The Importance of Lunch : And Other Real-Life Adventures in Good Eating

In this mouth-watering collection of witty, topical and common-sense essays, award-winning critic John Allemang brings us back to a basic but often forgotten truth about food: it's one of life's most elemental and reliable pleasures.

Allemang pairs each essay with easy, timeless (and occasionally eccentric) recipes from his own kitchen. They include dark mushroom risotto, ripe peach crisp, chicken with mustard and nuts, the ultimate mussels in wine, the redoubtable head cheese, and an Indian sweet he calls carrot fudge.

In his prose as much as his cooking, Allemang takes aim at our tendency to make food a burden, whether by treating it as a form of ostentation or as an occasion for guilt. In his life, and in this book, food is a joy.

John Allemang's "On the Table" column ran for several years in The Globe and Mail; he is now the paper's television critic. A food enthusiast since he first made the child's improved version of scrambled eggs (add ketchup while cooking), Allemang has been writing about food  --  for The Good Food Guide of Britain, the Globe and Toronto Life, among other publications -- since 1977. He lives with his family in Toronto and is the occasionally grumpy father of two teenage vegetarians.