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Thursday, November 6, 2008
Ten All the Food We Love By Sheila Lukins
Ten All the Food We Love
By Sheila Lukins
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Book Review: Ten: All the Foods We Love and 10 Perfect Recipes for Each
Who hasn't found themselves in the pages of a well-used copy of Sheila Lukins's The Silver Palate Cookbook at some point in their cooking career? When I first moved to New York eleven years ago, it was this volume, found dog-eared and frayed on the shelves of my boyfriend's shoe-box kitchen, that got me feeling like a proper New York cook.Sheila Lukins gets people to cook, and that's what I love about her. Her books are inviting and not intimidating. Most of them are thick, square paperbacks with brightly colored covers that you can flop open on your counter top and splatter with grease and not fret. They'll all places to go to find a great recipe for something classic, but knowing that it will have a little kick to bring it up to date.
In Ten: All the Foods We Love and 10 Perfect Recipes for Each (Workman Publishing), her latest of eight books, is no exception. Here, she presents ten recipes for each of thirty two foods "we love" from cocktails (a favorite "food" of just a few people I know) to chops to clams, tomatoes and grains. The recipes are the kinds of things people want to cook, they are the recipes for which we here at The Kitchn often get requests: Asian Orange-Scented Chicken (see below for recipe,) Creole Shrimp, Caesar Salad, Velvety Black Bean Soup, Black Chocolate Cake with Fudge Icing, and Green Apple Sorbet.
My only criticism is that the book ends at the thirty-two foods "we love." I wonder how something so seasonally specific as asparagus gets a chapter while other more widely available and versatile vegetables like broccoli, onions and beets don't get their time in the Lukins limelight? In an era where seasonality and variety are so coveted, it is a bold move to assume one vegetable is loved more than another. For the most part, her guesses are probably spot-on, but personally, I'd rather have ten recipes featuring beets, something I have in my kitchen from late summer until deep into winter, than ten for asparagus, a vegetable I eat for a few short weeks in spring and believe is best when it's barely cooked at all.
As a mostly-internet based food writer, my first urge is to turn this project into a website so that the library of foods "we love" can expand, more attention can be paid to seasonality and the conversation about what to do when a (fill in the blank ingredient) lands on your counter top or fridge shelf can continue. Just a thought, Sheila.
• Ten: All the Foods We Love and 10 Perfect Recipes for Each (Amazon, $13.57)
Asian-Scented Orange Chicken
Serves 6 to 8
(reprinted with permission from Workman Publishing)
Here soy sauce, sesame oil, and ginger blend beautifully with the juice and zest of fresh oranges to give the chicken a delightfully bright Asian flavor. Honey lacquers the skin to a rich golden brown. The Watercress and Mushroom Salad is just the right counterpoint to the sweet chicken.
2 chickens (each 2 1/2 to 3 pounds), each, cut into 8 pieces
Finely grated zest of 4 oranges
2/3 cup fresh orange juice
1/4 cup honey
3 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil
1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
2 teaspoons finely minced garlic
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
4 scallions (white bulbs and 3 inches green), thinly sliced on the diagonal, for garnish
Watercress and Mushroom Salad (page 254), for serving
1.The day before serving, rinse the chicken pieces well, removing all excess fat, and pat them dry. Place the chicken in a large bowl.
2.Combine the orange zest and juice with the honey, soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger, garlic, and red pepper flakes in a small bowl. Stir well, and coat the chicken pieces thoroughly with this mixture. Refrigerate, covered, overnight.
3.Thirty minutes before cooking time, preheat the oven to 375° F and remove the chicken from the refrigerator. Arrange the pieces in a large shallow roasting pan, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Pour 2/3 cup of the marinade into the pan.
4.Bake the chicken, basting it frequently, until it is golden brown and shiny, 1 hour.
5.Transfer the chicken pieces to a large serving platter. Strain the pan juices into a small saucepan and boil until thickened, about 10 minutes. Drizzle the sauce over the chicken, and sprinkle with the scallions. Serve immediately, with the Watercress and Mushroom Salad alongside.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
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Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Screen Doors and Sweet Tea By Martha Foose
Screen Doors and Sweet Tea By Martha Foose
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2009 James Beard Foundation Awards Nominees
Screen Doors & Sweet Tea, by Martha Hall Foose, hardcover, 256 pages
The 10 Best Cookbooks for Summer
After flitting from Mexico to India and other equatorial points, this year the summer's warm-climate cookbooks centered on the American South. The best of many contenders is Screen Doors & Sweet Tea, a wisecracking, storytelling treasury of Southern dishes, both the well-known (cornbread, lady peas, juleps) and the slightly less familiar. Some, like Apricot Rice Salad, have an elegant, dinner-on-the-porch feel. Others (All for Okra and Okra for All), are resolutely egalitarian.
Foose has a marvelous gift for the pithy turn of phrase, and all of her recipes carry intriguing subtitles: "Proper Fried Chicken: My Thoughts, at Least," "Lunch Counter Egg Salad Sandwich: Ode to Waxed Paper," "Baked Macaroni and Cheese: A Vegetable in Some States."
As I see it, there are two ideal ways to enjoy this book: 1) Pick out your favorites, cook your way through them one by one, and gorge yourself silly; or 2) sit on the porch and read it while somebody makes you a julep. Either will do just fine.
June 1, 2008
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Jewish Home Cooking By Arthur Schwartzs
Jewish Home Cooking
By Arthur Schwartzs
2009 IACP Cookbook Award Finalists
And
2009 James Beard Foundation Awards Nominees
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Visit Arthur Schwartzs
Arthur Schwartz's Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited
Schwartz (Arthur Schwartz's New York City Food) breathes life into Yiddish cooking traditions now missing from most cities' main streets as well as many Jewish tables. His colorful stories are so distinctive and charming that even someone who has never heard Schwartz's radio show or seen him on TV will feel his warm personality and love for food radiating from the page. Oddly, even the shorter anecdotes often run longer than the actual recipes; anyone intending to cook from the book should have some kitchen experience or risk frustration at the often brief instructions. Dishes run the gamut from beloved appetizers like gefilte fish to classic meat and dairy main items (cholent, blintzes), plus less familiar items like onion cookies and Hungarian shlishkas (light potato dumplings). Schwartz intersperses engaging commentary on everything from farfel and matzo to Romanian steakhouses and why Jews like Chinese food. Those with Westernized palates may recoil at the thought of gelled calf's feet, but Schwartz shows how stereotypically heavy Ashkenazi food can be improved and made at least somewhat lighter when prepared properly. Cooks and readers from Schwartz's generation and earlier, who know firsthand what he's talking about, will appreciate this delightful new book for the world it evokes as much as for the recipes. (Apr.)
SeeTuesday, April 8, 2008
Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen by Trisha Yearwood
Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen
by Trisha Yearwood
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SOUTHERN COMFORT: If you are looking for a cookbook by a hardier hungry girl, you could do worse than snag a copy of Trisha Yearwood’s superb “Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen: Recipes From My Family to Yours.” (It is No. 9 on the advice list.) It’s a smart, generous, friendly and no-nonsense comfort-food primer. Yearwood, a country singer who is married to another (Garth Brooks), put her book together with her mother and sister, raiding her family’s bountiful store of recipes. There are some almost dainty things to eat here (cheese straws, a minty Greek salad), but Yearwood isn’t playing to the foodie cognoscenti — she’s not afraid to use canned ingredients when the moment seems right, and she’s great on toothsome Southern classics like fried chicken, pink salad, pork ribs and something she calls “cooked-to-death green beans.” Yearwood won me over when she suggested (for her mashed potatoes) pulling out a pressure cooker, an old-fashioned device that’s wonderful for flushing out food snobs. I haven’t seen one since the glorious kitchens of my youth, my mother’s and my grandmother’s. Mine’s been broken for years. It’s time to buy another.
