Our December/January selection: Midnight Chicken

If you read my post for the last selection, Cinnamon and Gunpowder, you might remember I found myself in some sort of time warp.   Apologies to Claudia, the host for the last round, because I am still reading that book (and enjoying it).   I just ran out of time.

Imagine my surprise when I also realized that it was time for me to host.  It seems like it was just a couple of moths ago that I chose Midnight Chicken by Ella Risbridger.  

About the book:

A book of recipes and reflections that reveal the life-changing happiness of cooking.

"Bridget Jones' self-effacing wittiness, Julia Child's companionable forgiveness and Sylvia Plath's poetic prose." --NPR

"A manual for living and a declaration of hope." --Nigella Lawson

There are lots of ways to start a story, but this one begins with a chicken.

There was a time when, for Ella Risbridger, the world had become overwhelming. Sounds were too loud, colors were too bright, everyone moved too fast. One night she found herself lying on her kitchen floor, wondering if she would ever get up--and it was the thought of a chicken, of roasting it, and of eating it, that got her to her feet and made her want to be alive.

Midnight Chicken is a cookbook. Or, at least, you’ll flick through these pages and find recipes so inviting that you will head straight for the kitchen: roast garlic and tomato soup, uplifting chili-lemon spaghetti, charred leek lasagna, squash skillet pie, spicy fish finger sandwiches and burnt-butter brownies. It’s the kind of cooking you can do a little bit drunk, that is probably better if you’ve got a bottle of wine open and a hunk of bread to mop up the sauce.

But if you settle down and read it with a cup of tea (or a glass of that wine), you’ll also discover that it’s an annotated list of things worth living for--a manifesto of moments worth living for. This is a cookbook to make you fall in love with the world again.

About the author:

Ella Risbridger is a writer and editor, mostly found in a pink kitchen in South London. She writes cookbooks, children's books, poems, articles and honestly, a whole bunch of stuff. Midnight Chicken was Sunday Times Book Of The Year 2019, Guild Of Food Writers General Cookbook Of The Year, and an Amazon bestseller in both hardback and paperback. Likes poems, cats and gardens.

Please note that the recipes are written using British measurements.

As always, I can't wait to see what is whipped up! The deadline for contributing your post is Monday, January 31, 2022.   Please leave a comment below with a link to your post or email me at eliotseats@gmail.com.  For more information, please visit the Guidelines tab.  

Happy Holidays!