Welcome to Life is Nuts!
The title of this blog relates to my new book, Nuts in the Kitchen, which will be published by William Morrow in April. I realized the title’s relevance to everything once I’d written it down.
Life is Nuts will take you on a rollicking ride through the world of nuts – yes, almonds, peanuts, Brazil nuts, cashews, pine nuts, macadamia nuts and many others – giving you ideas, information, and recipes for their use. It will also be a portal into my food world, which is my entire world.
In Life is Nuts I’ll talk about food in all its guises, share recipes, introduce you to farmers and fishermen, merchants and chefs, neighbors and friends, food people all. You’ll come to know my town in Normandy, the wealth of tips and tricks of French cuisine, the beauty of ingredients available at my market. I’ll let you peek into my life, that of a single mother and journalist, author, cooking school proprietor. You’ll get the feel of living across from a gorgeous church in the center of a busy town filled with great little boutiques, and you’ll inhale the aromas from boutiques, patisseries, boulangeries, cacao and coffee roasters, charcuteries and all the little tiny kitchens in town.
I’ll talk a lot about Nuts in the Kitchen too. It’s my ninth book, and I wrote it because I realized that so many Americans are missing out on how delicious, nutritious, and noble is the simple nut. We tend to view nuts as a guilty pleasure, a forbidden snack that we over indulge in then feel bad about. Other cultures don’t suffer this and routinely take the nut out of the snack bowl and put it into everything from soups to sauces, breads to stuffings, appetizers to desserts. Nuts in the Kitchen is all about how to use nuts in astounding, simple ways.
To research the book I traveled to many different countries because I like to meet people, see how they work, hear their stories, and taste their food.
In Sweden, I found amazing breads of all kinds studded with every kind of nut and seed; in Spain, almonds are spiced and roasted and served in tiny little bowls with a glass of sherry, and they’re also ground and used to thicken soup; in Italy, nuts are in so many pasta sauces and nearly every cookie; in Turkey, nuts are tucked into roast lamb, layered with sheep butter and pastry, sprinkled on hummus; in France, nuts are sauteed with poultry and used instead of flour in cakes and pastries; in Thailand nuts are crushed into salad dressings…it goes on and on.
You’ll learn about it all as I welcome you to Life is Nuts.
Bon Appétit!
