cookbooks

The Potato Book and The Snack Hacker

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A photo of two hardback books. The one on the left is The Potato Book by Poppy Cooks, which is pink and features a photo of the author, a young blonde-haired woman, eating a chip, and The Snack Hacker by George Egg, which looks like a partially-opened sardine tin containing various snacks.

We’ve picked up a couple of new cookbooks recently: The Potato Book by Poppy Cooks (sponsored link) and The Snack Hacker by George Egg (sponsored link). And I’ll be honest: the main reason I’m writing about these new books is to break up what had been planned to be a full week’s worth of blog posts about smart home tech and firmware. As it was, we ended up buying a new car sooner than planned, and so some of those posts have been pushed back now. Anyway, on with the books.

The Potato Book

This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned a book by Poppy O’Toole, better known as Poppy Cooks, as we also have her slow cooker book and use it regularly. Poppy is known as ‘the potato queen of Tiktok’, and so I guess it was only a matter of time before she published a book of potato recipes. Indeed, the cover of The Potato Book has a quote from Nigella Lawson describing her as ‘the high priestess of the potato’.

The Potato Book is split into eight themed chapters – mashed, roast, chips/wedges/hash browns, 15-hour potatoes, world classics, baked, potato salads, bakes and extra crispies. Usually the first recipe in each chapter sets out the basics, so the very first recipe in the book is how to make a classic mashed potato with salt, butter and double cream. The rest of the chapter is then variations on the basic recipe, such as hot honey and bacon mash.

Crucially, each recipe tells you what variety of potato to use for the best results. For example, the mashed potato recipes call for Maris Piper potatoes, but others use red-skinned or baby potato varieties.

We’ve only had the book a couple of weeks, and so far, we’ve just cooked her Swiss Rösti recipe. It wasn’t bad, but didn’t end up as crispy as we’d hoped.

I’m not going to spoil the final recipe in the book, but it’s worth marvelling at it.

The Snack Hacker

The second book was The Snack Hacker by George Egg. We’ve seen George’s Anarchist Cook show before (almost ten years ago, blimey) and this is in a similar vein – unconventional ways of preparing food.

Whilst some of the recipes are akin to traditional cookbooks, where you start with a set of raw ingredients, many take an existing snack food item and ‘hack’ it into something better. For example:

  • a Gregg’s Steak Bake, with some mustard, soured cream and spices to make a Stroganoff Steak Bake
  • a Breakfast McMuffin enhanced with mackerel fillets, curry sauce and mayonnaise to make a McKedgeree Muffin

It’s not just a book of recipes though. It’s also a memoir, covering George Egg’s career and childhood memories – especially the ones that are food-related. The illustrations and design are excellent – all done by Egg’s son, Jem Ward, with whom he pitched the idea for the book.

As yet I’ve not cooked any of the recipes, but I enjoyed reading it and will be trying a couple.

The Sad Bastard Cookbook

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The cover of the Sad Bastard Cookbook

According to a bit of pseudoscience commissioned twenty years ago by a now defunct satellite holiday channel, today is ‘Blue Monday‘ and therefore the most depressing day of the year. It’s also depressing this year specifically for another reason. With this in mind, today’s blog post is about the Sad Bastard Cookbook, which has recipes for when you need to eat but don’t have the spoons to cook something.

If you want to buy the Sad Bastard Cookbook as an actual, physical paperback, here’s the link to buy it on Amazon (sponsored link). But you don’t need to pay for it – there’s an official free PDF download.

Low effort recipes

The whole idea of the Sad Bastard Cookbook is that the recipes require minimal effort, and generally use ingredients that don’t go out of date at short notice. As an example, the first three sections focus on instant noodles (ramen), starting with simply boiling water for the ramen and then eating them. Many recipes also have a ‘bottom-tier’, ‘mid-tier’ and ‘God-tier’, depending on how you’re feeling and what extra ingredients you have. One of these is ‘kinda like Pad Thai’, which uses rice noodles, peanut butter and sweet chilli sauce, and “tastes kinda like you’d imagine Pad Thai sauce would taste if you’ve never had Pad Thai before”.

Other recipes include ‘pasta in a rice cooker’ and ‘can of soup’.

Core ingredients

Here’s the bit of the book that is probably most useful – the ‘Core ingredients to keep in your kitchen’ section. There are lots of good suggestions for basic and long-life ingredients to buy, and keep on hand for times when you don’t feel like cooking but need to eat something. Even if you’re the sort of person who can usually cook something delicious, no matter how you’re feeling, it’s a really useful list of what to have on hand. I wish that past me had this for times when I’ve lived on my own, as it would’ve given me some fallback ideas for meals.

Like I said, the book is available as a free PDF – even if your mental health is fine, I strongly recommend reading it. You’ll pick up some useful hints for times when you’re late home and tired, or realise that you’re hungry at 10pm on a Sunday when the shops are all shut.