The Cincinnati Enquirer

Required Reading

Don't blink, or spring will be over and it will be summertime. It's a time of year with special cooking demands. There is an abundance of fresh things to cook, and it's the only time of year some people entertain, because they can do it outdoors. Most of us like simpler foods, served as close to their original form as possible.

That's what Nigella Lawson's specialty is anyway, so her new book Forever Summer (Hyperion; $35) is a natural. Famous for her Style Network show Nigella Bites, Lawson is good at collecting and presenting recipes that make cooking seem easy and enjoyable; she introduces all of them with an evocative paragraph, very English in its off-handedness. Many of her recipes began life as thrown-together leftovers.

There are simple pasta dishes, such as linguine with chili, crab and watercress; salads including a carrot and peanut salad and another with watermelon, feta and olives. Meat dishes include Italian-style crispy lamb chops, Sicilian vinegar chicken and a new, fresh take on ham with pineapple. Many of the desserts are English summer-afternoon-inspired, such as chocolate raspberry Pavlova, lemon cupcakes, rhubarb fool and summer crumble.

Timely Tip

Nigella Lawson on begging recipes:

"This is how this game works: cooking isn't about the suspicious guarding of closely kept secrets but is a matter of sharing, passing on, the almost gossipy dissemination of habits and practices; recipes that are considered high-level security documents are not recipes that survive (or ones, frankly, that you'd want to eat.)"

From Forever Summer