Discovering the mysterious Basque cuisine

'Cooking is a perfect vocation for people who like to find and make connections' says the author of this exquisite Basque Book, and based on my experience, I particularly agree with. Food brought a lot of new friends and happy connections into my life, and helped me to start a journey of tastes and colours that I hardly imagined less than ten years ago. 

The Basque Book is first and foremost about a cuisine whose history and menu we easily ignore. After starting to read the book I tried to think about one single Basque restaurant I know in Europe, particularly in Germany or France or Switzerland. Nothing by far, and I am usually quite in my own element when it comes to remember unique food memories. 

The recipes, organised in chapter dedicated to main ingredients or cooking methods - Fish, Eggs, Stews, Vegetables - are the usual meal served at the Txikito restaurant in NYC. There are 114 recipes, based on 14 years of daily cooking experience, of a Basque chef and his Jewish-Argentinian wife. The ingredients are basically simple, but combined in infinitely delicious way. The success is a matter of practise: 'If you know how to pitch out good raw ingredients, you can cook Basque food'. The good news: it is not a highly technical cuisine, so all you need is to be in the right environment to learn the right moves and taste matches. Another good news: 'Basque food makes you a better cook. It teaches you to respect ingredients, embracing and amplifying their natural flavors'. 

More than a way of eating, Basque cuisine is also a high-end identity matter: 'Cooking is very much its own language and by maintaining their culinary traditions, the Basques kept alive a food-driven lexicon, assured many Basque words lived on even for urban Basques'. At the end of the book, an extensive lexicon is provided in order to offer to the reader the proper explanations for the terms  and ingredients used. For instance, did you know that the Basque version of tapas is pintxos bar?

The recipes presented can be easily organised in variants of menus to be served all round the week. Before the reader is introduced to the recipes as such, there are specific explanations given about ingredients such as salt - how to used, how much and why, often in combination with oils for various preserves too, how to develop your art of mayonnaise - if you have any, as I am a complete illiterate in this respect - or how to properly prepare the sweet onions 'the foundation of all the Basque mother sauces'.

Shortly, it is a book worth a read, interesting not only as a cookbook, but for the entire anthropological and historical approach. 

Disclaimer: Book offered by the editor in exchange of an honest review

The Pho Cookbook, by Andrea Nguyen

The Vietnamese food is a relatively latest addition to my Asian food preferences - with Japanese food as number 1. It took me a long summer to get used with the special taste of herbs and spices added at the spring rolls and the vegetables soups, but the cold coffee was a love at first sight. I keep trying new and new foods but I feel that probably, until I will go to Vietnam and enter the spirit of the place and see the original ingredients, I will still not be a faithful lover. 

The Pho Book, by the Vietnamese food expert Andrea Nguyen brought me closed to this special Asian cuisine. 'Rice is the dutiful wife you can rely on, we say. Pho is the flirty mistress that you slip away to visit'. With such a description is hard not to want to know more, including about how to make your own Pho at home - not as difficult as one may think.

What I appreciated about the book in the first place, is the careful research, including in Vietnam, and the anthropological investigation about this meal. Based on a deep knowledge and years of practice - her mother has a Pho restaurant too - the reader is offered more than a cookbook, but a rich food story book. Useful - particularly for a reader outside the Pho-realm - it is also that there are many details about preparations and possible meal matches. 

Surprinsingly for me, Pho can be eaten any time of the day, in various combinations, including meatless, a variant which 'seemed surreal, if not as absurd as a drone aircraft'. However, instead of meat one can use tofu or seitan variants. Anyway, the 'ultra' traditional Pho has: broth, noodles and cooked beef. 'A bowl of steamy pho and a glass of ice coffee is an unbeatable Viet food pairing'. The author also recommends coffee with coconut milk, which I tried once but was not happy with. 

I recommend this book to anyone interested in Vietnamese food, and for any foodie writing lovers in general.

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher via NetGalley.com

How to start loving your body

In our teen years or later in life, with or without a reason, every woman goes at least once in her lifetime through a bad relationship with her body. Blame the society, the media, the stereotypes...the reasons do not matter always too much, but the effect on our self-awareness and even health can be devastating. Strict diets, psychological pain, tensed social relationships.

Although we cannot predict when this crisis will take place, at least we can learn how to cope with them in a delicate and constructive way. 

Based on her experience, not always happy, Laura Fenamore elaborated a couple of advices aimed to stop our negative way of treating ourselves. 'I went from being totally irresponsible with my health, and with my heart, to being completely devoted to self-care and self-love'. This wisdom does not come overnight and the author herself needed a lot of time and failures to find her way. But, the most important is to be positive and turn every experience we go through into an asset for our inner development. 'Though we don't always succeed at what we set to accomplish, that does not make our efforts failures'. Finding the right support either as a group or as an individual is very important in some stages of the development. 

For someone being victim of abuse and unhappy life occurences being a victim and keep being one the entire life is a logical result. However, it is possible to go beyond the paradigm of 'victim stories' that 'keep us stuck'. 'After recognizing that we are not in fact a victim of anything or anyone, we are able to take back our power and take control of our eating habits, lifestyle and ultimately, our happiness'. 

In this process, the laws of attraction are very important and my personal experience too proves the importance of a positive mind. Good things start simply to happen to those who are wishing for. Just because. 

Being in love with ourselves is the beginning of normality and of a meaningful life celebrating the present and using every moment of life for being grateful and happy. 'When we fall in love with ourselves (...) we begin to fell a deep sense of self-care and want to nourish our bodies with what is best for them'. 

A book recommended to anyone interested in increasing self-respect and understanding our bodies not like standards expected by the society but as a way of expressing ourselves. It is well written and can be easily read. My only regret is that there are not too many examples offered which can offer even more inspiration and guidance to the reader.  

Disclaimer: I was offered the book via NetGalley.com, but the opinions are, as usual, my own