Complete Outdoor Living Cookbook [antikvár]

introductionOutdoor living equals escape. Whether you are vacationing in a cabin in snow country, enjoying the warm, lazy days of summer at the seaside, or headed off to a Saturday afternoon picnic or tailgate party, you are getting away from the demands of everyday life.Not surprisingly, the combination of fresh air and recreation whet the appetite for good food. Luckily, I have been able to satisfy such cravings at my second home on northern California's Lake Tahoe. I invite my friends and family there, and spoil them with rustic country breakfasts and with bountiful grilled dinners after a day of hiking, swimming, or waterskiing. I gathered those recipes in Cabin Cooking, the first book in the Williams-Sonoma Outdoors Series, which was followed by three more titles celebrating good food for the great outdoors. Now, the best of all those recipes are presented here, covering every season and setting, from savory to sweet and everything in between.Fortunately, you don't have to travel far or have a house on a lake to experience the enjoyment of eating with the outdoors as the backdrop. You can do it in a neighborhood park, at the local beach, or even in front of a warm fire in your apartment. Such experiences are more about a mood than a place about an appetite that comes from not being clamped to a dining-room chair. Instead of a tablecloth, there's a blanket spread wide. Instead of a carving fork and knife, there's a ladle in a kettle of chowder. Instead of a table, there's your lap.The recipes in this book have been developed with the idea of making cooking surrounded by nature as easy and as pleasurable as possible. The ingredients are commonplace rather than exotic, and the kitchen equipment does not venture beyond the elementary: a saucepan, a frying pan, an outdoor grill in warm weather, good knives, mixing bowls, wooden spoons. What you assemble from these basic foods and tools are simple seasonal menus: cucumber soup in spring, cherry tomato and corn salad in summer, risotto with greens in autumn, roasted pears in winter.Use your imagination when serving your meals. Take advantage of a sunny morning or midday or a warm evening and put up a table outdoorson a porch, under a tree, or near the shore. Shade daytime diners with big umbrellas, and illuminate nighttime meals with lanterns. When the weather is cold, treat yourself to a supper by the hearth, with a roaring fire and a candlelit table. Whether serving indoors or out, use no-nonsense china or enamelware and durable flatware for your place settings and decorate with what nature provides, such as seashells, flowers, and small boughs. Maintain this easygoing style by bringing clams to the table in a tin florist's bucket, wrapping biscuits in a bandana, serving fried potatoes straight from the cast-iron pan in which they were cooked, or arranging lemon squares on a well-cleaned length of driftwood.Finally, outdoor living also equals relaxed living, a philosophy that reaches from the kitchen, where only easy-to-assemble recipes are prepared, to the dining table, where an informal, leisurely, convivial ambience prevails.