A Platter of Figs

David Tanis' world of cooking and eating is one I've never even dreamed about. His meals are full of seasonal veg and friends who love food as much as he does. All his recipes are to cook for at least eight people. The recipes are grouped into meals (as if for parties) and the meals are grouped by seasonality. Each meal has much to teach about cooking and combining flavors. Of course, being seasonal, his winter meals don't involve many vegetables. However, in this book, that just doesn't matter. It isn't his use of vegetables that captivates readers. It's his use of fruit. If he had dedicated the entire book to celebrating seasonal fruit, it would have been an even better book. As he describes being seated around a table with one's friends eating pears and parmigiano I forgot all his other recipes. Not to say that they aren't good, but his fruit recipes are divine! He opens the book with an introduction called "The Way to Eat" that tells readers about his first experiences cooking and takes us all through his journey with food up to the present. He writes about people who have fed him and taught him about food. I loved journeying from Ohio all across the country and, eventually, to Europe with him. A Platter of Figs is a remarkable journey and one full of remarkable food.

Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant

This is a book to read alone. Seek out a quite place. Perhaps over a meal alone. Choose to be alone. Enjoy it. But do not read it lonely. That is another matter entirely. And not one to be taken lightly. These "confessions of cooking for one and dining alone" can be decadently alone, but in others the writers tell of extremely lonely times in their lives. Jenni Ferrari-Adler collected essays from 27 writers and each of them has a different take on the experiences of eating alone or cooking only for oneself. When I first opened it, I was swept away by the idea of spoiling oneself with fabulous meals, not to be shared. That glamour soon wore off as I got deeper into the book and found several sadder stories. Their reality tore at me. I wondered what else is happening to such and such a writer? Have they solved the conflict in the story or are they still alone or, perhaps, still without a new favorite restaurant? I'll never know and that is part of the delight and the charm. I feel as if I've met all these people, like they have become my friends, even more so than is usual with my relationship with the authors of the books I read. These stories are so intimate, not like a book signing or any other way I could possibly meet these writers. It's just me and the one writer. No other fans or anyone else to monopolize the conversation. Even we hardly speak, just understand. It's just me and Ann Patchett over a bowl of oatmeal. I've never loved oatmeal so much as when I eat it with Ann. What a shame I have never met her!

Jamie's Kitchen

This book is begins with salads and then is broken up into cooking methods. Uncooked dishes, then steaming, followed by poaching ending with roasting and then sweets and baking. The salad chapter at the beginning is full of lovely, fresh, innovative salads. Several even use root veg, which I adore in salads. Of course, the roast chapter is full of meat and the frying chapter is full of fish. The deserts are very simple and often fruit based. Every chapter is full of wonderful recipes, from his flavored salts to his ravioli with roasted red onions, thyme, pinenuts, and maris piper potato, they are all delicious. Jamie Oliver is his usual witty self which makes this a very entertaining book in addition to a very useful one. The division of it into cooking method chapters makes it a wonderful book to improvise off of and to learn from. No matter your achievements in the kitchen this book will be an enjoyable and educational read.

In Nirmala's Kitchen

In Nirmala's Kitchen, traditional food is celebrated from 15 countries and regions. The origins of recipes range from her native Guyana, in South America, to North Africa to Tibet and all over the rest of the world. Her chapters on various countries in Asia were particularly good. Her roti flatbreads are good and her cardamom coconut macaroons are little clouds of heaven. Of course, since her recipes are authentic, the ingredients are a little hard to find. It would be better, though, if she tried to cover few countries and went into more detail with each. It would also be nice to have more food and fewer drinks. The guide at the end of the book to Nirmala's exotic ingredients is rather discouraging than otherwise and makes me desire a simpler shopping list for a less authentic dish. 

Jamie's Dinners

Really basic, simple, hearty stuff. Just old fashioned really British food. "proper bloke food" as Jamie sometimes calls it. He covers several basic sauces and then shows the reader lots of different ways to use them. His "five minute wonders" chapter was rather a let down. the shopping for them makes them almost as much work as cooking something already in the house. His chapter on "sarnies" is wonderful. Sarnies are British slang for sandwiches by the way. He does some of them on sandwich presses and others are cold. In addition to loads of great sandwiches, his pastas are wonderful. He included potato salad and other such dishes in his salad chapter, which was rather disappointing after reading all the great salad recipes in his other books. He usually does such new, fresh salads which use ordinary ingredients in such unusual ways. The desert chapter was also disappointing. They just didn't look appetizing. Jamie's done better books, unless you like pictures of babies. Then you might consider it one of his best.

Healthy Heart Cookbook

The words American Medical Association on the cover almost prevented me reading it. But luckily, the salmon on the cover overrode that revulsion. The twenty page introduction on heart health and the virtues of exercise was another count against. Then I began reading the recipes. Beautiful photographs accompany most of them. Delicious enough photographs that even the few recipes without photographs, the reader is willing to trust. The main courses presented use a great variety of veg, though many also involve fish and, a few of them, meat. The deserts look lovely and fresh and contain little fat. The poached pears with a berry-orange sauce are just wonderful. The book ends with a picture glossary of ingredients that can be very helpful. This is a book for function, not entertainment.

Bold Italian

Scott Conant began the book by explaining his ideas on Italian food. He tells us about the simplicity, boldness, and honesty of his food. The theory behind this cookbook is great. Pages and pages just full of a love of food that I can relate to fill the introduction. He gives the reader lots of wonderful information and words like scarpetta ("little shoes" in Italian, referring to scraps of bread used to sop up leftover sauce on a plate). When I progressed beyond the introduction, though, things changed. Both photographs and recipes look revolting. His marinated shallots are ok, but that's about it. Many of the dishes have fancy sauces drizzeled over them. Others use many fancy ingredients that are hard to find. But all of them have one thing in common. They all contain meat or fish and, sometimes, both. Every one of them. Even the vegetable side dishes are topped with anchovy butter and shredded or crumbled meat. Panchetta is used in almost every recipe. For all his "simple" and "honest" food, his recipes are full of snails and sweetbreads, though at least, he does not pair the two.

The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen

In between abused, yellowed paperback mysteries and slim, faded picture books Gold embroidery on red silk shone out. A black rectangle enclosed gold letters proclaiming that the secrets of a good Chinese kitchen lay in wait for anyone patient enough to comb through the whole booksale cart. Library carts usually don't have much, but now and then you find a gem. It's always a risk. You've never read it before. What if you don't like it? It's now or never, you have to reach for it. A dollar goes into the library's coffers and a potential treasure goes home with you. No lottery could be half so exciting or rewarding. I opened it and memories flooded back to me. Foods I have eaten, stories I have heard, bathed me in comfort and remembrance. I'm not Chinese, but the stories that Grace Young told and the recipes she shared made me feel as if I had grown up in her house, or perhaps that she had grown up in mine. I don't cook her recipes very often, but if I'm feeling lonely or homesick, I retreat into her pages to find family.

Jamie's Italy

Ah......Jamie Oliver. The best looking chef in Britain. Can I resist reading every book of his that I get my hands on? I think not. Not only is he fantastic looking, but he also writes very good recipes. His cookbooks are the sort where you read every word and can actually go cover to cover. The comments in the margins or at the bottom of a page are very much worth reading. He tells his readers so many wonderful stories and uses so many funny sayings that he writes a very good read. Of course, since this is a book about Italy, he's not stingy with the hard to find ingredients, even suggesting that his readers should grow their own cavolo negro, Italian dark cabbage, because it's not available in stores in the UK or America. So, just don't try to make an authentic ribollita. Most of the recipes are quite good with ingredients substituted in for anything rare. His pastas are superb as are all his veg dishes. The only other warning is that there are two or three pictures of Jamie and his friends working with whole, raw, dead animals. So while this is a very worth while book to read, just keep it away from the kiddies.

The Improvisational Cook

Shasta pointed at it on the library shelf with a laugh of "Oh! that will be perfect for you, Mom. You're always improvising!" I doubtingly took it my hands, asking myself how anyone could write a book telling you how to improvise. It seemed like an oxymoron, but it wasn't. I read it at the time only to humor my son and was therefore disappointed. I wasn't reading it for fun. I was just glancing through it to please him. I took it home. It lay on my bedside table for a week before I picked it up again. I gave myself so many reasons not to like it, not to want to read it, but manly it was the lack of pictures through out the book that threw me. I like to see what my food is meant to look like before I try to recreate the author's vision. Or perhaps, I was always a sucker for picture books. Author Sally Schneider finally got my attention with her "magic peppers" which became a weekly staple for me to make. Then her oven roasted tomatoes. By the time I read her recipe for oven fries, I was a fan. Every time I am tempted to go back to fast food and red meat, I eat her "post-modern oven fries." Preferably with a spicy black bean burger (from the freezer) on a toasted whole wheat bun spread with a sweet mango chutney. No fast food joint can attain that bliss! Each time I open the book I see a recipe that I haven't payed attention to before that opens up a whole world of new improvisations. Whether I follow the recipes precisely or make it up as I go along, loosely basing my dish on an idea of hers, Schneider never lets me down.

The Enchanted Broccoli Forest

Faded purple binding drew me in past the brightly colored spines of newer cookbooks. The title held me attention. I rolled the words around in my mouth like smooth, rich dark chocolate. I hadn't read Moosewood or any other books by Mollie Katzen. I hadn't even heard of her. And I certainly wasn't a vegetarian. I began to read. This wasn't my first cookbook, but it was my first cookbook crush. I had read other books by skimming recipes and sometimes fervently disagreeing with the author. But I trusted Mollie implicitly. That is until page 200. Escalloped Apples au Gratin. It sounded interesting. Before, that is, I read a request of the author at the top of the page, "Please don't be deterred by the presence of sauerkraut in this recipe." She went to tell me that I needn't inform my guests of its presence and that she had tricked many a sauerkraut loather into eating it. My trust fled. Mollie had betrayed me. My author, who I loved so much, respected so much, was willing to fool me into facing my greatest childhood fear. Sauerkraut. I had been willing to try anything she asked, all through her wild and creative recipes. This was just going too far. Of course, I still read the rest of the book devotedly. I loved everything in the book, from her vegetable soups at the beginning to her meal planning tips at the end, except, of course, those Escalloped Apples au Gratin. Mollie guided me through her enchanted forest and lead to new and uncharted recipes of my own. With her, I fell in love with reading cookbooks for pleasure. I loved the comments she made and the little pictures in the corners of pages. It was an amusing and enlightening book. And someday, I'll brave the sauerkraut and trust her on one more thing. It won't be for nothing, either.