Cookbook Corner (New Column!): The Recipe Wheel by Rosie Ramsden + Raw Courgette, Lemon & Chilli Bruschetta (2024)

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Wednesday, 30 July 2014

On my shelf in the drawing room (we’ve run out of room in the kitchen) I have 34 cookbooks. Two years ago I had 3. There are 10 more cookbooks in my Amazon wish list, and my wish list is not a list of books I would like to buy, they are books I am going to buy next time I go on a cookbook binge, someone gives me gift vouchers or people ask me what I want for Christmas or birthdays. This is nothing compared to my mother, on our kitchen shelf she has an impressive 139. No one has the time or the energy to go and count all of the food magazines she’s also saved for recipes which I sort of count as seasonal cookbooks, too.

The point I’m making here is that there is a very massive food related passion of mine that, except for in the form of adapted recipes, that I don’t really share here on the blog. I think this is a shame, and it is something with my new ‘Cookbook Corner’ feature I’m looking to rectify. Most evenings curled up in front of the television if I’m not scrolling through Pinterest on my iPad, I have my nose in a cookbook. I think a good cookbook is more than just a collection of photos and recipes, they tell the story behind the food and the person cooking it, too.

I’ve experimented a bit with cookbook reviews here on the blog before (theJoy The Baker Cookbook, where I cooked and photographed two recipes from it and shared one of them, andBrilliant Breadby James MortonandMr Todiwala’s Bombaywhere I photographed a bit of the inside of the book and shared a recipe), and I’d love to hear your thoughts on which format you like best. But to kick off this new column here on the blog I want to talk about a lovely new book the guys over at Ebury send me a few weeks ago: food stylist and artist Rosie Ramsden’s first cookbook The Recipe Wheel.

The concept of the book is pretty simple. 120 recipe ideas (I want to emphasis the ideas part here) that revolve around 10 ‘recipe wheels’. I’ve included the bread and roast chicken wheels here to give you the general idea, but they basically take one core cooking ingredient or method (poached fish, custard, risotto) and throw out ideas for entertaining, using up leftovers, or for comforting meals at home featuring that core ingredient.

I have so many different cookbooks for different things; regional cooking, baking books, technique books, books full of the sort of food I like to cook and I use every day and books I love for ideas and research, but cooking out of would be totally scary (here is looking at you Ludo Bites!) The Recipe Wheel is the sort of book I’d keep on the kitchen counter and maybe do one or two recipes verbatim from, but mostly draw from all the time for inspiration, or recipes for dressings or sides to go with something else. It tells you how to make tartare sauce, grind up a fragrant garam masala and how to choose the best cuts of beef for braising. I’m particularly excited about the delicious looking jam jar dressings, just thrown in as an added bonus on pg 136. However, I do want to make some of Rosie’s recipes recipes straight up both for myself and my family; her Baked Lemon Risotto, Crispy Beef Salad and Blackberry & Yogurt Sponge spring to mind.

When the team at Ebury offered to send me the book, it was with the added challenge to either come up with my own recipe wheel, or to put together a dish inspired by one of Rosie’s. Now, as tempting as creating my own avocado wheel would have been (!), one of the recipes on her bread wheel caught my eye. Her Courgette, Chilli and Garlic Bruschetta sounded fantastic, and as it is Summer I have an endless supply of courgette to make it through. While her original recipe used slightly cooked courgette ribbons, you know how much I love grating my vegetables (here, here and here), and how much of a fan of raw courgette I am (here and here), so I played around with her recipe a bit to make a fresh starter for a Summer supper.

There are not really exact measurements for this, the main idea is to use up leftover bread and part of your Summer vegetable glut in one swoop. I’ve put measurements below to give a general idea of a flavour balance, but just go with the flow of what you have to hand, tasting as you go along.

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