting for decades and you can see the change in Australian tastes over the years, especially in the compilation style books. If you are a note taker in your books you can also notice a change in your tastes as time goes on.
My first cookbook was No-Kitchen Cookbook, bought in London in 1979.
We travelled around Europe by car and caravan, so just 2 gas burners for cooking, for 18 months.
We made pizzas by frypan, vegetarian casseroles with TVP mince, and even managed to collect the ingredients for a steamed Christmas pudding, cooked while free camping by the road in Jugoslavia.
Thank you rttech for sharing this beautiful cookbook, it’s a real treasure with a beautiful provenance. I’m looking forward to exploring it and trying some of your mum’s recipes - let’s hope I can do her justice!
My go-to cookbook at the moment is a collection of recipes I’ve written in an exercise book, with lots of notes and reminders, tips, and so on. Just simple dishes I love making and my guests enjoy. I’m never going to make Bombe Alaska or Flambé anything, so a recipe for those would be useless to me.
In good cooking the know how and the skill comes with lots of practice.
As Mrs Simmonds used to say: “ It looks like it needs a bit of extra flour…or another egg…” That’s troubleshooting which comes from experience.
In fact my wife is making the “Avocado, Mango & Walnut Salad” for a get-together tonight as her friends always request she bring it along s her “plate”…
I visited Rusty’s Market yesterday for the first time this year to get some decent lettuces for the recipe instead of the pathetic overpriced specimens that the supermarkets stock.
When I had finished and was walking through the plethora of food stalls which offer a myriad of Asian and other cooked foods, I was amazed to see a young Asian woman sitting on a vacant table eating her lunch.
She was actually eating KFC which she must have brought from a nearby shopping centre whilst surrounded by vastly better offerings.
Whilst everyone is searching their recipe books, I would ask that if someone comes across a certain type of Gyros recipe that I read in a cookbook we had some decades ago, could they kindly post it as I have searched all our cookbooks and the internet without finding it.
It involved a boned-out lamb leg roast and a boneless veal roast which were both beaten to flatten them, with one then placed on top of the other, rolled and tied, and then roasted, somewhat akin to those Turducken roasts that appear at Xmas time.
I recall the photos but not the other ingredients or quantities.
It sounds like a very interesting way of making a roast, @Fred123
Unfortunately, I have never come across the recipe you’re looking for.
FWIW. I do think that the other ingredients could be just the seasoning.
You could spread pesto on it before rolling it up, or minced garlic and rosemary, or oregano, and plenty of salt and pepper.
Or do a breadcrumb paste with olive oil and any herb you prefer, (mint goes well with lamb) spread it on the meat and roll it up.
I am not 100% sure what you are describing but I think you are talking about the traditional way of making gyros (yeros, doner kebab) in which minced lamb is formed into a large kebab which is then grilled on a vertical rotisserie. The veal is layered across the kebab to give it physical support so the mince doesn’t sag off the spindle. So the reference to a boneless roast or turducken are a bit misleading if that is what you had in mind.
There are 1000 recipes on the web for this and they vary in how spiced up or augmented they are. If you don’t have some kind of rotisserie I don’t think it is worth pursuing as the result will be quite different if you just roast the lump. The reason they use the vertical rotisserie is because a big lump of mince would tend to fall off a horizontal spit, however if you make it smaller and lighter gravity will not tug so hard in comparison to the adhesion of the meat and you will get away with it.
It definitely did not involved any mince, and was a boned-out lamb leg and a piece of veal, and as I mentioned, I clearly recall the photos.
When I mentioned Gyros to a person who worked for me in the 1990’s, he said he used to buy them when he lived in Adelaide but I suspect that he was actually referring to was something like a doner kebab.
Unfortunately, with the cost of a boned-out leg of lamb being arounf $20/kg and veal not being readily available in FNQ, it would be very disappointing to make and cook one only to find out it was not satisfactory.
I cannot believe that not only can I not find the cookbook I read it in in the 1980’s, I also cannot find it on the internet, despite having searched for both for years.
My partner’s ‘scrapbook’ of recipes, tips, info and nonsense is unbeatable. But a Highly Commended must go to the ‘Good Chef Bad Chef’ website which continues to surprise us with useful (and tasty) advice. There are also a couple of straight reference books that are regularly consulted regarding what it is, where it comes from, why it tastes like it does…
