Nigella Bites: From Family Meals to Elegant Dinners -- Easy, Delectable Recipes For Any Occasion

Most people who will want to order this book will have seen Nigella's cooking show on TV. If you like her cooking, you will really like this book. Some great recipes.

I haven't read the entire book but I have made the ham boiled in coke. It was outstanding! I've made it several times for my family and it's almost worth the price of the book. It couldn't be easier and always turns out delicious.

As a professional working chef. I've been impressed by Nigella Lawson approach to food, for several reason, like her I am Italian ( she is part italian but both our mothers are) Also for those people who think professional chef's cook at home like we do at work, HAHAHAHA fat chance, how often we come home and are satisfied by the cool simplicty of a bowl of cereal or a ham and cheese sandwhich. But since I have discovered Nigella my hame and cheese sandwhich has be morphed into her Mozzarella in Carroza ( Carroza means carriage dont ask I dont get it either)I just added some ... ham I got from the deli section of my local market. and it is good!, her recipies are all about the comfort and joy of what cooking should be, its not about food art which so many literary chef's seems to feel their dishes need to be, Not Nigella, her dinner parties are great no fancy dishes just a table set with warm candles alot of happy people great food and love ( thats an italian for you) Ive made almost all of the recipies in her book. The Chocolate Cake is incredible and easy to make.The Sticky toffee pudding is easy and incredible and I took her Ginger Jam bread pudding to work and it became a dessert for the days special and we sold out of it like you cannot imagine, its just really easy yummy simple food. The Salmon over the fresh greens is great the entire section called "Temple Food" is full of wonderful simple and mainly asian in flavor and low calorie dishes that comfort and soothe. The book has some clever names, I gotta admit trashy still cracks me up Ive made the fried peanut butter and banana sandwhich several time afte work with a tall ice cold glass of non fat moo( milk to y'a'll) its total yum! The Warm thai duck salad is easy and simple to make and excellent with thinly sliced london broil if you cant find duck. The Pasta and Meatballs is great, if you dont want to make your own pasta De Cecco Fettucini or Tagliatelli is a perfect subsitute. The Ham and Coca Cola and Sweet Corn pudding are tasty and perfect for the upcoming easter weekend. her recepies are simple and easy to follow, when I bought this book I bought it before it came out here, I got the UK version all in metric, I had to rely on my cooking school conversions but since its now available here, no conversions needed. Im amazed how much I go back to this book when I want to have some people over and throw something together that easy relaxed comforting and fun. Oh yeah the spiced nuts , make em for a party they will be gone in a flash they are so good. I just ordered her new book forever summer I look forward to that. I also hope style channel starts showing that series. Ive checked it out on her website over in England and it has the recepies available there according to color? I dont know what the deal is with the colors yet but Im sure I will find out when the book gets here

Most books about food are written by cooks who can write. Negella Lawson is writer who can cook. Her book, Nigella Bites, has the appearance and structure of a cookbook, but it is really about how she uses food to cope with suffering. And suffered she has. Despite a storybook life (her mother, was a beautiful heiress, her father, one of Conservative Party's most powerful ministers), Mrs. Lawson has lost first her mother, then her sister to cancer. Recently the disease took her husband after a four year struggle. Cookbooks generally don't tell you about who wrote them any more than do chemistry lab texts. Who was to know from reading the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book that a paralytic stroke prevented Fannie Farmer from attending college? Where in The Way to Cook does it indicate that Julia Childs worked for the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA)? Nigella Bites on the other hand is flavored through out by the writer's personality. We find out Mrs. Lawson has trouble sleeping some nights, she misses her sister, she suffers from the occasional hang over and doesn't like to waste food. Most of all we learn how what she feels about what she cooks. She is usually explicit about the emotional weight various recipes carry. Food is life. Eating is what separates the living from the dead. One can almost picture Mrs. Lawson in the middle of a sleepless night using the thin layers of a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich or a slice of chocolate fudge cake to buffer the darkness surrounding her. When she writes "you need to know there's something to stave off that moment of desolation that threatens to settle when the eating's done for the day" makes me wonder if the book could not have been titled The Sorrow of Cooking. Because she is better looking, a better writer, and a better cook than Martha Stewart she is currently be marketed here in the United States as sort of a British-Yiddish successor to the controversial homemaker/business executive/cultural icon. I think this is misplaced, since the two women represent two different aspects of the human experience and appeal to readers for different reasons. Even though the book is bit thin in terms of number of recipes (about 70 compared with 1,849 Farmer's first book) they are easy to make and highly original (deep-fried candy bars with pineapple anyone?) and the writing more than makes up for it. Can it be any surprise Mrs. Lawson won Author of the Year in the 2000 British Book Awards? This is that most rare of the genre, a cookbook worth reading even if you have no interest in cooking.