“New” vs. “All in One Place” cookbooks

October 16, 2012 by
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Fall cookbooks have been streaming in over the threshold, and over the weekend I got the call for cookbook roundup.  So, this morning I sat on the kitchen floor, where stacks of books have been piling up, and started sorting. There are three big piles: (1) "Give away," (2) "Keep but not under consideration for roundup," and (3) "Roundup candidates".… read more

Money is no object! (and neither is time.)

October 9, 2012 by
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Ah, the restaurants of the 1%.  I haven't been inside one since the 1% were more like the 20%, over a decade ago.  And though I wasn't part of the 20% even then, I could once in a while visit their culinary haunts. The kind of personalized, luxe experience now enjoyed by patrons of the world's most rarified eateries may… read more

A Mideast revolution in cookbooks

October 2, 2012 by
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 I've said it before and I'll say it again--the most exciting subject area in cookbook publishing these days is the Middle East (followed perhaps by Southeast Asia).  It seems like every week brings a gorgeous new book full of chickpeas and sesame and pomegranates and dates.  Right now it seems to be all about the Fertile Crescent.  Yotam Ottolenghi wowed… read more

Grains…taken as a whole

September 25, 2012 by
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Remember how it used to be with whole grains?  You'd go to a natural-foods store asking for farro or spelt, and the assistant manager would say, "how do you spell that again?"  And then, if you were lucky, you'd score some of last year's wheatberries, which you would forget to label. and then they'd sit on the shelf until the… read more

Catching Downton Fever

September 17, 2012 by
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It's 111 days until the premiere of Downton Abbey's third season--not that anyone's counting!--and cookbook publishers are doing their best to milk the nostalgic, Downton-deprived masses. Adams Media, which brought us the Unofficial Hunger Games and Unofficial Game of Thrones Cookbooks, has come through again. The Unofficial Downton Abbey Cookbook has the usual blend of just plausible and just silly… read more

Cakes from the Dark Side

September 10, 2012 by
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The other day I got a serious problem in the mail.  I was briskly opening up boxes and bags of new fall cookbooks when--blam!--there it was, staring up at me with an evil expression.  Twisted Cakes, it read, and beneath that was a Technicolor splurge of frosting which swiftly resolved into a hideous, grinning clown-face that didn't even pretend not… read more

Going back to bread

September 4, 2012 by
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We've just rounded the corner on Labor Day, which means...it's bread season again! Time to make soup and swab the bowl with torn and crusty slices.  Time to slice sandwich breads for school lunches.   Time to rise early and smell the claylike aroma of the yeast.  Soon, there will be a sweet spot near the wood stove that's perfect… read more

Late with the Lunchbox

August 29, 2012 by
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The kids went back to school today, and my brain is slowly waking up from its summery haze, still smelling vaguely like sunblock.  Logistics are flying left and right as I try to remember how to do all the things School Year Mom does. One thing I didn't even attempt this week was one of SYM's harder events: packing the… read more

EYB and the seasonal cook

August 20, 2012 by
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Although I've been gardening vegetables for almost 10 years and have made enough mistakes to consider myself sort of "experienced," harvesting has always been a weak point for me.  If I haven't been vigilant, the late crops are buried under weeds and I can't find them, or the pests have munched them to bits.  As for the early crops, they… read more

Tackling the faraway nearby

August 13, 2012 by
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Two vastly different cookbooks arrived recently.  The only thing they had in common was that each focused on a country far, far away from this one, and barely addressed by other cookbooks. They gave me a chance to think about the way we indulge our taste for adventure by cooking the food of faraway places, and the way it sometimes… read more

The portable pantry

August 6, 2012 by
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I'm away this week with my family on Lake Michigan.  As I prepared for our trip, I stumbled on a question all us cooks on vacation have to ponder:  what to pack?  I don't mean the usual stuff: swimsuit, sunscreen, a cheap novel or two.  I mean:  what to pack from the kitchen?  knowing that kitchens away from home are… read more

Recipe wishlists: how to handle them?

July 30, 2012 by
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OK, so I could use some advice.  As you probably know, I review cookbooks and test recipes most nights.  As I go through new cookbooks, I post-it dozens of recipes I'd like to try, just like everybody else.  And just like everybody else, I only get to a fraction of the recipes before I get distracted by something (in my… read more

International Eclectic

July 23, 2012 by
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Is it me, or are we seeing a rise in unclassifiably ethnic cookbooks? It used to be that you might run across a cookbook author with an unusually well-travelled culinary past--Tessa Kiros of Falling Cloudberries, say, whose recipes are Finnish and Greek and South African, just for a start.  Books like hers are as much a story of the author's… read more

5 kitchen things I can do without

July 19, 2012 by
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A little while ago, I wrote a post venerating the 5 kitchen things I can't do without.  I thought, in the interests of candor, I'd do a counter-post showcasing just a few of the many flaws in my frustrating kitchen. For a person who writes about food professionally, I have an incredibly bad kitchen.  It's really hard to convey just how… read more

Lazy about lunch

July 16, 2012 by
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I just realized today while once again punting on lunch--a quarter of a honeydew, a chicken-apple sausage, and an iced decaf--that while I use recipes almost every night for dinner, I almost never crack a cookbook for lunch.  And I'm fairly willing to bet that you don't either. It's not really surprising.  Some of us are working when lunch arrives,… read more

Don’t Try This At Home. On Second Thought, Go Ahead!

July 9, 2012 by
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In 2005, Jane and Michael Stern published Roadfood, an adoring and adorable guide to dives and obscure eateries across America.  I loved the Sterns' vision of a life lived driving from one delicious thing to the next (although as they revealed in their memoir, it's not as easy as it looks).  They are no longer together, but I'll always have… read more

Independence, locavore style

July 3, 2012 by
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Kitchen Gardeners International, the terrific local-food organization whose advocacy helped to establish the White House vegetable garden, used to run a wonderful event called Food Independence Day.  Folks from all over the country would participate online and pledge to eat all or part of their Independence Day meal from local sources.  On an interactive map, you could see who was… read more

Popular vs. timeless

June 26, 2012 by
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Just because it's fun to check in with the rest of the world from time to time, here's the 5 best-selling cookbooks on Amazon today.  (I'll just list the titles, on the principle that sometimes it's OK to judge a book by its cover.) The Skinny Rules: The Simple, Nonnegotiable Principles for Getting to Thin Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat,… read more

5 kitchen things I can’t do without

June 24, 2012 by
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Each of us has a different approach to kitchen equipment.  Some of us--whether because we're just starting out as cooks, or we live alone, or because we're minimalists or purists--have a fairly austere selection: a couple of good knives of different sizes, cutting board, measuring tools,  a few good pots. The rest of us tend to accumulate.  Some of us love… read more

Teen and “student” cookbooks: really necessary?

June 18, 2012 by
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Summer's just about upon us, and even the latest high school and college graduations are finishing up.  Each year, I wonder: how many of those new graduates are getting cookbooks as presents?  And how many of those cookbooks have names like "Clueless in the Kitchen" or "Teen Cuisine" or "Teens Cook" or "Awesome Recipes for Teen Chefs" or "Where's Mom… read more

Pops: Cake or Ice?

June 11, 2012 by
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As long as I could remember, "pops" were something you bought off a truck--some kind of unnaturally-colored ice on a stick you didn't know whether to lick or bite, but ate anyway after a swim on a hot day. Then, I married into a Midwestern family and got used to hearing "pop" in places where I was used to hearing… read more

The end of baking season?

June 4, 2012 by
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It started happening last week already.  I'd planned to bake a couple loaves of bread for sandwiches.  But around mid-morning, when I got around to pulling down the flour and finding the yeast, it was already muggy and still and shaping up to head toward 85 degrees.  I looked at the oven.  The oven looked at me.  We agreed to… read more

“Having it all in one place”: a good enough reason to keep a cookbook?

May 30, 2012 by
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In the days before I developed a systematic winnowing process for choosing my favorite cookbooks, I often found myself making a familiar argument, as I stood - book in hand - over the discard pile.  "But having all these recipes in one place - that's got to be worth something, right?" Usually the cookbook in question leans on a lot… read more

Going without: are photos essential in a cookbook?

May 21, 2012 by
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Remember the old, unillustrated days of cookbooks, when you opened to a page of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, or Joy, and your eyes always fell on an unbroken page of solid words?   Oh, you might get a diagram of primal cuts on a beefer or something like that.  But as for the recipes themselves?  How they were… read more

Three cheers for garden cookbooks!

May 15, 2012 by
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With spring firmly underway and greenery springing up in every direction, I'd like to say a few words in praise of one of my favorite types of cookbooks--kitchen garden books.  Unlike, say, grill books or preserving books, it's not a densely populated category--there might be one every year or two.  They're all roughly the same format:  a focus on each… read more
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