Saturday, November 29, 2008


DONNA HAY – NO TIME TO COOK
Fourth Estate – NZ$49.99

My guess is that cookbooks may represent as much as 50% of all non-fiction sales in bookshops in this part of the world? Perhaps bookseller visitors to this blog may like to comment?

There is no doubt, whatever the exact percentage is that they represent, it is significant and must be the biggest selling individual genre by a county mile.

One of the reasons, apart from our passionate interest in all matters food, is the uniformly high quality of the cookbooks published in New Zealand and Australia.

The latest welcome example to hit my desk is Donna Hay’s No Time To Cook . So far I have made two salad meals from it, chicken salad with coconut dressing, and minted pea & feta salad.
Both took me less than 15 minutes to prepare and assemble, and I’m really slow at chopping and making dressings, both were healthy and very tasty and made a welcome change to the trad green salad I usually make. Sunday morning coming I plan to make her Pancetta Baked Eggs which looks scrummy and again is going to be dead simple and quick to prepare. (I reckon I can make it while Annie is away getting the Sunday Star-Times and Herald on Sunday).

This is a large format book with in the main four recipes on each page, all illustrated in colour, and while they can all be prepared quickly by those with no time to cook, the food presentation is superb and will have your guests thinking you have been slaving in the kitchen for hours. My kind of book. Thanks Donna.

Recipes and images from No Time To Cook by Donna Hay, published by Fourth Estate (an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers), 2008.
Text and design copyright © Donna Hay 2008
Photographs copyright © Con Poulos 2008

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i'm going to buy it for myself for xmas = cant resist !
lez