I have blogged about Sophie Dahl before. But enough of that. Those of you regular readers will know my love affair with her food, her philosophy and her beautiful, beautiful features - but if you want more on that read the earlier post. This is about something completely different. This is about her kitchen.
Well, it's not really her kitchen - the Daily Mail ''exposed" that it is a "Kitchen for hire" for TV shows and the like - but still, I like to think it is. I guess the whole craze started with Nigella, who shot her first series "Nigella's Kitchen" in her own house, with her own utensils, ingredients, oven, fridge and - even, children. I still chuckle to myself at those hilariously staged, but oh so nigella, moments when she would totter downstairs in the middle of the night and have a slice of chocolate cake or a spoonful of syllabub straight from the bowl in the fridge. "Positively sinful" she would coo. Ah Nigella. She really set the bar high for kitchen lovelies. Sophie Dahl is apparently her "successor" what with her "Voluptuous Delights" (anyone else thinnk that has a touch of "domestic goddess" to it?) and her curvaceous figure. Although, really, lets be honest, they are two completely different cook - Sophie is vegetarian, after all and nigella is most certainly not, remember the coke-baked ham? There is one way in which Sophie is following Nigella though, and that is with her TV Kitchen.
Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights
With the aga, the white-tiled splashback, the bunches of peonies and chrysanthemums and that wooden benchtop that goes on for days it really is the stuff of cooking legends. Sophie Dahl's cooking style really is that rustic, country-side aesthetic that I love. My favourite recipes of hers are for pea and mint soup, french onion risotto that is creamy and gooey as it should be, and my absolute favourite of desserts - eton mess - a glorious muck of sharp meringue, light-as-air cream and the tang of pickled rhubarb and strawberries. I still remember the first time I heard about Eton Mess. I had just read Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate and I remember demanding it from my mother... The way it was described - it seemed like heaven in a glass goblet. And believe me, it is. Heaven. "Intensity and relief in every bite" as Nigella herself says.
Oh Sophie. It's bad enough that I long to be you for your symmetrical face and your superb writing style, but now I want your (fake) kitchen too? Lemon yellow kitchenaid and pistachio green wallpaper and all? And now I want Eton Mess too. It's just not fair.
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