My new favorite food book

I just finished reading what may be my all time favorite food book: Jam Today: A Diary of Cooking with What You'e Got by Tod Davies is and isn't a recipe book--okay, I put flags on no less than 20 things I want to try, but only in a few instances are there actual recipes. Mostly it's a one-way conversation, in which she tells us how she decided what to cook for dinner that night, how she chose the ingredients--usually based on what she had (caveat: her husband, a vegetarian, maintains an amazing garden of vegetables and herbs, which helps her a whole lot). But the whole thing is conversational, casual, friendly, as though she's inviting you into her home. They like sage a lot, so she slivers it, browns it in butter, and puts in it a lot of dishes--I have a thriving pot of sage on my front porch that I never do anything with, but I will now. She has lots of recipes for basil--and I have lots of basil, plus my neighbor has a lot more. The first dish I'm going to try is beets and greens--I was raised eating them, and I often cook them for myself, boiling the beets until the skin removes easily, slicing them and reheating with the greens until the greens wilt. I add a bit of butter and some lemon (Jamie used to like them with vinegar, the way his grandmother ate them, but not too long ago, as an adult, he decided he didn't like them any more). But Davies mixes cooled, diced beets (and she roasts rather than boiling) with a homemade vinaigrette, shreds the greens and sautees them, then mixes with olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper.
Davies makes soup--there are at least two recipes for vegetable soup--but she makes it the way I used to when the children were at home. You save a little of this and a little of that--especially water from boiling or steaming vegetables (have you noticed that even when you steam broccoli or asparagus, the water turns green?). When the time is right, she throws it all in the soup pot, with whatever additions she has on hand--potatoes, turnips, yellow squash, lots of herbs.
She likes more hot pepper than I do, so I did skip over several of those recipes. And she uses parsley as lots more than decoration, which is about all I've ever done with it. In fact, at one point, out of lettuce but burdened with a whole lot of both curly and flat-leaf parsley, she makes a parsley salad. (I can never grow it because the slugs, beetles, whatever they are before they turn into butterflies, simply mow it down.) She mentions Welsh rarebit bu doesn't give a recipe--darn, I remember that from my childhood and have one recipe but would welcome another.
At the end of the book, she gives what is the most intriguing recipe of all--Cavalho Concado, or Tired Horses, from her Macanese grandmother. It's an hors d'oevres of ground chuck, flour, soy sauce, green onion, sugar and vinegar, served on small pieces of stale bread--or bread dried out in the oven. Sounds wonderful, but you might not need dinner afterward.
My cooking friends and family should all be warned they're getting this book for Christmas--it's a true treasure. I'll probably blog from time to time about the things I fix following her ideas. But I really want to learn to look in the fridge and on the front porch for herbs (which I underuse) and invent wonderful dishes with what I have. Oh, yes, she uses a lot of pasta, and a lot of farm fresh eggs.
And a note: the title comes from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, where the Queen says, "The rule is jam to-morrow and jam yesterday--but never jam to-day." Davies disagrees--and she says her cookbook is not really a cookbook, not really a memoir--it's an answer to the Queen. I like this lady and wish she lived closer than Oregon.
Her method reminds me of Jacques Pepin's fromage fort (strong cheese, I think) which uses all those bits of cheese in your fridge. Just put them in the processor with lots of garlic, fresh ground black pepper, and enough white wine to make it spreadable. If you put in Roquefort or Gorgonzola, that will dominate; if you use other cheeses, the flavor is totally different. It's good either way. Hmmm. I've got a bunch of cheese in the fridge--it may soon be time.