Sunday Afternoons

I first heard about Nigel Slater the other day via my friend Claire's Flickr. She posted a photo and talked about an amazing dish of "red potatoes sliced & lightly fried, layered in a dish with sage, onion, bacon and chicken stock..." she made from Nigel Slater's Appetite cookbook. I drooled all over my keyboard reading about those potatoes and scoured the internet to learn more about this "Nigel Slater." A British food writer, he has written for The Observer Magazine for over a decade and has published over a dozen of his own cookbooks and thoughts on food. I'm a sucker for new cookbooks and love to peruse the aisles looking at volumes of gorgeous photos of food, imagining the way flavors come together as I read through a recipe. So, with him in mind, on the way to a movie, we popped into Powell's Books and found The Kitchen Diaries for only $10. (Score!) Two pages in and I was smitten. Back at home I interrupted Whitney over and over with things like, "listen to what he says about farmers markets versus commercial supermarkets" or "check out this recipe for pork chops in mustard sauce", "dude! Steamed sea bass with ginger and cucumber!" She rolled her eyes and accepted my enthusiasm as my nose hid behind this book for the next few hours. So today, a lazy and rainy Sunday afternoon, I hungrily poked through the pages reading off recipes to Whitney while the Patriots and Jets battled it out in the background. We settled on "Roast Chicken Wings with Lemon and Cracked Pepper."

All at once citrusy and delicious, we devoured almost a dozen wings in less than 10 minutes. The meat fell off the bone and our fingers and lips became sticky with the wonderful flavors. We quickly determined that the next time we make this, we will certainly need to double the recipe. A fabulous, quick and easy lazy Sunday afternoon snack.
Check out Nigel Slater and his wonderful books. We highly recommend it.