3 Recipes For A Decadent Summer Supper From Nigella Lawson

Nigella Lawson combines her love of food and storytelling in her cookbook, Cook, Eat, Repeat.

“Cook, Eat, Repeat. These words, the day-in, day-out, never-endingness of it all, no doubt sum up the Sisyphean drudgery of cooking for those who resent time spent at the stove. For those who, like me, find structure, meaning and an intense aliveness in the rhythms of the kitchen, they represent an essential liberating truth.

What seems essential to me, as a home cook, is that however many times we cook a recipe, and perhaps especially when we cook it so many times it ceases to feel like a recipe at all, we never exactly replicate it. In winter, pans will be colder than in summer, so cooking times will be different. That is, perhaps, a plodding example. But ingredients vary all the time, as do our moods, and if we’d expect the former to make a difference, I have found over the years that it is no less true of the latter.

When I test recipes — and this is even the case with baking, where the precision required would seem to guarantee some degree of uniformity — I am freshly astonished how each time there will be some small variation in either cooking process or outcome. I find freedom in this, and feel grateful that we who cook in our homes, as distinct from those who cook professionally in restaurants, do not have to be shackled by the creativity-draining need for consistency. Quite apart from the variables I have no control over — a lesson in itself — cooking at home in the normal run of things simply allows for less freighted experimentation.”

Scroll down for three must-try summer recipes from Nigella!