Eat Drink Live by Fran Warde

Eat Drink Live bursts with sunshine and happiness. Fran Warde clearly loves writing about food and harnessed with Debi Treloar's lifestyle photography, Ryland Peters and Small could hardly go wrong. We are always bemoaning the dark winter evenings at the GWG but this book is an instant pick me up.

The book has been divided into three sections, morning, noon and night so you can make a beeline for a recipe immediately without having to thumb through page after page. Fran's breakfast recipes are fun, full of fresh flavours and colour. The idea of melon and strawberry juice is an appealing incentive to get out of bed when the sun is shining.

As for noon, one might draw the line at cooking spaghetti over a fire by the sea but the photographs look very good. Fran takes us through the various scenarios of garden lunches, Sunday roast and winter lunches. Warm Mediterranean Puy lentil salad with its tomatoes like glistening rubies is delicious and a mixture of hot potato and watercress with mustard seed is positively edifying.

Recipes for night time have been given the Fran makeover too. It seems that no book these days can get by without mentioning the ubiquitous comfort food factor. Are we all such shivering and nervous wrecks that we need to overdose on carbohydrate at the end of a tense day? But yes, there is a time and a place. Fran's suggestions are steak and mushroom pie and Banoffi pie, sticky toffee and banana pudding, not everybody's cup of tea. With dinner party dreams and seductive dinner dates, you are spoiled for choice.

Fran believes that ‘cooking should be one of life's pleasures' and Eat Drink Live seems to embody just that. This book will make an excellent present, even if its shelf life might be a little limited.

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Publication Details:
192 pages. Photography by Debi Treloar. £20
ISBN 1841720739
2000

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