Gourmet Lady Blog

One day awhile back, customers from California were visiting and making a recipe that involved cooking lamb in the fireplace.  It sounded really wonderful and they were searching for a few ingredients and also a good bottle of wine (I recommended Abacela Merlot), which by later accounts, went very well together.  They had seen the lamb recipe in Saveur Magazine (“savor a world of authentic cuisine”), which they kindly gave me a subscription to that I’m really enjoying. 

In the Saveur 100 edition – a list of favorite restaurants, food, drink, people, places, and things -- #42 is a food book that’s really about food.  It is Hungry Planet:  What the World Eats (Material World Books and Ten Speed Press, $40).  Here’s the feature:

On one page, we see the Natomo family (one husband, two wives, one sister-in-law, and 11 children) from Mali surrounded by its weekly diet of millet and corn, dried fish, rice, and water (total cost $26.39).  On another page, the Caven family (mom, dad, two kids) from California poses with its seven-day supply of supermarket bounty, including frozen corn dogs, cereal bars, onion bagels, Chicken McNuggets, and Coca-Cola both regular and diet (total cost: $159.18).  They are just two of the 30 families from 24 countries whose hebdomadal fare has been photographed by Peter Menzel and written about by Faith D’Alusio in an illuminating, thought-provoking, and gloriously colorful socio-anthropological study of international eating habits.  The authors supplement their family portraits with detailed reports on how people all over the world eat, cook, shop, and live.  We also get such pertinent information for each country (not necessarily the same facts for every one) as life expectancy, fertility rate, daily available caloric intake per person, unemployment rate, annual per capita meat consumption, percentage of population either overweight or obese, the McDonald’s quotient, and so on.  Additional photographs depict both family life and surroundings – and there are even recipes, for everything from the Madsen family’s Greenlandic seal stew to the Australian Molloy family’s barbecued prawns with chilies, cilantro, and lime butter.

This book sounds delicious and would be the Gourmet Lady’s choice of a good coffee table book.  Hmmm, is my birthday anytime soon?  Is my favorite sister who buys me books still reading my blog?

In case you’re thinking of inviting me for dinner, go for the prawns with, and save the seal stew for another day.  I can’t figure out what kind of wine goes with seal.