"Donna Hay" news and stories

With a gentle anise flavor, as well as a great crunch, fresh fennel is delicious in this salad and even on its own when sliced thinly. If you're looking to update your salad greens, this fennel and parsley salad is perfect. Due to its simplicity, you can change up the ingredients very easily and create new versions of it throughout the fall months.

Read on for the recipe from the cookbook: Instant Entertaining by Donna Hay.

I guess I was due. I mean, it has to happen occasionally, right? It all started Saturday afternoon when I was hanging out with some friends. Angie and I started talking madeleines (because of my post last week) and she handed me a beautiful Donna Hay cookbook to take a peek at her madeleine recipe. I've always loved flipping through Donna's magazine in Barnes and Noble and I was quickly drawn into this book of hers as well. The Simple Lemon Cake recipe leaped out at me and I copied it down to try at home.

Tonight I felt like baking and so I flipped open the moleskine notebook into which I had written the recipe and started to pull ingredients together for the cake. I added some chopped rosemary to the lemon zest, thinking that it would add a nice depth of flavor, but that was the only addition I made. It smelled wonderful as it baked, and when I tested it with a skewer after the prescribed 35 minutes, it came out clean. After letting it cool for a while I cut into it and discovered that something was...off. It was as if the center just hadn't baked. I put it back into the oven for a while, but soon discovered that no amount of time and heat was going to fix this sucker.

I once had something similar happen to a loaf of banana bread into which I put too much apple sauce, but I was a little agog that it had happened while I used a seemingly tried and true recipe with which I hadn't messed around (unless somehow I wrote the recipe down incorrectly). It has a good flavor but resembles something closer to a pudding than a cake. I always hate it when good ingredients don't reach their full potential. The recipe is after the jump, in case anyone wants to try it on their own, or just take a peek and tell me where I may have gone wrong.

Photo by Marisa McClellan

Hot, comforting and filling, risotto is comfort food - albeit one that is a cut above a casserole or other hearty, quick-fix dish. It is not that risotto is difficult to make, but the thing that makes it special is the slow cooking and constant stirring that develops the creamy texture that is so satisfying. This Risotto with Smoked Mozzarella and Radicchio was made by Tami, from Running with Tweezers for the food blogging event, Hay Hay It's Donna Day, in which variations of Donna Hay recipes are celebrated by bloggers. This particular variation on a basic risotto comes from Food & Wine magazine. While many risottos use Parmesan as the main cheese, this one gets a deeply satisfying flavor and creamier than usual texture from smoked mozzarella cheese. The richness of such a cheesy dish is cut by the slightly bitter crunch of radicchio. The wonderful thing about risotto is that there are so many ingredients that can be used to make it that it can really be customized to your preferences. It is just a matter of getting down the basic technique and being willing to commit a few extra minutes to stirring.

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Recipes for home cooks tend to be formulated for a specific numbers of diners, usually 2, 4 or 6, which are all fairly common family numbers. Most recipes are easy to double, so you can turn a chicken dinner for four into a meal for eight quite easily. Recipes for entertaining and parties, however, are different. You generally want small or bite-sized portions and need a single recipe that will feed a house or yard full of people. Fortunately, there are several cookbooks on the market that can help you out here by providing you with lots of recipes that a specifically geared towards pleasing crowds. These are some of my favorites. Some are more traditional and some are more current, but all are great additions to home libraries.

• Party Food by Barbara Kafka
• Entertaining by Donna Hay
• Williams-Sonoma Entertaining
• Joy of Cooking: Party Foods and Drinks
• Just a Bite by Gale Gand

This isn't a complete list, by the way. What are your favorite entertaining cookbooks?

[Photo by Nicole Weston]