Due to a coding error, Gentleman’s Portion: The Cookbook has apparently not been available for some time. Now the eBook publisher’s IT team have rectified the situation and the book is once again ready for purchase. This was also an opportunity to review and revise the text.

After a good launch in November 2020, zero sales for the past few months bothered me no end. Having laboured mightily on the hundred or so recipes in my new cookbook, it seems to have vanished from the eBook universe. First, they said it was a coding issue. My fault. There was no option but to recode the whole book from scratch. Job done and reloaded, the same error code appeared. The publisher double checked, found a new fault at an IT partner’s firewall and—eventually—fixed it. I can’t imagine how many sales I lost to loyal readers who gave up trying to download the book after a few clicks, but here we are just in time for Christmas.

Now the book is available through several international distributors such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. If you haven’t done so, please click on your favourite online retailer and buy a copy. It’s only 9.99 ($US, $CAN, £GBP and €EURO) in any currency. Makes book-keeping easier.

While recoding the book, I also had a chance to correct a few typos that had revealed themselves and rewrite some sections that seemed clunky. The punctuation, spelling and grammar in the second version should be exemplary. If you find any errors, please don’t tell me as I will already have heard about them from numerous other sources.

As I write in the introduction, Gentleman’s Portion: The Cookbook contains a full basket of delicious recipes, with many vegetarian options. It’s mostly what you might call comfort food, collected into the four seasons so you can more easily follow the farmers’ crop cycle and support locally grown food: A Spring Portion—when the earth awakes from its long winter sleep and we relish really fresh produce again; A Summer Portion—when market gardens and farmers’ fields overflow with bounty that sings of sunshine; An Autumn Portion—when roots and fruits dominate and farmers put their crops aside in cool dark places; and A Winter’s Portion—when we rely on food that stores well through the cold months while flavour intensifies.

It had been several years since Market to Table: The Cookbook was published as an eBook, to coincide with the broadcast of my eponymous Canadian television series—episodes of Market to Table and its predecessor Escapes with Nigel can be found on YouTube. Since then, recipes had been piling up on my Gentleman’s Portion blog and remarkably, they seem to have a consistent comfort food theme.

In both books, each recipe is preceded by a story, mostly as they appeared in the original blog here, since readers tell me they like these anecdotes. Whether you are a serious foodie, or just like browsing, I hope you find something amusing, entertaining, informative or all three in the tales I tell and the recipes I develop.

It is not a truly vegetarian book, so there are recipes with fowl, bacon, fish, dairy and eggs, but I have been trying to adopt a healthier lifestyle and apart from occasional yearnings for a steak, I have stopped writing about dishes involving beef or lamb.

Here are photos of a dozen of my favourite recipes. All are easy to make and will turn out just right if you follow my simple instructions—guaranteed!

And now, as the recipes continue to pile up again, I am starting my fourth cookbook (and seventh book). For the moment it is simply called Nigel’s Kitchen Book Four. No doubt something more appetizing will occur to me before it’s finished.

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This is Nigel’s 324th blog on Gentleman’s Portion. The SEARCH function at the top works really well if you want to look back and see some of his previous stories.

The link to Gentleman’s Portion: The Cookbook is now live, well priced at $9.99 or £9.99 and available on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Google, Kobo and Scribd.