On Trusting Food Bloggers, Cookbook Authors and Their Recipes

How do you know if you can trust a recipe from a food blogger, a chef, or a cookbook author? Why do we trust some recipe authors more than others? And why do we not trust certain recipe authors at all?

We're inundated by food blogs, food websites and recipe aggregation sites these days. There are so many cookbooks out there, and more coming out every year, that it's almost funny. And they all seem to have some kind of marketing angle, food niche or some celebrity chef behind them in order to stand out from the pack.

And there's nothing more frustrating than trying a new recipe and having taste bad. It can take the fun out of cooking for weeks. No, months!

New cooks--those who haven't yet developed an eye for discerning good recipes from bad ones--are like lambs led to slaughter in this world.

But yet there are certain cooks and chefs I instinctively trust: writers and cookbook authors like Mollie Katzen, Paul Prudhomme and Jay Solomon, for example. Among food bloggers, I instinctively trust recipes from people like Dave at Food and Fire, Melissa at Alosha's Kitchen, Jules at Stonesoup, and Mike at Dad Cooks Dinner, just to name a few.

And then there are the cooks and food bloggers I instinctively don't trust: like Martha Stewart, or Shauna Ahern. Martha Stewart has a reputation for complex, often difficult, recipes. Shauna Ahern has an unfortunate reputation for publishing sloppy, error-ridden recipes.

I think it comes down to consistency. As circular as it may sound: if you're reliable, people will rely on you. They'll see you as a generally sound source of good recipes. This is what I'd like to have for my reputation here at Casual Kitchen. People know what they're predominantly going to get here: easy, healthy and laughably inexpensive recipes. Sure, not all readers will like all of my recipes, but the majority of readers should like the majority of my recipes... or else I'm doing it wrong.

I'd also add that the standards differ between regular bloggers and professionalized websites or cookbooks or magazines. Recipes from professionalized sites have test kitchens, editors, copy editors and fact-checkers: in other words, they have a staff of people who exist to check things over. This isn't to say that you'll never find a mistake in a professionalized publication, but the vast majority of mistakes will get caught and fixed.

Therefore, the professionalized realm is, and should be, less forgiving: If you publish a bad or error-ridden recipe on a professionalized media site, your reputation can suffer permanent harm.

I think this is why, for example, a widely-read food blogger like Shauna Ahern can catch heavy flack after publishing error-ridden recipes on professionalized food sites. Ahern's infamous "Potato-Mushroom Tart" on Martha Stewart's website is an object example: not only did it leave out "potatoes" in the ingredient list (an error several commenters quickly caught), but the savory recipe also accidentally included a sweet crust recipe containing cinnamon and sugar (an error that several commenters caught after having made the recipe, which apparently tasted awful). By the way, this recipe, and the Martha Stewart-affiliated website that contained it, have long since been deleted. But as we all know, the internet never forgets.

Look, nobody is saying everything must be perfect everywhere and always. But if you're publishing recipes on major media company websites, you (or the site publishing you, or ideally both) have an obligation to not post recipes with catastrophic errors in them. Don't you think?

Readers, how do you know who to trust when you read food blogs? How do you think about this issue?



For further reading:
1) Shauna Ahern's infamous and error-ridden Potato Mushroom Tart post, courtesy of the wayback machine.
It's quite interesting to read the comments--there's an entire a story arc there. First, a series of increasingly frustrated comments from readers who can't believe such a glaring error could exist in a recipe from a well-known food blogger on a Martha Stewart site no less. Next, days later, a response from a site editor. Then, yet another day later, a response/excuse from Shauna Ahern herself ("I'm not sure why people are so upset"). After that, a series of weird sockpuppet-like comments ("this recipe was delish!"). And then an intriguing meta-discussion of whether it's "mean" or "a personal attack" or "hate" to criticize a bad recipe on a major media company's food website. Really interesting on a few levels.

2) About a month later, Ahern published another highly suspect recipe, this time on The Food Network's website.

3) Not for the faint of heart, and don't go here if you have anything else to do today: A 1,391-page (and growing) thread on Shauna Ahern at the Get Off My Internets forum.


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Giveaway! Rotisserie Grilling

Readers! I've got two free Kindle edition copies of Mike Vrobel's new book Rotisserie Grilling and I'd like to give them away to two lucky commenters.

Mike is the author of the excellent food blog Dad Cooks Dinner, and he's taught me the majority of what I know about grilling. Now, he's officially an indie author with his comprehensive and easy-to-understand cookbook on the techniques and secrets of rotisserie grilling--a subject that, intriguingly, isn't really addressed anywhere elsewhere in the cookbook marketplace.

Mike's book covers literally everything: You'll learn how to set up your own rotisserie at home. You'll learn the pros and cons of different types of grills. You'll learn everything you need to know to make magazine-caliber meals out of rotisserie poultry, pork, beef, roasts, ribs and lamb. You'll learn the techniques of trussing, spitting (no, not that kind of spitting), salting, brining, dry and wet rubs, marinating--even "brinerating." And Mike also shares more than fifty of his top favorite rotisserie recipes.

In other words, CK readers are in for a treat with today's giveaway.

As always, I want to use this giveaway to help readers cross-fertilize and promote their own work, so here are the laughably simple rules to enter today's giveaway: Just leave a comment below with a grilling, roasting or barbecue recipe you'd like to publicize from your blog, and share a link to it in your comment! You'll get your work in front of all of Casual Kitchen's readers too.

It doesn't matter if the recipe you share is meat-based, veggie-based... or carbon life form-based. Baked potatoes, roasted veggies, secret marinades, recipes for steaks, shellfish or shrimp--I don't care. What I want are recipes, people! Get the word out on what you've written, and we can make this into a resource for everyone.

PS: If you don't have a blog, feel free to share a favorite recipe from the site of a blogger you follow. If by some horrible twist of fate you don't know any grilling, roasting or BBQ recipes, you can still enter: just leave a comment with your name and some way for me to reach you.

Once again, here are the rules:

1) Leave a comment below
2) Share a link to a grilling, roasting, barbecue or marinade recipe on your blog.
3) Sit back and enjoy while our readers cross-fertilize.

I'll make a random selection of the two winners on Monday, September 24, at noon Eastern time. Let's get to sharing recipes!




How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

The Tired & Hungry Cook's Companion

This post is a quick update on an affiliate relationship that readers can use to help support the extensive free content here at Casual Kitchen.
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Long time readers know of my deep respect and admiration for Jules at Stonesoup. Well, right now, Jules is offering an enormous discount on her latest e-cookbook, The Tired & Hungry Cook's Companion, and I wanted to tell readers that Casual Kitchen is honored to have an affiliate relationship with Jules' consistently exceptional work.

This cookbook is exactly the kind of thing we love here at CK: it's designed to help cooks with little or no time put inexpensive, healthy and easy-to-make dinners on the table. And right now, (until Sunday October 17th) this cookbook is on sale at 48% off!

Jules brings you 95 recipes, each with multiple variations, for the laughably cheap price of $19. And there's also a premium version complete with video instructionals, available for $49 with the same generous discount.

I recommend Jules' work absolutely and without reservation to my readers, and Jules, to her credit, backs up her work too--with a 100% unconditional money-back guarantee. Stop over at her site and take a look!

Shrimp Creole, Paul Prudhomme Style

"Mmmm.... this is restaurant-quality stuff!"

Whenever we have dinner guests over--especially friends who eat out all the time and rarely cook--I know this is the highest of high praise.

And Chef Paul Prudhomme's Shrimp Creole is one of those "restaurant quality" recipes. It's not an easy recipe, and it's not exactly laughably cheap like many of the other recipes here at Casual Kitchen, but it's still very much worth the slight extra expense and effort--and it's still far cheaper than a similar restaurant meal. If you like spicy, rich food, you won't believe you made something this good with your own hands.


So many people are shocked to find out that a regular person--yep, a person just like you or me--can cook amazing dinners just like this at home. You can.
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Shrimp Creole
Modified from Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen

Ingredients:
2 pounds medium to large shrimp, with shells on
2 1/2 cups, in all, of seafood or shrimp stock

1/4 cup chicken fat, pork lard, bacon fat or Crisco
2 1/2 cups, in all, chopped onions
2 cups chopped celery
1 1/2 cups chopped green bell pepper

4 Tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1 bay leaf
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons white pepper
1 teaspoon cayenne (hot) pepper
3/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 1/2 teaspoons Tabasco
1 1/2 teaspoons dried basil
1 Tablespoon dried thyme leaves

3 cups peeled tomatoes, chopped
1 1/2 cups canned tomato sauce
2 teaspoons sugar

Plenty of cooked rice

Directions:
1) Peel and rinse shrimp, refrigerate until needed, saving the shells to use in your shrimp stock. Chop onions, celery, bell peppers and garlic. Also, bring a medium saucepan of water to a boil, briefly blanch tomatoes, peel, and set aside for later.

2) Heat the chicken fat or other fat over high heat in a large pot. Add one cup of the onions and cook over high heat for 3 minutes, stirring frequently. Lower the heat to medium and keep stirring, until the onions have caramelized* (see below) into a rich brown color, but not burned, another 3-5 minutes.

3) Add the rest of the onions, celery, green peppers and butter. Cook over high heat, stirring occasionally, until celery and pepper become tender, roughly 5 minutes.

4) Add: garlic, bay leaf, all spices, Tabasco, and just 1/2 cup of the stock (basically add everything but the tomatoes, tomato sauce, sugar and the rest of the stock). Cook over medium heat for 5 minutes, stirring and scraping the pan bottom well.

5) Add the tomatoes and simmer for another 10 minutes. Then add the tomato sauce, sugar and remaining 2 cups stock and simmer for about 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

6) Cool and refrigerate if making the sauce the day before (and do not add the shrimp yet!). If serving immediately, turn the heat off and add the shrimp. Cover and let sit for 5-10 minutes, or until the shrimp are just plump and pink and not overcooked. Serve immediately by placing a mound of rice in the center of a plate and ladling a generous portion of shrimp creole sauce around the rice.

Serves 8-10.

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Several recipe notes:
1) I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to make your own stock for this recipe. I know it adds extra steps and time, but it is worth it. Our labor-saving trick is this: we will make one of our typical vegetarian soups or stews earlier in the week, and I'll save all the veggie trimmings from that dish, chuck them in the pot and simmer the stock for a few hours that day. Then, when we buy the shrimp, I'll devein and peel the shrimp one day before I make the sauce and add the shells to the stock, simmering it for another 4-8 hours to give it even more body. You'll have plenty of extra stock left over that you can freeze and use in other recipes, like our Risotto, our Easy Sopa de Lima or our Chicken Marsala. You won't regret it.

2) * Caramelizing the onions is perhaps the single most important process step in the entire recipe. Somehow, this step imbues the entire dish with a soft and sweet flavor:


3) It really helps to have a helper for this recipe, especially one who's sufficiently motivated by the promise of a delicious meal that she'll happily do this recipe's worst prep job: peeling and deveining the shrimp.


4) A word about the fat used in this recipe. Many of Paul Prudhomme's recipes involve the use of a disturbing amount of butter and/or fat. This recipe is not health food, people. Just remember these kinds of meals should be cooked (and gorged on) in moderation. Furthermore, I would not use olive oil as a substitute--it is too likely to smoke during the step where you caramelize the onions on high heat. Be sure to use a fat or an oil that has a higher smoke point.

5) Like many recipes, this dish tastes even better the next day, so if you really want to wow your guests or your family, make this sauce a day in advance, and then when your guests arrive, bring the sauce to a good boil, and then add the shrimp (PS: any sauce that can be made a day ahead of time lends itself very well to dinner parties).

6) Oh, and try to avoid overcooking the shrimp.

7) As I said earlier, this dish isn't laughably cheap--in fact, it might be the single most costly meal in this entire blog. That being said, the aggregate cost of this dish was $20.08, of which $11.48 was the cost of the shrimp. But given that it serves 8-10 quite generously, the cost per serving was still in the neighborhood of $2.00-$2.50. Once again, proof that with a little practice anyone can cook restaurant-quality meals and still eat cheaply at home.

8) Finally, it's hard to believe such an amazing recipe has such a simple list of ingredients. Like I said before, you too can make food like this at home!






Related Posts:
Cookbook Review: Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen
Garden Gumbo Recipe
Shrimp in Tomato Sauce: Middle Eastern Cuisine
Shrimp in Garlic Sauce (Camarones Ajillo)

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Malcolm Gladwell Was Completely Wrong About Cooking

I'm sure many of you have read or heard of Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell's book about exploring the sources and drivers of exceptional success. One of the key themes in his book is the concept of the 10,000 hour rule--that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to get good at a new discipline.

Another way to think about that number is to call it 10 years of roughly 20 hours of intense practice per week. You wanna learn to sculpt? 10 years of practice. You want to earn a living playing blackjack? Yep, 10,000 hours.

But there's one discipline where the 10,000 hour rule is complete crap: cooking.

You can become a good cook, a really good cook, in a small fraction of that time. In fact, if you can read and follow simple instructions--a pretty low bar--you can learn the basics of cooking simple, good meals in a matter of days. Seriously.

How to go about learning to cook? First, spend a few hours perusing a basic, introductory cookbook. Books like Julia Child's The Way to Cook, Better Homes and Gardens and The Joy of Cooking are the traditional resources for learning how to cook, but a more recently published work like Delia's Complete How To Cook will teach you the basics just as well.

Second, spend just a few more hours trying some recipes out in your kitchen. If you're nervous picking out recipes, have a look at my essay on How to Tell if a Recipe Is Worth Cooking with Five Easy Questions. And if you're unsure what kind of cooking gear you might need to get started, read my essay on mastering the costs of setting up a kitchen.

Then, start cooking. You'll be shocked at what you can do in just your first few attempts.

Readers, what were your experiences like when you first began to cook?

Related Posts:
The Favorite Cookbooks of My Favorite Bloggers
Six Cookbooks That Should Be the Foundation of Your Cookbook Collection
Six Secrets to Save You From Cooking Burnout
The Basics of How to Modify a Recipe










How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me from your own blog, or by subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

African Peanut Stew

I'm always happy to support the authors of a good cookbook--and Almost Meatless by Joy Manning and Tara Desmond is one of the best new ones around. So when Joy and Tara asked me to participate in a "virtual potluck" and cook a recipe from their new cookbook with a group of other food bloggers, I was more than happy to say yes.

In fact, I already knew what recipe I wanted to cook--and readers who remember my rabidly positive review of this cookbook can probably guess which one: African Peanut Stew (on page 35, an already well-stained and splattered page!).


In short, this is the kind of recipe that I love. With lots of fresh, healthy ingredients, a fairly simple cooking procedure and a low cost per serving, this stew literally jumps off the page. But the most unexpected selling point of this recipe (and a feature I didn't fully appreciate until I'd actually made the dish) was how flexible and substitution-friendly it is.

As you'll see shortly, this dish calls for okra, a vegetable our grocery store rarely carries. Instead, I substituted fresh green beans. And it worked perfectly.

I had a ton of chicken in the freezer that I got on sale the other week, so I took the liberty of substituting it for the turkey meat specified by the recipe. It also worked perfectly.

And when I saw red bell peppers in our grocery store at $5.99 a pound, an absolute joke of a price in the middle of our summer growing season, I muttered to myself, "screw it, I'm going with green peppers at a fraction of the cost. Nobody's gonna miss a little extra color." That worked too.

It turns out that this dish is so flexible that it allows you to consider all kinds of adaptations and substitutions. You can make this dish with meat or without (try substituting very firm tofu, chickpeas or pink beans in place of turkey or chicken). You can make it spicier by adding extra cayenne pepper (which we did). You can even consider other leafy greens in place of Swiss chard (collards or kale would be excellent, and equally healthy, substitutes).

This kind of flexibility is rare in a recipe, and it provides enormous benefits to the cook. You can choose to follow the recipe as written (after all, the first time you make any new recipe, it's always a good idea to do it by the book), but you can also choose to tailor the dish to the best and most reasonably-priced veggies available to you.

If you can build a collection of recipes that are as flexible and adaptable as this one, you'll find cooking at home much more fun--and much less expensive.

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African Peanut Stew
With permission from Ten Speed Press, from Almost Meatless by Joy Manning and Tara Mataraza Desmond

Ingredients:
2 Tablespoons oil, divided
1 (12-oz) boneless, skinless turkey thigh, cut into strips
1/4 cup water
4 ounces okra, sliced thinly
1 onion, sliced into strips (see below)
4 cups stock
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 teaspoons garam masala
1 cup canned or fresh diced tomatoes
1/2 cup smooth peanut butter
4 cups thinly-sliced swiss chard or red chard
1 small red bell pepper, chopped
1/4 cup roasted salted peanuts, coarsely chopped
6 scallions, thinly sliced

Directions:
1) Heat 1 Tablespoon oil in a large pot or dutch oven on medium high heat. Add the meat and cook for five minutes, until lightly browned. Transfer meat and juices onto a plate.

2) Add the 1/4 cup water and deglaze the pot (see below), scraping up the bits from the bottom. Pour the liquid and bits over the reserved turkey and set aside.

3) Add the other Tablespoon oil to the pot, add the okra (or green beans, in my case) and saute on medium heat for about five minutes. Add the onion and saute for another 5 minutes. Pour in 1/2 cup of the stock and deglaze the bottom of the pot.

4) Add the garlic and cook for about 30 seconds, just until fragrant. Stir in the cayenne, garam masala, tomatoes, peanut butter, reserved meat and juices, remaining stock, and Swiss chard. Simmer over medium-low heat for 45 minutes. Serve over rice and garnish with red (or green, in my case) bell pepper, chopped peanuts and scallions.

Serves 6+.
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A few recipe notes:
1) For those of you who want a quick clinic on how to reduce an onion to a pile of thin strips in just seconds: cut the onion in half from top to bottom, lay each onion half flat side down, and starting along the side of the onion, systematically make cuts through its length, working all the way around the onion. See below:


2) A quick definition of the phrase deglaze the pot: deglazing simply means to add a little liquid to a pot (it can be stock, water or even wine), and then scraping up any bits of browned and caramelized food stuck to the bottom of the pot. The bits of browned food dissolve into the liquid, creating a rich and tasty sauce base, as you can see in the photo below:


3) Because Swiss chard typically comes in enormous bunches at the grocery store, you will have quite a bit left over after making this dish. It's quite delicious chopped up (stems and all) and steamed in a saucepan, and it's one of the most eye-healthy veggies out there.


4) A few words on cost: With the substitutions that I made above, my cost to make this dish came to $9.07, or a laughably cheap per-serving cost of $1.51. Your mileage may vary, but if you were to follow this recipe to the letter, the total cost will be perhaps an extra $3-$5 overall--still quite a reasonable bargain.

5) Finally, let me once again recommend this excellent cookbook to you. If you are looking for healthy, creative and inexpensive meals to cook in your home, consider adding Almost Meatless to your kitchen bookshelf.



Related Posts:
How to Tell if a Recipe is Worth Cooking With Five Easy Questions
How to Modify a Recipe: The Six Rules
Antioxidant Alert! Portuguese Kale and Potato Soup
Three Easy, Delicious and Inexpensive Homemade Salad Dressing Recipes



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Cookbook Review: Emeril at the Grill

From time to time, Casual Kitchen receives review copies of new cookbooks. My goal is to warn you away from the bad ones and draw your attention to the good ones. Here's another really good one.
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I've always been just a bit intimidated by the grill. So when a review copy of Emeril Lagasse's latest book Emeril at the Grill: A Cookbook for All Seasons arrived in my mailbox the other day, I dug right into it.

And I was impressed. You'll walk away from this cookbook with more than 100 recipes, almost all of which are surprisingly inventive and easy to make. You'll also get plenty of tips and strategies on grilling techniques and even a bonus section of 11 drink recipes.

Because celebrity chefs can't afford to bore their audiences, they typically make their recipes unusual or kitschy at the expense of making them simple or affordable. This makes for great TV, but it also results in difficult recipes that take hours to make and require ingredients you can't find.

Somehow, Emeril Lagasse avoided this trap and figured out how to pump out interesting recipes that aren't a pain the ass to make. It is a crucial gift on display throughout this cookbook.

One final note for the Almost Meatless crowd: Obviously, no one writes a grilling cookbook with vegetarians foremost in mind. But Emeril surprises us once again by including nearly two dozen really good veggie-centered recipes in this book.

You can buy Emeril at the Grill at Amazon for a surprisingly reasonable price of around $16. Highly recommended.



Related Posts:
Mastering Kitchen Setup Costs
Seven Rules To Ensure Mistake-Free Cooking
Cookbook Review: Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen
Grilled Tuna Steaks: Casual Food for the Grill

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Almost Meatless: Cookbook Review

From time to time, Casual Kitchen receives review copies of new cookbooks. My goal is to warn you away from the bad ones and draw your attention to the good ones. Here's one of the best I've seen in a while.
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I've found a cookbook that matches the food philosophy here at Casual Kitchen perfectly: Almost Meatless, by Joy Manning and Tara Desmond.

Are you trying to make your diet healthier, but you're not ready to commit to strict vegetarianism? Are you looking for a collection of intriguing recipes that will help you adopt a more conscientious diet and cut your food bill? Then this cookbook is for you.

Joy and Tara start from a premise that Casual Kitchen readers will fully appreciate: most Americans eat far more meat than they really need. But these authors don't run to the opposite extreme and ram vegetarianism down our throats. On the contrary, both freely admit they eat meat and have no interest in cutting it out of their diets. I think of Joy and Tara as "moderates" in the vegetarian debate.

The recipes in Almost Meatless are generally quite easy. They avoid showy and expensive ingredients that you can't find in your grocery store, and yet these recipes still grab you because they combine ordinary ingredients in highly creative ways. Exactly the kinds of recipes that pass my Five Easy Questions Test.

A few favorites that stood out to me: Shrimp and Slow Roasted Tomatoes (page 52), Sweet Potato Chorizo Mole (page 78, a casserole-style dish that will literally leap out of this cookbook directly into your recipe filebox) and African Peanut Stew (page 35, an exotic recipe that looks like it could be made in under an hour and for less than $2 a serving). I hope to blog about each of these in the coming months.

Of course I expect a cookbook to have great recipes--otherwise I'd never recommend it to readers. But Almost Meatless goes further still, providing extensive information on the proper care and handling of various meats, as well as an extremely helpful chapter on stocks and broths (the recipes for veggie stock and mushroom broth are both worth noting).

And at the very end of Almost Meatless you'll find something you almost never find in even the very best cookbooks: a list of recommended food-related titles for further reading. Joy and Tara's reading list includes some expected books, like Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, but it also suggests some interesting lesser-known titles like Aliza Green's cookbook Beans and David Joachim's The Food Substitutions Bible. I love this feature, and I think every cookbook should include a solid reading list just like this for those readers who want to learn more.

The only (minor) criticism I have for this otherwise exceptional cookbook is the omission of prep and cooking times with each recipe. I consider cook times a critical tool to help readers judge which recipes they'll have time to make on a given day. I hope Joy and Tara include this feature in their second edition.

You can buy Almost Meatless for $15 at Amazon, a surprisingly reasonable price in the era of the $50 celebrity-endorsed cookbook. I'm glad Ten Speed Press took a chance with these first-time authors--we're all the richer for it. I highly, highly recommend this cookbook.




Visit Tara Desmond's blog: Crumbs on My Keyboard
Visit Joy Manning's blog: What I Weigh Today



Related Posts
Cookbook Review: The Cornbread Gospels
Cookbook Review: Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen
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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

Six Cookbooks That Should Be the Foundation of Your Cookbook Collection

Are you looking for a list of reasonably priced cookbooks that can be the foundation of your cookbook collection?

I'm often asked to recommend cookbook titles, and today's post is a brief list of the six cookbooks I would recommend the most highly out of the dozens of cookbooks I've bought, borrowed and used over the past 20 years. Today's six recommendations are our "foundation cookbooks" here at Casual Kitchen.

It's all too easy to have many of the cookbooks you buy just sit on your shelf, wasting space and money. That's why it's so critical to get trustworthy recommendations, so you can be certain that the cookbooks you buy will be a part of your critical few. I hope you enjoy these cookbooks as much as we do.

Readers, what are the foundation cookbooks in your kitchen?
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Six Foundation Cookbooks:
1) Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant



This is our favorite cookbook here at Casual Kitchen, and in my humble opinion, it's one of the best cookbooks in existence. It contains some 500 recipes across 18 different ethnic cuisines, and after more than ten years of cooking from it we've still barely scratched the surface of what this book has to offer.

2) The Vegetarian Epicure



A classic work of the vegetarian cookbook canon. Even if you're just part-time vegetarians like we are, or if you're just looking for ways to cook great recipes at reasonable expense, this is an exceptional cookbook that I recommend highly. It's filled with straightforward and delicious recipes of all types, and it includes highly informative chapters on vegetarianism, as well as a discussion of issues surrounding processed foods and food additives (given that the book was written in 1972, this book was far ahead of its time in addressing these subjects). Still more amazing is the fact that author Anna Thomas was only 24 years old when she wrote this treasure of a cookbook.

3) Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook



Don't expect to see exotic ethnic cuisine in this warhorse cookbook (although the book tries valiantly on occasion), but do expect to find all of the information you'll ever need to know to cook every meat, vegetable, casserole, bread and cake under the sun. In short, for under $20, it's all you'll ever really need to master hearty American cuisine.

Also, for supporters of breast cancer awareness, there is a limited edition "Pink Plaid" version of Better Homes, which contains the full Better Homes cookbook with bonus feature recipes from a variety of female celebrity cookbook authors.

4) Vegetarian Soup Cuisine: 125 Soups and Stews from Around the World



Jay Solomon's cookbook is unfortunately becoming more and more difficult to find on bookstore shelves, but you can still get plenty of copies at Amazon. This wonderful, modest little cookbook opened an entire new world to me of simple one-pot soups and stews, most of which are easy to make and laughably cheap. If you're looking to make an investment in reducing both your food bill and the amount of time you spend cooking, this book is an excellent place to start.

5) 365 Ways to Cook Pasta



On a per-dollar-spent basis, I've found more great recipes in this cookbook than in any other cookbook I've ever purchased. By far. I highly recommend this book if you're looking for a big selection of affordable recipes, most of which are extremely easy to make.

6) Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen



The least healthy, but the most fun, cookbook on this list. This cookbook is suitable for intermediate-level cooks, as some of the recipes in here can be a bit involved and complex. But if you've mastered the basics of cooking, this book will teach you how to make exceptional Cajun and Creole food and blow away your family and friends with what is arguably America's greatest cuisine. Just take one look at the picture of chef Paul on the cover and you can tell that there's gonna be some great recipes in here.

Related Posts:
How to Get More Mileage Out of Your Cookbooks
Cookbook Review: The Cornbread Gospels
How to Apply the 80/20 Rule to Cooking
The Most Heavily Used Tool in Our Kitchen--Our Rice Cooker.

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

* A note to readers: As always, along with each book title, I've included links to Amazon for your convenience. If you are interested in buying any of these cookbooks, you can help support Casual Kitchen by using those links to visit Amazon. I will receive a small affiliate fee based on your purchases, and it will not cost you anything extra. I thank you, readers, for all of your support!

How to Make the Best Cornbread. Ever.

Corn bread.

It might be the easiest of all bread recipes. It's an unintimidating starting point for beginners who want to learn the pleasures of baking. And it combines simple, honest ingredients into a deliciously textured, not-too-sweet bread. Cornbread is almost like dessert, but with little sugar and even less guilt.

I've been making corn bread for years and have always liked it, but I'd never found a recipe that really knocked my socks off. Until now. I believe I've now found the perfect cornbread recipe, buried in a cookbook we've had on our shelves for more than ten years. A cookbook that I just hadn't properly exploited before.

And to any of my readers new to baking, this is an ideal recipe to get your feet wet. You might have a few startup costs for some baking or mixing tools, but because this recipe is so easy and so delicious, it is an extremely encouraging way for a novice chef to get started down the road towards baking other foods.

I guarantee that this cornbread will be a home run in your home.

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Corn Bread
(very slightly adapted from The Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas)
PS: be sure to take a look at this follow-up post with several cornbread modification ideas!

Ingredients:
1 1/4 cups white flour
3/4 cup whole grain corn meal (can use regular degerminated corn meal--see note 1 below)
4 Tablespoons sugar
5 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

1 egg
1 cup milk
2 Tablespoons melted butter

Directions:
1) Preheat oven to 375F.
2) Sift dry ingredients together into a large bowl.
3) Beat the egg with the milk and add to the dry ingredients. Quickly add the melted butter and stir with a rubber scraper until ingredients are combined well.
4) Spread the batter into a buttered 9-inch pie dish.
5) Bake in oven for 30-35 minutes, or until it is lightly browned around the edges, or until a fork stuck into the center of the pan comes out clean. Serve hot.

Serves 4-6.************************
Five brief recipe notes:

1) A note on types of corn meal: This dish will come out well if you use regular corn meal, but it will have an even better texture if you use whole grain corn meal. If you can find Indian Head Old Fashioned Stone Ground Yellow Corn Meal in your store (see the photo to the right), get it--it's a steal at about $1.59 for a two-pound bag. In contrast, regular corn meal (Quaker is a typical brand), is both degerminated and is more finely and uniformly milled. Here's an instance where the "finer" product just isn't quite as good.

2) Try making this corn bread in a buttered pie dish rather than a more traditional square baking pan. A wider, flatter pie pan exposes more surface area of the batter to heat, so the cornbread cooks more evenly throughout. It was also quite easy to cut and scoop out pieces, and cleanup was a snap.

3) Laughable cheapness alert: This entire batch of cornbread can be made for well under $1.00. To put this in context, I used to pay $1.79 each day for a mediocre cornmeal muffin on the way into work--more than it cost me to buy an entire two-pound bag of corn meal. Yet again more evidence that you can cook food at home that is not only less expensive, but often much higher quality, than anything you can find in stores or restaurants.

4) A note to beginning bakers on start-up costs: To make this recipe, you'll need to add some tools to your kitchen: an inexpensive flour sifter, some inexpensive mixing bowls, measuring cups and measuring spoons, an electric mixer, and obviously, a pie pan. I'd guesstimate that you can get good-quality examples of all these items at a discount department store for around $50. That might seem like a lot, but keep in mind that this is a one-time expense that's well less than the cost of a nice dinner out for two. Also, all of these items will last for years--even decades! Heck, I'm still using an electric hand mixer that I bought for $19 back in 1991.

If you'd like some more ideas on how to save money on kitchen items like these, feel free to take a look at a post I wrote on managing kitchen setup costs.

5) Finally, a question for my readers: What do you like to put on your cornbread? Butter? Maple syrup? Strawberry jam? Let me know in the comments!

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Be sure to take a look at our follow-up post with several modifications to try with this basic cornbread recipe!

Related Posts:
Blueberry Coffee Cake: Nostalgia FoodsCookbook Exploitation: How to Get More Mileage Out of Your Cookbooks
Eight Tips to Make Cooking At Home Laughably Cheap
More Applications of the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.