Cooking Through Poppy Cooks: The Food You Need

I love cookbooks. When I’m at a bookstore I always look at the sale area for a good cookbook. When I’m on holiday I buy a cookbook of traditional foods from wherever I am. When I’m at a restaurant and there’s a cookbook I get so excited I sometimes cannot properly handle myself because truly, nothing is better than a good restaurant cookbook. I also buy cookbooks from people on the internet that I think are cool. Enter Poppy Cooks.

I first discovered Poppy through her guest appearances on Sorted YouTube’s channel and immediately got the vibe of someone who I feel like I would love to meet at a really good local pub. She’s a Michelin-trained chef but somehow comes across as fun and just… normal. She’s known for her neverending love of potatoes and doing insane things with them.

I bought this book when it came out in 2021 and have made a few recipes from it, but in an effort to actually use all my cookbooks and maybe make myself a better cook, I’m going to attempt the whole damn thing. All the ones I’ve tried so far have been excellent so I’m just going to remake them.

I’ll be updating this post as I make the recipes. I would love to just continuously cook meal after meal from a book but I don’t have the stamina for a big cook every night so I need to break it up a bit.

I love the concept of this book. She has one big recipe that she then uses to make the rest of the recipes- a weeknight meal, a brunch, a potato dish, and a showstopper or two. I’ve noticed some books can give you these big quantities and say, “You can use it for anything!” but it’s nice to physically see how you can do one big batch of something and use it through the week in new, exciting ways. Call me a princess but I simply cannot eat the same thing night after night.

Something to keep in mind: I am not a chef or a food photographer. I am just a normal girl in a normal kitchen making a normal effort. This is a realistic portrait of what these dishes would look like coming out of your normal kitchen. If you want professional photography, buy the book.

The Front Pages

I know a lot of people don’t read the front pages of a cookbook, but they can hold so much information. In this one, you get a breakdown of Poppy, her experience, and how she came to be a chef. She keeps an incredibly informal, chatty writing style. Given what you’ve read of this post so far, I am clearly very into that. I also love that she’s included a list of assumptions giving what size of things like vegetables and eggs. An onion is not an onion is not an onion. I need information about sizes and approximate weights.

Even though it’s in the back I’m mentioning it here because it’s a sort of reference point: the British term to North American term chart is GOLD. I could have saved myself hours and hours of googling if I had that when I first moved to Ireland.

A Labour of Love Sauce

A disclaimer: I’m Italian and have a lot of opinions about pasta sauce. Is this my Nonna’s herb sauce that takes all day to make and tastes like me being in her kitchen at five years old? No. Is this sauce excellently delicious? Yes.

I expected it to be harder given the name, but realistically once you’ve chopped the garlic it’s a very hands off process. I used chili flakes instead of fresh chili because the grocery stores around me hate flavour, but otherwise I followed the instructions. I think I maybe should have bubbled mine a bit because it came out slightly liquid-y. It definitely adds up to more than the sum of it’s very simple parts.

I also love it’s placement in the book as a first recipe. I think pasta sauce has this air of, “slow cooked, very difficult” about it but this recipe alone shows that that isn’t always true. If you’ve never made a big pasta sauce before this is a most excellent recipe to start with. If I don’t have all day to make my Nonna’s, this is probably the version I’ll be making in the future.

Well Good Meatballs

I am very team meatball and these did not disappoint. I never would have thought to use a beef wellington inspiration for a meatball but the mix of beef, mushroom, mustard, and thyme made a delciously perfect treat. I also loved wrapping them in prosciutto. An absolute stroke of genius.

I was a bit worried because my sauce turned out a little runny but the meatballs took up a surprising amount of the sauce and the entire thing was absolutely delicious. Also, having extra sauce isn’t the worst thing.

The only substitution I made was a bit of dried thyme instead of fresh because… well look, you don’t need a six paragraph rant on what I think of the supermarkets I live in and I did not feel like getting on a bus.

I don’t know if I’d class these a true weeknight meal- if I had worked a full shift I probably wouldn’t have had the energy to make them, maybe on a Friday with a glass of wine? There was also more dishes than I’d want on a weeknight but the flavour was absolutely perfect and well made up for it.