COOKING NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Taken from Vegetable Heaven, by Catherine Mason
(Pauntley Press, 2002, ISBN: 0-9534897-3-6, price £20.00)
Copyright © 2002 Catherine Mason

Ingredients

It goes without saying that in Vegetable Heaven all food is produced without chemical assistance. Good husbandry and best growing practice prevail. Fruit and vegetables are grown organically, and eggs come from happy, free-range hens! Olive oil is extra virgin and cold-pressed. Pepper is usually black and always freshly ground in a mill. Salt is additive-free sea salt – flakes for crumbling over food at the table, coarse lumps for adding to cooking liquids. Lemon juice is freshly squeezed.

Moroccan preserved lemons (page 198) are one of my current favourite ingredients and crop up in several recipes. If you enjoy drinking Margaritas you'll probably like their flavour – it has a similar quality. They are very simple indeed to make and add a definite something extra to any dish in which they are used. That said, they have to stand around in the kitchen for at least seven days before they're usable, so if you don't have any to hand, simply use grated lemon zest instead.

Most vegetable stock powders and cubes taste pretty nasty. I've tried many, and the only one I can honestly recommend is Marigold Swiss Vegetable Bouillon Powder. I've used it for years because it actually taste of vegetables, unlike many of its rivals. It is quite easy to find, at least in British shops.

Growing food

I have a kitchen garden in which I grow some of my own fruit, vegetables and herbs. It's a great source of inspiration to me, and I find the whole process of growing food immensely rewarding and enjoyable. It's also hard work and time-consuming, so I don't grow as much as I'd ideally like to.

All the food in this book can be made perfectly well with shop-bought ingredients but, for any readers interested in growing food, there are a few pointers in the recipes to particular crops I have found especially useful and good to grow.

Weights, measures, precision and experimentation

Experienced cooks will take the recipes as a starting point, adapting them to suit particular conditions and requirements, which is perfectly fine by me. Less experienced cooks will, I hope, appreciate the reassurance of tightly defined recipes. Although I've given precise measures so you can duplicate a specific end result, most recipes are quite forgiving if you decide to improvise.

A tablespoon is 15 ml, a teaspoon is 5 ml and spoonfuls are level unless otherwise stated. Where it matters I've given the exact dimensions of pots, pans and other cooking vessels. The size of such things can have a dramatic influence on cooking times and the way a recipe turns out. Liquids evaporate much faster from a wide, shallow pan than from a tall, narrow one, for example.

The recipes have all been test-cooked by someone other than myself, namely my husband, Andrew, to ensure that they work if followed accurately, but do treat them as a starting point if that's where you're at. Experiment if you feel like it, and trust your own taste and judgment. I hope that ultimately you're cooking to please yourself. There is no single right way to cook and only you should be the final arbiter.

Paintings and prints

The logistics and economics of top notch food photography are daunting for a tiny publisher like Pauntley Press and, wanting to make an illustrated book, I wasn't prepared to settle for anything less than the best. I also had some niggling reservations about food photographs. Much as I enjoy them, a straw poll of friends and acquaintances revealed that for every person who finds them useful at least one other finds them intimidating... Hence the idea of a collaboration with an artist was born. I wanted to make a book in which the vividness and sensuality of the illustrations at least matched that of the food – a book that would inspire in the kitchen and also be a feast for the eyes – a beautiful object in itself. In Elda Abramson I found an artistic collaborator who exceeded even my most optimistic expectations. When the first batch of paintings arrived I was knocked out, and they just kept getting better.

We, and nearly everyone we showed them to, loved Elda's paintings so much that we decided to make them available as prints. We adored them all, so every painting reproduced in this book is available as a print. There's an order form at the back of the book, or you can obtain them via our web site:

www.pauntley-press.co.uk

Acknowledgments

Heartfelt thanks to the following people who have helped in innumerable ways: Elda Abramson, Lynne Clark, Adam Flowers, Danny Flowers, Andrew Ford, Andrew Moss, Liz Oppedijk, Bernadette Stokoe.

Catherine Mason
Pauntley, 2002