Shandies are dandy

When the mercury starts to rise, people begin their quest for a refreshing beverage to sip after participating in their favorite summertime activity. A shandy is the perfect drink to quench a heat-fueled thirst, but it's great almost any time. Shandies can be simple mixtures of beer paired with lemonade, soda, fruit juice, ginger beer, or another beverage, but they… read more

Banish bland potato salad

Summer means having picnics, and having picnics means making potato salad. Sometimes that salad doesn't quite live up to expectations. Luckily Epicurious just took a look at common potato salad problems and how to fix them. The biggest complaint for potato salads is that they can be a bit bland. Epicurious recommends properly seasoning the potato cooking water - and… read more

Featured Cookbooks & Recipes

At Eat Your Books we want to bring you the best recipes - our dedicated team searches out and finds online recipes excerpted from newly indexed cookbooks and magazines. New recipes from the best blogs are indexed daily and members index their favorite online recipes using the Bookmarklet all the time. Below you'll find this week's recommendations from the EYB team.… read more

Inside Ottolenghi’s test kitchen

Yotam Ottolenghi's cookbooks are among the most popular books in the EYB Library. The recipes are vibrant, fresh, and visually stunning. If you've ever wondered what it takes to come up with these wonderful recipes, you can now satiate your curiosity, as NPR's The Salt gives you a backstage pass into the Ottolenghi test kitchen. You might think the kitchen… read more

André Soltner on the importance of mother sauces

If you asked cooks today to name the five classic mother sauces most probably couldn't recite them. But chef André Soltner certainly can, and he thinks that knowing these sauces is vital to anyone cooking in a restaurant. The esteemed chef knows a thing or two about these sauces and plenty more. The long time chef of the highly regarded Lutèce in NYC,… read more

Highlights of the 2015 Ballymaloe LitFest

For the second year running we spent a most glorious weekend at Ballymaloe (pronounced Bally-mal-loo), which hosted the third Kerrygold Cooking Literary Festival of Food & Wine (LitFest for short). The venue for the festival is split between the Ballymaloe House grounds and the nearby Ballymaloe Cookery School, which is helmed by Darina Allen and numerous members of the Allen family.… read more

May 2015 cookbook roundup

Every month Jane and Fiona wade through hundreds of cookbooks, selecting and reviewing all the best new releases of U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand cookbooks. The only thing left for you to do is to add them to your Bookshelf. US The Broad Fork by Hugh Acheson: In The Broad Fork, James Beard Award winner Acheson narrates… read more

Celebrate National Wine Day with sangria

Today is a national holiday in the US, but this year it also coincides with a "food holiday," National Wine Day (not to be confused with National Drink Wine Day). Many people are attending parades and memorial services today to honor those who have fallen while serving in the military, and in addition are celebrating the long weekend by gathering… read more

The guide to grilling guides

This long weekend marks the unofficial start of summer in the U.S. The Memorial Day holiday also kicks off the grilling season, especially for those in more northern latitudes who eagerly anticipate the first firing of the grill. Although tradition dictates that steaks and hamburgers will make an appearance, more and more people are venturing beyond meat to grill fruit,… read more

Get “yellow fever” for saffron

If you haven't cooked with saffron, the world's most expensive spice, you'll definitely want to after reading about the Ottolenghi saffron recipes featured in The Guardian. The name saffron comes from the Arabic word for thread, and the thin stigmas of the crocus flower do quite resemble thin crimson strands. Harvesting saffron is a painstaking process that has so far… read more

A big name returns with a new cookbook

It's been over a decade since Anthony Bourdain has written a cookbook. His last was 2004's Les Halles Cookbook. But that's about to change as HarperCollins imprint Ecco has signed Bourdain for a new cookbook titled Appetites, currently slated for a release in fall 2016. The book will be coauthored with Laurie Woolever. According to the publisher, the book will distill… read more

Featured cookbooks & recipes

Did you know adding online recipes to your EYB Bookshelf is a really great way to build your personal recipe collection? You can now do this even if you have a free membership! Try it out now and see how easy it is. Browse the recipes below, choose one that appeals, click on the link, and add it to your… read more

Avian flu causes worry about egg shortage

An outbreak of the avian flu in the US Midwest has prompted concerns about an impending egg shortage. Large industrial customers are developing contingency plans. Makers of products like mayonnaise, ice cream, cookies, muffins, and cake m ixes are looking to egg alternatives as a possible solution. As of this Wednesday, the flu is forcing farmers to kill more than 33… read more

A sweet seed-saving success

The farm-to-table movement has produced renewed interest in heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables. It's something that David Shields knows a lot about. Shields, a professor at the University of South Carolina, is author of Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine. His mission is to restore antebellum cultivars and foodways. About 10 years ago, as part of… read more

Sample two ‘classic recipes for modern people’

Max Sussman is the chef de cuisine at Roberta's in Brooklyn. During his tenure at Roberta's, the restaurant has received 2 stars from the New York Times. Eli Sussman is a line cook at Mile End Deli in Brooklyn, which has been featured on several "best of" lists, including Time Out, GQ, and Village Voice. The brothers have joined forces again… read more

Cookbook giveaway – Classic Recipes for Modern People

Chef brothers Max and Eli Sussman are back with their fourth cookbook, Classic Recipes for Modern People, featuring over 75 recipes that reimagine classic dishes from their childhood and yours, with a little humor baked in along the way. Get a sneak peek into the cookbook with two sample recipes shared on the EYB blog.  We're delighted to offer 3… read more

A berry good harvest

It appears that 2015's strawberry harvest in England is going to be a bumper crop. According to The Telegraph, strawberry yields are expeced to increase by nearly 20 percent this year. The bump is due to "a perfect combination of weather conditions, new growing techniques and more land given over to the crop." Despite a sluggish start to the season with several cold nights in… read more

DIY herb stripper

If you're like me, you love to browse through kitchenware catalogs. (In my case it runs a close second to perusing cookbooks.) We may already have cupboards and drawers overflowing with bowls, pans, and kitchen tools, but it's still fun to see the new cookware and gadgets or swoon over the newest color of Le Creuset. Sometimes the browsing even… read more

Rhubarb moves from sweet to savory

Rhubarb season is in full swing in the Northern Hemisphere. Usually that means pies, tarts, and crisps, but chefs are taking a look at using rhubarb in savory applications as well. The Washington Post recently devised a contest for three area sous-chefs to come up with a savory spring rhubarb dish, and the results were fabulous. The challenge was to… read more

Sarah Leah Chase breaks long hiatus to write a new cookbook

After a two-decade hiatus, Sarah Leah Chase is back with a new cookbook, New England Open-House Cookbook: 300 Recipes Inspired by the Bounty of New England, which will be released later this summer. Chase is a caterer, cooking teacher, and prolific writer who is best known for co authoring The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook. Her other cookbooks, all highly… read more

How to marble like a pro

You know those gorgeous marbled tops and spiderwebs on cakes, tarts, and cheesecakes? They're really easy and don't require any fancy equipment, says Alice Medrich (via indexed blog Food52). In addition to the classic marbling technique like the one used on Medrich's Marble cheesecake pictured left, she offers tutorials on how to make a spiderweb design, the chevron often found on Napoleons,… read more

Blanching vegetables locks in color and crunch

Spring vegetables are exciting for cooks because they are fresh, delicious, and fast. You can maximize their bright flavors and colors by blanching them before using, and indexed blog Serious Eats provides a guide to using the technique with all manner of vegetables. Blanching vegetables serves a number of purposes. First, blanching destroys "enough cellular structure to just barely tenderize… read more

New ways to get your foodie fix

Can't find enough online sources to get your foodie fix? While that's an unlikely scenario, both Facebook and Twitter have recently created new feeds that deal exclusively with food. Twitter announced its new feed on April 29.  The site's announcement noted that the obvious:  "There are many thousands of food-related Tweets people send on Twitter each day - Tweets about… read more

Cookbook giveaway – A Free Range Life: Winter Goodness

In her latest cookbook, A Free Range Life: Winter Goodness, Annabel Langbein takes a lighter approach to roasts and gravy, slow-cooker meals and winter cakes and puddings. She attempts to streamline and simplify winter cooking to give it the same easy mood that we love about summer. In addition to over 130 new recipes, A Free Range Life: Winter Goodness is… read more

Jammin’ cocktails

It's easy to end up with a large collection of assorted jams, jellies, and preserves. The tiny, adorable jars packed with fruits both novel and familiar practically beg us to take them home.  But there is only so much toast that you can eat, and rather few savoury uses for jams, so what else can you do with the surplus?… read more
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