New to the Bookshelf: How To Be A Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking by Nigella Lawson

Non-Fiction. Paperback from Random House. Published in 2003. Purchased at Books, Etc! in Staines, UK

While we were in Staines yesterday to go to the movies, we had a little time to kill, so we went to the bookshop. I found this baking cookbook by Nigella Lawson, who is a popular UK cookbook author. The title put me off a bit, but here is what she says in the introduction:

"The trouble with much modern cooking is not that the food it produces isn't good, but that the mood it induces in the cook is one of skin-of-the-teeth efficiency, all briskness and little pleasure. Sometimes that's the best we can manage, but at other times we don't want to feel like a post-modern, post-feminist, overstretched woman but, rather, a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake. ... So, what I'm talking about isn't not being a domestic goddess exactly, but feeling like one. ... The good thing is, we don't have to get ourselves up in Little Lady drag and we don't have to renounce the world and enter into a life of domestic drudgery. But, we can bake a little - and a cake is just a cake, far easier than getting the timing right for even the most artlessly casual of midweek dinner parties. This isn't a dream; what's more, it isn't even a nightmare."

Publisher's summary:
This volume is not about being a goddess, but about feeling like one. Nigella shows that there can be more feelgood mileage from running up a tray of muffins or baking a sponge cake than in almost any other cooking - and that it's not actually hard. "How to be a Domestic Goddess" understands our anxieties, feeds our fantasies and puts cakes, pies, pastries, preserves, puddings, bread and biscuits back into today's kitchens and our lives. Everything from dairy cakes to chocolate cakes, from brownies to bagels, from gooseberry-cream crumble to double apple pie, from pizza to pistachio macaroons, scones and muffins to cheesecakes and steamed syrup sponge, from baklava to a Barbie cake, as well as children's cooking, Christmas baking and other family festive treats.

To buy from amazon.co.uk, click here: How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking
from amazon.com, click here: How to Be a Domestic Goddess (not released in the US in paperback yet)