I know that I give a lot of cookbooks away but I know that you’re about as food obsessed as I and that food can permeate not just cookbooks but fiction books too! Today I am giving away 5 copies of Kerry Greenwood’s new book Cooking The Books which is a detective story based around food. The main character Corinna Chapman is a baker and owner of Earthly Delights bakery and bakes all manner of delicious breads and pastries. Corinna also has a hot young boyfriend Daniel whom she regularly cooks for in the book. I’m about a quarter of the way through the book stealing time to read it when I can.

This copy of Cooking The Books has a special recipe booklet attached with recipes for beef goulash, risotto Corinna, tournedos Parisienne as well as basic bread, pasta douro, Barm Brack (a good bread for Halloween!) as well as some basic sweets. The recipes are very simple and with a short ingredient list so they look quite doable indeed!

Thanks to Allen & Unwin, five lucky Not Quite Nigella readers will each win a copy of Cooking the Books by Kerry Greenwood with the bonus recipe booklet! For a chance to win all you have to do is tell me who your favourite mystery writer is and why! Simply add your answer as a comment to the story. The competition ends at midnight AEST on the 12th of November, 2011. You can enter this  competition once daily and it is open to anyone within Australia.

***The winners are:

Margaret J. of NSW

Kristy D. of NSW

Samantha S. of Victoria

Pamela W. of NSW

Taya P. of NSW

***

Best of luck!

Lots of love,

Lorraine

xxx

Even though I don’t follow a gluten free diet I know a lot of my darling readers do so when I got a review copy of the new Rowie Dillon book Indulge I wanted to make sure that I got some to give to readers too! You may know Rowie as the woman who started Rowie’s Cakes, a gluten free cake range. Well now she has a cookbook filled with one hundred gluten free recipes with sweet and savoury recipes including pasta, pastries, cakes as well as general breakfast, lunch and dinners. My favourite chapter would have to be the children’s party chapter which has some adorable ideas for your G.F. littl’un!

Apart from these recipes and every recipe has a photo (don’t we just love that?) there is a section on the science of flours to help explain each flour, where to buy it and when best to use it. There are pizza bases, pasta, a delicate feathery sponge and a delicious looking lime and coconut island cake and there were a range of pastry bases to choose from. As she says in her book “In cooking when you’re gluten intolerant, pastry, pies, pizza and pasta are the four Ps you generally skip” so I was most curious about these-stay tuned for some testing!

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I remember growing up and my parents would have people over. Not often mind you, but when they did the dinners would be conducted without any background music. The only music you’d ever hear in the house was my music being played at ear splitting volume (I was a teenager) and my sister’s classical music.

I’ve since then learned that having music during dinner parties or when friends come over is actually quite crucial. For starters it puts people in a good mood and fills any gaps in silence. Sadly I do subject people to my own music taste ad at the recent True Blood dinner party people did comment that it was certainly an “eclectic” range of music. I should of course have just played the CD I was given from Ministry of Sound which is tailor made for setting the mood when entertaining. There are 41 tracks on 2 CDs and each CD is worth $35. There are tracks by Groove Armada, Cee Lo Green, Erykah Badu and Mark Ronson.

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