Confessions of a Hungry Woman

by Sam Woulidge (Random House Struik, R270)

Cape Town journalist and food blogger, Sam Woulidge, is probably best remembered for her great monthly columns in Woolies’ Taste magazine, in which she gives an honest and witty account of her four-year journey travelling the world and sampling its many delicacies and culinary delights.

Confessions of a Hungry Woman is Sam’s “love letter, to food and foreign places, but ultimately to South Africa”. It is a cookbook of two parts, first highlighting some of Sam’s columns published in Taste magazine and, second, it is a celebration of 14 of Sam’s foodie friends.

Says Sam: “ I don’t want to work too hard in the kitchen and would really rather share a glass of wine with my guests than worry over fussy, higher-grade-science-required recipes.”

And so she asked each friend to produce a menu for six people featuring easy but impressive dishes – fail-proof recipes with the guarantee that if Sam could make them, anybody could.

The result is a mouth-watering collection of 45 recipes – from the Badenhorst’s rare roast sirloin with fresh horseradish sauce and baby onions and Jacques’s whole baked salmon with cranberries, pine nuts and parsley, to Johan and Peter’s boozy prawns with tomatoes and olives, the easiest ciabatta bread and malva puddings.

The book is beautifully illustrated and superbly written, sprinkled with Sam’s tips and notes at the end of each recipe. She shares highlights of her travels and her childhood.

You’ll read this from cover to cover.