smothered eggplant and summer vegetables, Anna’s spaghetti and pesto Trapanese
Lidia’s Italy is another cookbook I bought through a club and hadn’t used until now. Lidia Bastianich is a cookbook author, TV personality and restaurant owner (most notably New York’s Felidia), and it is clear she knows her way around Italian cuisine. The book is organized [...]
Posts under ‘Comprehensive Cookbooks’
The Food and Life of Oaxaca: Holy Mole!
amarillo (thick yellow mole), frijoles negros colados, arroz con tomatillos, basic corn tortillas
I’ve had The Food and Life of Oaxaca for a number of years, but have never cooked from it until now. This is partly because when I lived in Portland, I wasn’t sure where to find the authentic Mexican ingredients. Then I was [...]
Vegetarian Times Complete Cookbook: Pasta Salad for a Warm Evening
asparagus and carrots with pasta; chickpea saute with garlic and olives
You’ll have noticed that I haven’t posted in a while. You know how it feels when you’re busy all the time but if you stop and look back it’s hard to point to anything specific that quite accounts for all the time that passed? Yes, [...]
Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites: Light Veggie Goodness
zucchini saffron pasta
This is the pasta dish that I meant to make yesterday but saved for this evening. A good choice, as it turned out, since it was even hotter today and very stuffy. Last night’s hour-by-hour weather report forecast storms coming in by 4 pm, which would reduce the heat only a little but [...]
The New Hostess of To-Day: In Which I Rediscover the Joy of Custard Sauce
apple snow, with boiled custard (soft)
The New Hostess of To-Day dates from 1916, so it’s not quite as impenetrable as Miss Leslie’s work but is still chock full of vague directives and alarming ingredients. Pigeon Galantine, for example, though I may just be biased by living in New York and therefore seeing any pigeon recipe [...]
The Enchanted Broccoli Forest: The Cute Overload of Casseroles
enchanted broccoli forest
I’ve had the book The Enchanted Broccoli Forest for probably 20 years now, and it’s a great cookbook. It has a wide range of tasty entrees, plus one of the best instruction sections for how to make bread that I’ve seen anywhere. But I had never tried the title recipe, “enchanted broccoli forest,” [...]
Twofer: How to Cook Everything and The Chicken Parts Cookbook
rice with fresh herbs, How to Cook Everything
drumsticks gremolata, The Chicken Parts Cookbook
Still careening around my life without managing to quite get back on track with the blog, I’m afraid. In theory the weekend would have been a fine time to get caught up, but on Friday night I was out, on Saturday I was [...]
Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone: An Unusual Savory Stew
quinoa chowder with spinach, feta and scallions
I had a big master plan for the year, and when I fell behind in the first six months I made a second master plan to get caught up. But in the past few weeks, for a variety of reasons I’d rather not get into right now, I got [...]
Cooking Essentials: Beautifully Rendered Basics
Cajun-style chicken
Cooking Essentials is a beautifully designed book from a cookbook club I used to be in. It presents what it promises: fundamental techniques and principles of cooking.
I wanted something easy and undemanding. It’s been a long week, and my energy was low. So I opted for Cajun-style chicken, which is about as simple as [...]
The Joy of Cooking (2006 ed.): A Classic, Revised
chicken breasts baked on a bed of mushrooms
The Joy of Cooking was the first cookbook I remember working with. My mother owned a copy that dated from the early 1960s, I think, and it was loaded with fascinating information. I still laugh at the thought of a recipe my sister and I came across at [...]
