Jeff Keys

August 16, 2011 by
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It's 12:30 AM at Vintage Restaurant and my work day is finally over. The restaurant is dead quiet and sparkly clean and I'm the last one to leave. The imprint of the day is hard wired into my bones and the echoes of the wild night still hum in the walls and whether it was a good day or a bad… read more

Graphic innovations in cookbooks

August 15, 2011 by
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I notice more and more of late that publishers are experimenting with cookbook design.  Not just in cookbooks intended for kids, where bold pictures, big type, and the occasional Elmo are par for the course.  They're re-thinking everything from illustration and type design to what the book is printed on. Last year there was BBQ25, with its heavy board, wipe-off pages.… read more

40 degrees of latitude

August 8, 2011 by
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I've often noticed that the equatorial and tropical cookbooks come out in summer, when the greatest number of people have a chance of getting the warm-weather produce typically found in those climates.  So we often see Mexican cookbooks and Thai and Vietnamese cookbooks around this time of year. This year, what I'm seeing are subtropical cookbooks--cuisines from that zone of mild… read more

2,000th book indexed

August 8, 2011 by
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We have just indexed our 2,000th cookbook and we are heading towards half a million recipes. With lots of magazines and blogs now being indexed too, the recipe index on Eat Your Books just keeps getting more and more useful. Don't forget you can add any of the online recipes to your Bookshelf - you don't have to own the… read more

Eat Your Books – minus the books

August 1, 2011 by
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I've been away from home the last week at a summer rental house, confronting all the adjustments required in an unfamiliar kitchen: radiant burners instead of propane, non-stick pans instead of cast-iron, and above all, no cookbooks except the ones I brought.  I brought just 5, which I thought was pretty restrained. And four of those were for ice cream… read more

Karen Solomon

July 28, 2011 by
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Karen Solomon talks about her love for 'The Jewish Home Cook Book'. Karen is the author of Can It, Bottle It, Smoke It and Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It   The only thing better than cookbooks is digging through a shelf of old cookbooks, and for these I am a happily-in-denial addict. Their torn covers of dated and often hilarious cover art, featuring food both… read more

Susie’s Heirloom

July 26, 2011 by
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I'm particularly excited about our guest contributor this month.  Karen Solomon's whimsically titled books Can It, Bottle It, Smoke It and Jam it, Pickle It, Cure It explore the world of DIY cooking.  They'll be my guides this summer if my garden yields the extra required for putting-up (a first, but it's looking rosy). But Solomon's piece isn't about that. It's about the cookbook… read more

Raw deals

July 18, 2011 by
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Raw food cookbooks...I love the paradox they pose.  If it's raw, then it can't be a cookbook, because there's no cooking involved.  And if there's no cooking involved, then why do you need a cookbook in the first place? This thought came to me most recently upon receiving a copy of Ani Phyo's Ani's Raw Food Asia.  Phyo is a raw food… read more

Kitchen gardeners love EYB

July 11, 2011 by
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Let's step away from the bookshelf and into the garden for a moment, shall we? I don't know if there is a time of year when I am more grateful for EYB than midsummer.  This year especially, when a temperate spring and a balanced summer have made my vegetable garden yield up treasures nearly every day.  A good garden calls… read more

Happy 4th!

July 4, 2011 by
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It being the 4th, a lot of us are celebrating a different sort of independence--independence from the stove. We're going to cookouts and picnics and barbecues.  We're getting buckets of fried chicken from wherever we can.  Of course, for some of us--including, I'm sure, many Eat Your Books readers--the Fourth means extra-big cooking projects, because we are the engine and… read more

First blog indexed

June 28, 2011 by
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We have now completed our first blog index - 1,099 recipes from the Simply Recipes blog by Elsie Bauer.  You can add the blog and recipes to your Bookshelf - every recipe has a Recipe online link back to the Simply Recipes site.  Another great feature on the blog recipes is that we can add the blogger's photos, which really enhances the… read more

Summer fruit cookbooks

June 27, 2011 by
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I have a soft spot in my heart for fruit trees, but the feeling is not mutual.  Over the years, we've tried to plant at least a dozen fruit trees on the property.  Three have survived--two apples and a pear.  The apples blossom gorgeously, but out of sync, and as they must cross-pollinate to bear, they bear scantily if at… read more

Add blogs to your bookshelf

June 16, 2011 by
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To make Eat Your Books even more useful we are adding blogs and food websites so you can now search ALL the recipes you want to use - whether they are in your cookbooks, in your magazines or on your favorite website.   Over the next few months we'll be adding more blogs and websites and we'd love to hear which… read more

Joe Yonan

June 15, 2011 by
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Joe Yonan is the Food Editor for The Washington Post and recent cookbook author I knew writing a cookbook would be a lot of work. After all, I had done it before -- in 2004, with Boston chef Andy Husbands. What I didn't quite realize, though, was how personal, and therefore how gratifying, my latest project would end up being.I suppose… read more

The baked and the beautiful

June 13, 2011 by
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When it comes to books about cake, there are the ones you use and the ones you don't.  There are the ones whose recipes you can, with a little attention, manage to produce yourself.  And then there are the ones where you just look through the pictures, slack-jawed.  I'm thinking of a book called Cakes to Dream On, with cakes that… read more

Cold and fizzy

June 6, 2011 by
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Just before the tornadoes struck, we had a week of humid, sweat-soaked heat western Massachusetts.  Then came the twisters.  They broke the heat in the course of their rapid, destructive passage, and we were grateful, at least, for that. Cool relief was the theme, albeit in a superficial way, in the mailbox too.  As I noted in the NPR summer… read more

To the sea! To the sea!

May 31, 2011 by
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The urge kicks in no later than Memorial Day: to hear the ceaseless roar of waves, to sift the sand between your toes, to eat of the shelled and the finned (maybe washed down with a pint of the foamy). Here in the land-locked portion of Massachusetts, I often just have to make do with the eating part.  Luckily, it's… read more

Magazine indexing

May 29, 2011 by
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You may have noticed a proliferation of Cook's Illustrated and Bon Appetit magazines in the EYB Library's latest indexed list. Now that we have the ability to index magazines we have several indexers making their way through piles of old magazines. We've been running a survey on the Community page to find out from you which magazines you'd like indexed. The… read more

Cookbook awards season

May 29, 2011 by
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Just as January and February are movie awards months with the Golden Globes, BAFTAs and the Oscars so May and June are cookbook awards months. The season kicked off on Friday night with the prestigious James Beard Awards event in New York City. We have a list of all the nominees and winners. Next on June 2 the international cookbook awards will… read more

Love-hate relationship with a cookbook–and it’s only day 1.

May 24, 2011 by
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Today I'm wrestling with an intriguing newcomer: The Cook's Book of Intense Flavors, by Robert and Molly Krause.  The premise of the book is fascinating: 101 unusual, vivid flavor combinations and recipes to go with them. Each combination gets a thought-provoking character précis.  Coffee, fig, and vinegar are characterized as "full-bodied complexity"; mushroom, rose and lavender as "opposites attract".  Some are… read more

More new developments

May 20, 2011 by
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We put up a new release last night with another new feature.  You can now view all comments for recipes under the Notes tab for a book.  The total number of Notes (shown next to the speech bubble) includes all recipe notes. At the top of Notes we have also added back the EYB comments which got accidentally dropped in… read more

What sells in summer?

May 19, 2011 by
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Every so often I have a look at the bestseller lists for cookbooks.  It keeps me honest--if the books people are buying aren't the books that I'm recommending, I should know why, even if that doesn't change my opinion about the books themselves. If you asked me what sells in summer, I'd probably say: eat-local books, grill books, ice cream… read more

New developments on EYB

May 17, 2011 by
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Many of you will be pleased that we have just released some much-requested features: Indexing of Magazines - we will shortly have the entire Cooks Illustrated collection indexed.   Bon Appétit, Gourmet, Cooking Lightand Delicious (UK) following soon.  Where a magazine recipe is attributed to an author we list that author so you will be able to include all recipes from a favorite author in your recipe… read more

DIY Cooking

May 16, 2011 by
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People get ambitious in the summer.  Vistas of leisure time seem to beckon, although all too often they turn out to be illusions.  Some of us decide to build decks.  Some of us buy packs of vegetable starts, which we convince ourselves will not succumb to pest attacks, July drought, and choking by weeds.  And some of us take on… read more

Alan Davidson

May 15, 2011 by
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Bruce Palling - Food columnist for the Wall Street Journal Europe looks at the life of the late Alan Davidson and recalls some memorable meetings with him.  Bruce has his own blog, Gastronenophile where you can read extended versions of his WSJ articles - including his 20+ course meal at Noma and an interview with Nathan Myhrvold at The Fat Duck.  Later this month (March 24), a library… read more
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