Post cards from the powerless

As you may have heard, Halloween came early to New England this weekend, in the form of an out-of-season snowstorm of heroic proportions.  It wasn't the the storm that was so bad, but the damage it inflicted on the trees, their boughs still laden with unfallen foliage--perfect for trapping heavy, wet snow.  All night long we heard the CRACK! of… read more

500,000 recipes indexed

500,000 recipes indexed - that's a lot of data inputting! Many people assume that this is an automated process - no, it's all done manually!  It's the only way we can provide such precise and accurate recipe searches by ingredients and categories.  No other recipe search engine does this!  We have a wonderful team of indexers headed by Deborah who take on any challenge… read more

Tracey Zabar

Susie interviews Tracey Zabar about cookbooks, kitchen favorites, and what makes a cookie tick.   I confess it: the cookie is my favorite dessert, any time of year, any day of the week, and (if we're being honest here) practically any time of day. I love cookies because they have a glorious variety of textures. I love them because they come… read more

3 ways of looking at a shrimp

Here's an interesting exercise I thought we could try.  Let's take 3 up-to-the-minute cookbooks at random off the pile and see how they address an everyday ingredient. Say shrimp. Shrimp Biryani (Indian Shrimp and Rice), from The Food52 Cookbook.  It's a fairly simple one-dish meal, with an attractive photograph at the end.  It has 18 ingredients if you count all the spices;… read more

Ground swell

Here's a completely new cookbook micro-trend:  ground meat.  To me, it seems surprising because meat cookbooks have been, if anything, increasingly DIY in recent years. There are smoke-and-cure books, and sausage books, and books dedicated to one kind of animal, and books dedicated to offal.  Diagrams of livestock sectioned into their primal cuts abound.  But only now do we see… read more

Choosing the best cookbooks–the 7 questions

Well, I've just about emerged on the other side of my first holiday cookbook roundup, and this time, I was unusually aware of my decision-making process.  You know how you're standing in front of the cookbook shelves at the store, leafing through cookbooks and trying to figure out which one to take home, and you feel paralyzed and uncertain, and… read more

Chef cookbooks, two ways

This week, two cookbooks from the Big Apple got me thinking about what it means to write a cookbook, when you're a famous chef.  It's certainly not the first time I've given thought to the subject--most recently, we looked at the new phenomenon of chefs' home-cooking cookbooks. The two I wanted to look at today, however, define the opposite ends of… read more

All tied up with a bow

Lately I've noticed a new subgenre in cookbooks, hovering somewhere between "D.I.Y.", "Entertaining," and "Baking/Pastry".  It's that tiny category of books focusing on homemade gifts from your kitchen.  You know, the box of holiday truffles, the little jar of blackberry jam, the syrup you tapped from your own trees. The first time I saw a book of this kind was… read more

Cookbooks or apps what will it be?

There seems to be a lot of online debate in the last few days on what the future holds for cookbooks.  The most exciting article for us, because EYB was the focus and it was carried around the globe, was the Associated Press article by Michele Kayal.  One of our most enthusiastic members, Mary-Claire van Leunen does a great job promoting the benefits… read more
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