Is Mämmi solid beer?

The Finns come Easter time take great delight in bringing out a box of mämmi. They always smirk when they ask you would you like to taste it, because it looks like something that you should not be eating. It looks like something you would find in a field of cows that had been sent out to pasture.It is dark, it is brown, and the only thing missing is a hoard of flies swarming over it.

It is impolite to decline such a Finnish delicacy, and they assure you that it tastes much better than it looks, and to seal the deal they say you can have sugar and cream on it. It is difficult to comprehend this logic, of making something faintly disturbing, better by putting sugar and cream on it.

Anyways when you look at what it is made of, the label says malted rye and malted barley, with a bit of pommerance  peel. Now if mämmi was marketed as a Guinness derivative, and that it was solid beer without the alcohol, then it might open up new doors for a world wide export market.

Having tasted it I have to confess that it is not that bad once you expunge the cows in a field connotation from your memory. I was enthused enough to try and make it myself. The baking process takes many hours and at the end of the day my mämmi turned out to be a real competitor for asphalt on the road. I believe I could patent the process and sell it as a substitute for tarmac.

Salmon Quiche

It is all in the pastry base. Really!!! What you want is something that is firm and interesting, and for this reason I added about 20 almonds that I had diced into small crumbs. They are surprises in the pastry. In addition I added half a teaspoon on rough crushed extra hot red chillies and half a cup of grated tangy Hergard cheese from Sweden. The other ingredients are 3 cups of flour and six table spoons of olive oil. Mix the whole lot in a bowl until it looks like a pastry dough. Squeeze it though your fingers untill all the crumbs are bonded together. Then place it in the centre of a big baking dish and press it out from the centre to the edges until it covers the dish. Put it in the oven and bake for 10 minutes at 230 C



Now for the killer filling and I do mean killer filling since the amount of calories and fat and cholestorol is equivilent to a heart attack on a plate. Crack three eggs into a bowl and add 2 dl of sour cream and half a cup of grated strong mature black label Emental. Then add three large dollops of mayonase, and five finely cut mushrooms.
Beat the hell out of the mixture and when it looks thick and creamy pour it into the pie dish and then sprinkle some smoked salmon over the top and dust down with som Parmesan cheese. Pop it in the oven for 40 minutes at 200 C and sit back and enjoy the aroma that fills the kitchen.



Since you know just how much evil stuff you have added to this dish you can assuage your conscience by serving it with some Japanese Mizuna, and some cheap white wine. Be sure to eat it all before you wife returns from her weekend away.

Foccaccia

I like to make Foccacia bread. It is so simple and quick to prepare and it tastes wonderful. You can go to specialist bakeries and get artizan bread but they will cost you an arm and a leg, so it is so much easier to prepare it yourself with good ingredients that will give you a bread that is full of flavour and a joy to eat.














Ingredients:

2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon white sugar
1 tablespoon active dry yeast
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon dried basil
1 pinch ground black pepper
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 cup water2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese
1 bag of mozzarella pellets
Shredded fresh rosemary for topping.















DIRECTIONS

1. In a large bowl, stir together the flour, salt, sugar, yeast, garlic powder, oregano, thyme, basil and black pepper. Mix in the vegetable oil and water.
2. When the dough has pulled together, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface, and knead until smooth and elastic. Lightly oil a large bowl, place the dough in the bowl, and turn to coat with oil. Cover with a damp cloth, and let rise in a warm place for 20 minutes.
3. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F (230 degrees C). Punch dough down; place on greased baking sheet. Pat into a 1/2 inch thick rectangle. Brush top with olive oil. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese, mozzarella cheese and fresh shredded rosemary.
4. Bake in preheated oven for 15 minutes, or until golden brown. Serve warm.

Onion soup with Aura cheese and rose pepper and dill

Onion soup with Aura cheese and rose pepper and dill
Originally uploaded by Selma Sol€.

Does onion soup frighten you? Don't be afaid. Here is my recipe.

Cut 4 large onions into big chunks. None of this finely minced french style onions. Cut them big and rough. If you want to practice your knife work then you can take 2 sticks of celery and chop it to dust. Throw the chunky onions and celery dust into into a pot and add a drizzle of olive oil, (why is it that olive oil always drizzles, why can't you have a thunder-storm of olive oil) and cook until soft.

Add a half litre of water and a stockcube and simmer for 20 minutes. Surprisingly onion soup tastes rather sweet so for a good topping, and to add some sharpness and contrast, I add freshly ground rose pepper and dill. These two ingredients put on at the last minute when the soup has been laddled onto the bowl, give the soup a rare fragrance.

Now for the AURA blue cheese. This should be added as rough generous chunks, and allowed to melts a little before you get stuck in.

On the side you can have buttered barley bread and tomato. Very simple and inexpensive. Enjoy

Scottish Tablet

Scottish Tablet
Originally uploaded by Arthur Eyetis.

My grandmother used to make tablet around about christmas time. She also made ginger beer and boston cream for new year

I remember being crazy for tablet, and it was always homemade stuff. The nearest commercial equivilent is Kendal mintcake that made it to the top of Mount Everest with Hilary.

Kendal mintcake is carried by mountaineers to give them energy, and when you see the recipe for tablet you can understand why.

1 kg of granulated sugar
1 tin of sweetend condensed milk
2 dl of cream
200 gm of unsalted butter


Melt the butter in a heavy bottomed deep pot. Add the sugar condensed milk and cream and bring the mixture to the boil. At this stage the liquid is a light creamy colour. Once the liquid is boiling reduce the temperature so that it is just simmering nicely. It is essential that you stir the mixture continuously to stop it from burning to the bottom of the pot. A flat wooden spatula is better than a wooden spoon for this job, becasue you can more easily scrape the bottom of the pot while you are stirring.

















While it is boiling you can expect the volume of the liquid to perhaps double, and it is hellish hot so don't go trying to taste the mixture straight from the pot as you will scald your tongue. As you stir the colour of the mixture will become darker and the stirring process usually take 20 minutes before the tablet is ready. You can test this by taking a teaspoon of the mixture from the pot and dropping it into a tumbler of cold water. If the mixture forms a solid globule then the mixture is ready.


Now remove the mixture from the heat and whisk for 10 minutes. Place some aluminium folio that has been greased with butter into a shallow baking tray and pour in the tablet mixture. It should begin to set almost immediately, but while it is still hot score the top of it with a knife so you can break it into squares afterwards. Set aside to cool and amuse yourself or your children by giving them the pot to lick.

One of the best thing about making tablet is licking the pot afterwards.

Tentura christmas cake

While in Greece I was served up some Tentura after a meal. It is a liquer and the main ingredients are cinnamon and cloves. You drink it down in a small shot glass and I suppose it is an ancient version of Salmiaki Kossu. So it was Maija's idea to make a cake with Tentura as a spice.



Now Christmas cakes have a great tradition in the UK and America. These christmas fruitcakes weigh a tonne and apparently if you don't eat them they last for ever. A bit like the English wedding cakes covered in icing and marzipan that can be saved so that the first born can sample their mother and fathers wedding cake.

Fruit cakes given as presents at christmas can be left uneaten, and if you don't like them they can be passed on to someone else. who will undoubtedly pass it on to somebody else the following christmas. They are so rich they will last forever it left untouched. I bet you the Pharaoh had perfectly good cake in his burial chamber.




Eggs, sugar, flour, butter, all go into the basic dough and you add it the fruits like raisens, sultanas, appricots, cherries and of course a generous helping of Tentura.




Now you don't want the cake to turn out like a coal-dust brickette so to prevent the cake from burning and sticking to the container, the inside is lined with brown baking paper and the outside is covered in newspaper.

Now I hear you question as to what type of newspaper to use. Well personally we got good results with Helsinki Sanomat, though I dare say The Times would have done equally well.

At all cost avoid The Sun, or The National Inquirer. For some reason cakes wraped in these newspapers always come out badly.




Finally when the cake is ready it has to be spiked with more Tentura, for after all eating cake is only a discrete way of consuming alcohol. Prick the cake with a toothpick and pour in as much Tentura was you want.

You will observe that after people have eaten a few slices they will remark how wonderfully moist the cake is, and will be asking for another slice.

Nuckle of Lamb

Knuckle of Lamb... I ate it many times in islamic resturants in Cairo. It is an awesome sight to have a chunk of meat like this braized to perfection and falling off the bone placed in front of you.

There is something very special about the way lamb is cooked in North africa or the middle east, that makes it so different from the roast lamb that you would get in England.

Perhaps it has something to do with the lamb itself in that it is not deep frozen stuff from New Zealand. Whatever it is freshness, spices, cooking method, it sure is tasty.

In marocco they will add to the casserole apricots, dates, almonds, sultanas or raisins, honey, saffron mixture, tomato juice and lamb or chicken stock, and I guess all that fruitiness gives a sweetness to the dish that you do not usually associate with lamb

The spices that I added were freshly sliced ginger. Don't use that powdered stuff it may give ginger flavour, but there is nothing so satisfying than to bite into a bit of ginger that has been cooked. It does something for the appetite.



Then there is Bay leaves, and rosemary and thyme which are traditional herbs to go along with lamb. In addition Rose Pepper and Black Peppercorns give the casserole some extra bite.

Whack the whole thing in a cast iron pot and add a couple of onions quartered and a large carrot diced. Add a stock cube and water, clap on the lid and cook in the oven for 2-3 hours at 180 C

It is read whn the meat falls off the bone and all the marrow has dissolved from inside the bone. at it with either rice or couscous.

Avocado and date salad

I will build my love a salad. First of all I will wash fresh stalks of celery in cold water and slice them diagonally.



I will build a tower of goodness from ripe avocado, crystalised dates, and dried bananna chips.



And on it I will lay wedges of strong salty cheese, and whole corriander seeds. For a dressing there will be fresh ground black pepper, white garlic sauce, and a drizzle of virgin olive oil.



I will lay it on a table of linen, and pour a glass of strong red wine, full heady tannin, that will sing a love song to the cheese.

Pasha & Kulich

Pasha & Kulich, originally uploaded by HyperBob.

Pasha is spread on the kulich and eaten.
Pasha is a very rich.

No!!! to say it is rich is a lie.

Pasha is a heart attack on a plate.
Pasha is the gunge that will clog your arteries.
Pasha has so much sugary sweetness it will have you running up the walls.
Pasha explodes in your mouth.
Pasha tingles your toes and gives you pins and neddles in your fingers.
Pasha makes you dance with schitzoid jerky movements.
Pasha is dangerous and should only be eaten by people who have practiced extreme eating for years.
Pasha is the nipple of heaven.

If food were flags

If food were flags then a tomato boat carrying a wedge of feta as cargo under the full sail of a basil leaf would represent Italy. The colours are right and the taste is right too. For the lion rampant of Scotland you would have custard and strawberries. The English would have milk and beetroot juice, and the Americans would have a blueberry pie topped with a triple helping of double cream, and an obscene amount of glazed cherries.

The sad thing is that things are being grown for looks rather than flavour. Shelf life is more important than taste. It is a given that tomatoes are red, but what is the point of selling nice red tomatoes when the price is all wrong. If you have a glut of tomatoes on the market then you get rock bottom prices for them.

So what you do genetically engineer them to remain green on the vine for a longer period of time, and when the price is right you pump ethelyene into the green house and have them ripen overnight, and then sell them at top dollar. They might be rock hard and taste like sewage, but they sure as hell look good on the supermarkert shelves.

If Peru had a flag it should be shaped like a potato, and potatoes should be knobbly with vivid strange colours, just the way nature intended, but no they need to have a certain shape if they have to be made into Walkers crisps, and Walkers will only buy certain types of potato which means that growers will only grow certain potatoes so they can sell them to Walkers. The end result is that the old varieties disappear.

The same is true for wheat and rice. Varieties are bred to be high yielding, but only if you use lots of fertilizer. This is why the big chemical companies are buying up seed companies, since seeds are being designed to grow well with chemicals. Who cares about the diminished gene pool? Who cares that the genetic heritage of the generations is being fed to pigs, because modern seeds give better yields and more profit. Who worries that there might be huge swathes for land devoted to mono-cultures of corn or rice. With mono-cultures the risk is that if they are hit by disease like a fungal rust then there exists the distinct possibility that entire crops will be wiped out from japan to India.

I am all for genetic diversity. I am all for taste. I want wierd shaped fruit with stange colours, that does not have a shelf-life and needs to be eaten fresh. Give me a basil tomato boat with a cargo of feta, floating on a sea of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Give me taste.

Strawberries and black forrest ham on a poppy seed roll

Why not? If things taste good on their own them why not combine them, and see if the combination opens any doors. Hmmm that roll with poppy seeds would burst a saloon door wide open. Those small wild strawberries would cause the camera eyed doors on the Sar wars DeathStar blink open, and if you laid a few slices of German black forest ham on the combination lock at Fort Knox it would blow those vault doors wide open.

Put them all together, bite into them and they prove to be the key that opens Pandora's other box, you know the one she kept under her bed covered with a red silk shawl. The box of pleasures that we are not allowed to taste.

I eat everything. I eat the forbidden. I eat crusts and burnt bits. The brown burnt egg stuck to the bottom of life's pan. I lick the bowl. I eat raw dough. I finger melted chocolate from the pan. I drizzle olive oil on green leaves, shake rock salt on fish heads, suck marrow from the bone, tear crisp spiced brown skin from the bone, squeeze mustard on hot pork, mash bannana on white bread and sprinkle it with sugar.

You ask why I do it and I reply. Why not?

God's blow-out.

Here is a thought for you. It comes from the old testiment. It is in actual fact a command from God, and it goes like this.

And thou shall bestow that money for whatsosever your soul lusteth after, for oxen, for sheep, or for wine, or for stong drink, or for whatever thy soul desireth, and thou shall eat there before the Lord they God, and thou shalt rejoice, thou and thy entire household

If I get it right there are times when you take the tithe ( a tenth of your income ) and instead of giving it away, you use it to have a good time with your family and friends. Now that is quite radical thinking


So here is what I am suggesting that when pay day comes along you forget about the rent and the bills and the other financial matters that weigh you down, and set aside one tenth of your salary to buy some really good food to share with your friends and family.

Don't blow the money on a resturant. You can make better meals at home. Cooking together is good. It does not have to be French cuisine, but what it does need to be is tasty. Lip smacking good. Finger licking good. Fresh tomatoes spiked with sea salt and placed on buttered bread straight from the oven is heavenly. Whole cloves of garlic drenched in olive oil. Scarred and charred salmon has that smokey oily tang that makes you want to take the flesh in your mouth and suck, and suck, and suck, until all the flavour has been drawn out






At the end of the meal there should only be bones left. Every bit of goodness should be devoured and savoured. And after the meal... lick each others fingers... you would not get away with that in a resturant.

You know it is what God wants... so do it.

The vampire challenge

Imogen I eat you, originally uploaded by HyperBob.

It all started out in a very innocent manner. I had found a photo by Imogen Cunningham called three vegetables, and as part of a Utata project I dug around in the fridge for three vegetables I could photo, and came across some cloves of garlic that had began to sprout.

So I snaped the garlic and since I had taken it out and it looked so nice I decided to spice it up and bake it in the over along with some potatoe wedges.

I went and bought some fillet steak to go along with it and I used some Nomu African rub to give it some edge.

Can you eat so much garlic in one go? Yes of course you can. The cloves go wonderfully soft and almost caramelised. I do not recommend using a knife and fork to get at the innards, instead use your fingers and suck all the goodness out of them.

If I were a Vampire I wonder how I would react to a nicely done RARE steak with garlic on the side. I think it would be tempting and off-putting at one and the same time. The luciousness of the red meat and the horror of the garlic, but I think that good food inherently has a tension within it. It almost dares you to be brave enough to eat it.

Gravlax... innit???

It is so expensive to make buy gravlax so why not make your own. It is very simple. First of all you need a nice bit of salmon. On offer in the shops at the moment at reasonable prices are farmed salmon from Norway or deep sea salmon from Ahvenamaa. I went for the salmon from the archipeligo.


raw salmon from the archipelego

To start the process you need to salt the fish and I use natural rock salt. It is big and it is cruchy and it looks good. It is enough to put a couple of table spoons on the salmon to coat the flesh.


Salmon salted with rock salt

After that the flesh is sprinkled with ordinary sugar. Just plain old sugar. I used sugar from estonia which I bought at a bargain price from Lidl. I was tempted to use some brown sugar from Suomen sokeri but thought better of it.


sugar added

Then it is time for some spices and I went for a mixture of rose pepper and Jamacian allspice. The recipe from the web called for crushed white pepper, but I did not have any so I went with the Rose pepper instead. It looks better with a little bit of red added to it.


Rose pepper and Jamacian allspice

Traditionally for some green you should go for dill, but I did not have any, but I did have some rosemary growing on the balcony so I chopped up some leaves and sprinkled it over the fish. It made a good contrast with the rose pepper.


Rosemary added

Finally the fillet is tightly wraped in cling film and place in the fridge for a couple of days to mature. The package is placed in a dish and then another dish is placed on top of it to weigh it down. You should expect some juices to come out of the fish fillet.


Wraped in cling film

In 48 hours time the fillet will be removed from the cling film and all of the remaining salt and sugar and herbs will be scraped off and the fillet sliced at 45 degrees to give very thin slices. It should be eaten with garlic mustard but I have decided to do gravlax con meloni.

If the Italians can get away with parma ham on melon, then I am going to be the first to put strips of gravlax with melon. I may even smother it in liqorice sauce. Eat your heart out fat duck.

P.S. Did I forget to mention that it was also marinated in Hunaja-Terva Snapsi (Honey-tar Schnapps)

Fava bean and chickpea soup

I visited a Kurdish shop in Espoon Keskus and bought some nibbles. It is hard to describe what they are exactly, since it looks like hollow bits of spaghetti coated in chilli pepper. Whatever they are they taste good, and to my mind are better than peanuts or popcorn. Perhaps it is a Kurdish version of Bombay mix.

Anyways I also discovered they had some condensed milk, something I have not been able to find in the supermarkets here in Finland. Maija found a recipe for some special christmas sweets which needed dark chocolate and condensed cream so we will be all set to roll in a few days time.

The other thing that I picked up was a tin of Fava beans with chickpeas, by Wadi Chtoura Foods. The only time I have heard fava beans mentioned in connection with eating was in the the movie "Silence of the lambs", when Hannibal the Cannibal says "A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti." So I just had to try the Fava beans and instead of liver I tossed in some spiced Gyros from Dulano.

I suppose the Fava beans should have been eaten in a salad with olive oil and lemon but when I opened the tin the beans and chickpeas were floating in a hot and spicey tomato and chilli sauce, and since it was one of those raw days outside, I added some more liquid to the sauce and made the whole thing into a warm and satisfying soup. I crisped up some bread under the grill and while it was still hot spread it with a generous layer of real butter. I had intended to leave half the soup for tomorrow but it tasted so good I ate the lot in one go. It was excellent and I plan to do it again as soon as I get more beans.

Though the wife says wait until tomorrow until you see how you react to the beans.

Fish and bacon... yeah right

Combine fish and bacon... I don't think so. I mean to say it just does not go. It clashes. Pig and fish just does not look right on the menu. Chuck in a few green beans. Vegetables always bring forgivness. Oh but I forgot about the white wine, a pinot grigio from Northern Italy. That makes everything right. Doesn't it? White wine and fish that has got to be OK, and white wine and pork well that is a combination to die for... NOT!!!

But who could resist Siika dusted down with rye flour and simply spiced with pepper and salt and fried so the skin on the fish is crisp and succulent. I mean to say this is a skin that you do not scrape off and put on the side of the plate. This is a skin that you cut off with the flesh and suck all of the goodness out of it. You eat some green beans because you feel guilty. You drink a little wine to get rid of the guilt. You eat some bacon and feel that you have to do some sort of penence so you eat some more fish to say that you feel sorry for defiling yourself with the evil pork, and so it goes on... fish, beans, wine, pork, until you have finnished the meal.

We always rationalise our reasons for eating stuff that we shouldn't. Fish good, wine bad, Pork bad, beans good. It all evens out in the end... that is if you do not use TOO much salt and pepper, which is diabolical and the most sinful of condiments.

Muikku/Vendace

Muikku/Vendace, originally uploaded by HyperBob.

How is it that you can buy gutted muikku? All the heads have been cut off and the insides are missing. I can only imagine some machine that slices the heads off and some suction method to remove the guts. But all that is beside the point, the important thing is how to cook them and how to eat them.

Well you have to cook them in rye flour that has been spiced with salt and pepper. Nothing else, and they have to be fried in butter. Not olive oil, not margarine, not sunflower oil.

And when it comes to eating them you eat them whole. You eat the skin, the tails, the fins, the bones, everything and you do it with your fingers. No forks and knifes.

Muslims have the habit of eating food with their hands, and we may scorn this practice but it makes very good sense. When you pick a fried fish up with your fingers you make a judgement of how hot it is, and if it is safe to put it into your mouth. How many times have you speared a pototo with you fork and popped it straight into your mouth without checking how hot it was?

At the end of the meal you can lick your fingers for desert.

Home-made Dill, Pepper, Garlic pickled Gherkins

Home-made Dill, Pepper, Garlic pickled Gherkins, originally uploaded by HyperBob.

Pickled Gherkins with dill, pepper,and garlic

I bought about a kilo and a half of gherkins to suppliment the ones I got from my allotment and decided to pickle them. This is the process.

Dump the gherkins in a basins and wash them, then take a fork and prick them all over. Transfer the gherkins to a container and cover them with 1/4 kilo of salt and leave for 4 hours. During this time the gherkins will become soft and they will loose water from the holes you have pricked on the surface.

Once the 4 hours is up wash the gherkins 5 times in cold running water ready for putting in preservative jars.

Pickle mixture.
1/2 cup of vinegar
2 cups of water
1 cup of sugar
1 tablespoon of mustard seed
1 tablespoon of jamacian allspice
3 heads of dill plant
6 cloves of garlic finely sliced.

Place all of the spices in a pot and add the vinegar and water and bring gently to the boil. Simmer for 10 minutes.

2 kilos of gherkins should fit nicely into 3 1/2 litre jars. Place the dill heads and mustard seed at the bottom of the jar, and then you can either pack the gherkins into the jar whole or you can slice them, then top up with the spiced pickling mixture and seal the jars.

When the gherkins go in the jar they are still rather green in colour but by the next day they will have drawn in the spiced pickling liquor and their colour will change to a more olive green, and believe it or not they are ready to eat the next day.

Great with cold ham or salmon.

Pistachio Lemon bread with Lemon butter

Judith Olney has a chapter in her book called Essence Breads and their butters, and Maij decided to try the Pistachio/Lemon bread. It is more of a cake than a real bread and it is quite heavenly to eat. After it had been made we cut a couple of slices and had it with coffee on the balcony.

The strange thing about this bread is that after it has been baked you prick the top of it with a wooden kebab stick and then pour a "glaze" over it, which is basically 1/3 a cup of sugar and the juice from a lemon. I thought it would make it sodden, but somehow the bread absorbed it all and became very moist and succulent with a tang to smack your lips to.




If that is not lemony enough for you then you also have lemon butter to go along with it, which is made with 8 tbl spoons of butter, 2 tablespoons of sugar and 1 teaspoon of lemon zest. As you can see from the photo the butter just melted into the hot bread once it was taken from the tin, and the pistachios were dotted through the bread with green nutty goodness.

Verdict: Mahtava!!!

Smoked fish and sunday newspaper

No we did not find a new way of cooking newspaper. We just read the day old Sunday newspaper while we were eating. When you read and eat at the same time it is a slow process, and you tend to savour the food a little more. You examine it for texture, You suck it for flavour, you pick the best bits out of one thing and leave the best bits of something else. Eating becomes and adventure, and you can quite easily pinch something off somebodies plate if they are engrossed in the gardening section.

Maija bought some lovely smoked "muikku" and we had it plain and simple with potato salad, tomato, gherkins, together with some focaccia rosemary bread. It was nice. I inspected those muikku. They were topped but not tailed. Crisp fish tails to a Finn is as chicken feet to the Chinese.

I have planted a tomato plant on the balcony, appropriately enough it is called "Balcony Star". It is a gnarly looking plant. Tough with wrinkly leaves and I am expecting a tomato that would win prizes. We shall see.



How do you take photos of food? It is quite a complicated business to get it right. Do you do close-ups? Should there be the background clutter of life? Like the newspaper or a flower. Or should it be clean and stark? I wish I knew.

The Judith Olney book has some wonderful photos in it and if you are doing her rercipes it is not good to try and repeat the same shots that she has put in her book. There has to be something different. I am still looking for a style.