Cooking from Lake House Organic Farm Book

Cooking From Lake House is a beautiful book, a real fantasy lifestyle feast. Trudie Styler is Mrs Sting. Lake House (one of the family's four homes) is the beautiful Wiltshire manor house where she presides over the organic farm that supplies most of the food that she, her husband and children and guests eat. Joe Sponzo is the highly talented and imaginative chef who has been cooking for the Stings since 1993. (This must be quite a billet for a chef, as he not only has at his disposal the most glorious, fresh produce and hand-reared meat, but he gets to travel with the family too). Any suspicion of Marie Antoinette and dairies is dispelled by Trudie Styler's "Introduction to Lake House", in which she recounts the hard work and dedication required to rescue the estate from the decay in which they found it and to convert it to organic status. A rock-star income helped, too.Joe Sponzo's recipes, as you might expect from someone who has to keep the interest of a cosmopolitan family with small children, vary greatly and cover a very wide range of styles and occasions. Impossibly gorgeous and elegant dishes like "Cape Cod Fish Stew" (which sounds like a thumping chowder but actually looks in the photograph more like a Japanese flower arrangement) or "Sea Bass with Sautéed Wild Mushrooms and Roast Carrot Confit" rub shoulders with robust items like "Burgundian Beef Stew" or "Curried Lamb Shanks". The recipes are also not required to be deadly serious, particularly where child-friendly dishes are concerned, so we get the bizarre Halloween speciality "Blood Orange Punch with Ice Hands". (The hands are made by freezing latex gloves filled with coloured water: they are peeled and floated in the punch.) --Robin DavidsonRead More