Spot on A Great New Cook Book and Cooks

This is my birthday present from my daughter and her family and I love, love, love it! I thoroughly enjoy Jamie Oliver's cooking show on the Food Network, but as it is now on very early in the morning I do not get a chance to see it. Our daughter's family DVR's it and we watch it together at a more ( to my way of thinking ) reasonable hour. Even better, I usually have a grandchild or two in my lap as we watch Jamie..oh joy! My husband is the "foodie" in the family and I thoroughly enjoy doing the table setting,being the go-for, and clean-up help when he prepares delicious meals , quite often, for friends and family. After all, my reward is that I get to eat fine food and drink fine wine and visit with people we love. Such a small price ...but I digress. My daughter asked what I wanted for my birthday and I suggested maybe a DVD of Jamie Oliver, not realizing he had a cookbook published. What a cookbook! It surpasses his show. It shows pictures of his gardens, him hunting, cooking outdoors, and much more...all done very practically too. As the wife of a hunter, it is refreshing to have a healthy view of such a much-maligned endeavor. Well prepared game of any sort is a rare thing now-a-days. I cannot say enough in favor of this cook book, and I will be reading it from cover to cover...and I have only read one other cookbook that way...might write about it later. All this to say that my husband suggested I cook through this book and blog about it like the movie "Julie, Julia". Nope, not going to do that, but I have decided I will blog every Friday starting next week about recipes from Jamie's book, and cook my way through it. Jamie's book is orderd seasonally and I will prepare his recipes accordingly. I will start with Autumn recipes and hopefully my husband will give me a LOT of help and we will have opportunities to share these meals with friends and family . I have been very, very busy preserving the harvest and bounty of the garden my husband so lovingly prepared, planted and tended. All he asks is that I do not let the fruit and vegetables go to waste. Until this year , my poor husband's labors have oft been wasted or ended up as chicken food because I am at the fairs from mid- August til the end of September and when home am too exhausted to do much canning, freezing, etc. Then I am ashamed for the waste and sad for my husband's hard work for naught. No more! I have canned pickles, jams, and tomorrow will can Tomato Jam, a recipe I found on this wonderful blog: One Perfect Bite* ( click here). I am excited about trying this jam out on broiled French Bread with a dollop of goat cheese on top. Another book my daughter and her family have ordered for me is by Nigella Lawson*( click here). I have seen a few of her shows ( Nigella Bites) on the Food Network, but she, too, is now on way too early for me. There is just something so pleasant about a woman who loves to cook AND eat too! I watched her prepare a few egg dishes awhile ago and thought I could get excited about cooking like that. Can't wait for my new cook book by her! Meanwhile, because I have been busy canning produce I have been making easy breezy dinners. That is O.K. with my husband because he has been coming home from work and straight-way working on finishing his new Honey house / pump house. It is looking good and we have been needing a new pump-house and water pump for a long time. It has room for all my husbands' bee-keeping equipment, and also has been prepared for extracting and storing honey. Yay! Dinner tonight was sliced ripe tomatoes, with baked chicken, toast and FETA PEPPER DIP , thanks to Noble Pig *( click here)! It is good, try it, you'll like it! "Here is what I have seen to be good and fitting: to eat, to drink and enjoy oneself in all one's labors in which he toils under the sun during the few years of his life which God has given him; for this is his reward." Ecclesiastes 5:18