Much more than just a pretty plate
DLifeinBalance:AFresherApproachtoEating ONNA Hay’s food appealed to me long before I became responsible for how recipes are visually realised in WaPoFood. In truth, the look of it lured me in; after all, the Australian cookbook author’s style launched the magazine (circulation 730,000) I used to track down at foreign-news stands, as well as a newspaper column and lines of housewares and food products. And 4 million books sold.
Yet looks aren’t everything, or so say folks who have nothing to do with design.
To that end, I’ve seldom been disappointed when re-creating any of her dishes, and her recipe writing skews minimalist yet does not leave too much room for guessing. The same can be said of the half-dozen or so things I tested from this book.
Why would the mere appearance of that food matter to home cooks? Along the same lines that Meryl Streep nails her character’s bluesweater speech in the film The Devil Wears Prada.
It’s a trickle-down thing: You’re not plating haute cuisine in getting dinner on the table, but “eating with one’s eyes” has been studied scientifically and cannot be discounted.
Unusual combinations
Hay food has crumbs and splotches of sauce and forks in situ, a lbeit caref ully placed, in a way that draws you in and makes you want to taste it.
The approach Hay alludes to in the subtitle treats some so-called “super foods” and alternative grains and flours to unusual combinations, such as rice flour, cauliflower, eggplant, zucchini and mint loaded into breakfast fritters.
Her super green stir-fr y contains nothing I haven’t eaten before, but its heap of sugar snap peas, edamame, asparagus by the inch, spinach, sca llions and ginger y, spicy sauce seems new and inviting on a ll sensor y levels. It a lso happens to be something you could eat your fill of wit h satisfaction and no guilt.
In Life in Balance: A Fresher Approach to Eating, a Hay devotee will notice that the author’s signature colour palette has expanded. The clean, almost-Scandinavian icy lightness and textured linens are still in use, as backdrops for platters of lemon grass tofu and beef tataki.
More prevalent here are darker hues that edge up on midnight and extend to purplish black.
The effect is hardly sombre; rather, it adds to the drama and richness of ingredients. Even brown food looks good, seemingly shot with the warmth of Woody Allen cinematography.
Relatively few ingredients
Speaking of, I haven’t had a glutenfree, vegan, non-dairy confection as rewarding as Hay’s five-ingredient Banana Cookies, in a shade of cinnamon brown.
They can be caky-soft or chewy, depending on how your oven is calibrated – and delicious either way. The flattened balls of dough are coated in Demerara sugar, which is now available at a good number of supermarkets and not to be substituted (I gave it a try).
They and the burnt almond butter shrimp with chilies both use that nut butter, a happy coincidence that will make you feel better about spending a sawbuck for a jar of the stuff.
As many ways as I have eaten my favourite seafood, t his preparation – again, easy wit h relatively few ingredients – shot right up to my topfive list.
None of the images accompanying this review are from Life in Balance, in case you were looking to see what inspires me so.
As I said before, Hay and her staff make it all look much better. As good as her food tastes.