Kitchen Bliss: Musings on Food and Happiness (With Recipes)

Kitchen Bliss: Musings on Food and Happiness (With Recipes)

James Beard Foundation Award– and Taste Canada Award–winning author Laura Calder is back with Kitchen Bliss , a warm, funny, and pragmatic collection of stories and recipes that reveal how cooking, feeding, and home-keeping can magically restore balance and calm in our out-of-sync lives. During the years of the global pandemic, Laura Calder, like many home cooks, found herself being drawn into the kitchen and becoming reacquainted with the power that the room can have to restore us when the going gets tough. In Kitchen Bliss , she reflects on how and why the kitchen and the dining table have held such an important place in her life and indeed taught her about happiness. In her inimitably wise, warm, and quirky voice, she shares stories about everything from her shattered childhood fantasies about Sultana cake, to a gastronomically disastrous camel safari, the perilous vicissitudes of daily dishwashing by hand, and how she identifies (positively, if you can believe it) with ground meat. Stories and musings on Emily Post’s concept of a “Little Dinner” (for eight, a mere bagatelle!), unsatisfying adventures at cooking school, hopeless kitchens and how to cook in them anyway, and the English aversion to warm toast are all accompanied by recipes to soothe, inspire, and delight. Nothing too fancy here, just perfect recipes for dishes like Disgustingly Rich Potatoes, Salted Caramel Ice Cream, Hainanese Chicken Rice, and The Full Quebecois Breakfast. Come for the stories, stay for the food! Laura has spent her life considering the life-enhancing pleasures of food: cooking, eating, and feeding. The pandemic gave her a new sense of urgency to share what she has learned. She says, “Life isn’t always a candy shop of delights, pandemic or no pandemic. Often we find ourselves in uncomfortable places and we must learn to create sweetness for ourselves out of whatever it is we’ve got—and that sometimes can seem like nothing but a whole lot of lemons. Well, at least that’s a start! We all know where to find the lemons: in the kitchen.” This is a delightfully entertaining book full of memories, insights, good advice, and humor that will inspire readers to get in the kitchen, tie on an apron, and discover their own form of kitchen bliss. “Laura Calder invites readers into her wonderful world of sizzling and sautéing, sharing delightful new recipes in her highly personal culinary memoir that reminds us of how blissful it is to spend a few hours in the kitchen, how cooking can get us through the best of times, and how healing it is during others.” — DAVID LEBOVITZ , bestselling author of My Paris Kitchen and Drinking French Laura Calder is an advocate of l’art de vivre , the French art of getting the most out of everyday life by putting care into everything we do, particularly when it comes to matters of the table. Perhaps best known for her James Beard Foundation Award–winning television series, French Food at Home , Laura is also the bestselling author of four cookbooks, including French Food at Home and French Taste: Elegant Everyday Eating . Her most recent work is a lifestyle guide, The Inviting Life: An Inspirational Guide to Hosting, Homemaking, and Opening the Door to Happiness . Laura holds undergraduate degrees in liberal arts and linguistics, and an MSc. in social and organizational psychology from the London School of Economics. She studied and worked in gastronomy in Canada, the US, and France, and in 2011 was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Agricole by the French government in service of promoting French cuisine abroad. She currently lives in Toronto with her journalist husband, Peter Scowen. Connect with her on her website LauraCalder.com or on Twitter @LauraCalder. Chapter 1: Hopeless Kitchens I Have Known 1 Hopeless Kitchens I Have Known It’s a funny thing about me and kitchens. I’ve never really had a nice one, despite the important place that cooking has always held in my life. Instead, I have made do with whatever has been thrown my way and, though I do fantasize about my dream kitchen (ahem, with separate pantry and scullery), in retrospect I’m rather glad to have been made to understand over the years that the key component to a companionable kitchen is not perfection, but charm. The same, of course, is true of people. I got a good start at this life lesson, because the rural New Brunswick kitchen I grew up in was about the craziest of the lot. Amongst its many other flaws, it had seven doors, which exited in all directions like a highway interchange. I recently read that the effect of a room is most critically determined by the arrangement of its openings. In other words, if doors and windows are not properly distributed, then no amount of tinkering with a room otherwise can ever make it right. This must explain why, despite the various attempts to improve it over the years, that kitchen has remained as dysfunctional as ever. I gave it a good once-over the last time