Lost Arts: A Celebration of Culinary Traditions Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is layed out as a series of chapters on particular topics such as making wine, vinegar, goat cheese, curing olives, making bread, etc. These chapters are then arranged as a description, with narrative, of how to make the food followed by recipes that *use the food*. So, for example, there is a chapter on making vinegar that can be summed up by: take old wine, get a mother of vinegar, let it hang out until done, (which is described) and bottle it. (with a little explanation of why you bottle). The recipes for the vinegar section then have various dressings that use vinegar.
This highlights a couple of things. First, that these foods are *simple* to make. There's nothing deep or complex about them. The foods will make themselves, if you just give a little support.
However, when I turn to the bread chapter, I am startled. The bread described uses commercial yeast, except for a very misleading section on sourdough. First, I would have thought that *this* book would emphasize sourdough bread which is easier, more fun, more tasty and, indeed, an increasingly "lost art".
I also would have thought that there would be a section on traditional preserving techniques, along the lines of the book "Keeping Foods Fresh" by Claude Aubert. The fact that it isn't highlights, I suspect, another underlying issue with the book. The imagined "good food" is western Mediterranean in origin. And the closer the better. It would have been interesting to consider some of the wonderful techniques used in Greece or Yugoslavia. That would get a range of fascinating things like pickled capers, cabbage and grape leaves, which would be very compatible with the spirit of the book and would have made a much more fascinating range.

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Product Description:
Hand-cured olives, home-baked bread, fresh goat cheese: Before Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, the only way to enjoy these pure and simple flavors was to make them the old-fashioned way-by hand. This charming little guide will teach you how to blend your own mustards, crush grapes for wine, bottle vinegar at home, and more. Sure, you can buy these things at the neighborhood farmers market, but Alley's instructions are so easy, you'll be inspired to add her age-old techniques to your culinary repertoire. The sumptuous recipes at the end of each chapter enable you to put the fruits of your labor to good use.

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What's Cooking at Moody's Diner Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a book that completes the other cookbooks that I have. There are so many homestyle recipes in it, that I feel nostalgic even reading the recipes.

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Here is a larger, redesigned edition of a tried-and-true classic cookbook inspired by the favorite Maine diner of travelers and "natives" alike! Like its famous namesake eatery, this cookbook almost needs no introduction. The original edition went into 15 printings, because recipes such as these simply never fall out of fashion. However, even more good recipes have been approved and appreciated by the clientele of Moody's Diner in the past decade or so and more great anecdotes and photographs have been collected, so clearly it was time for a bigger and better edition of What's Cooking at Moody's Diner. Fifty-nine new recipes were added, and -- by popular demand -- the "diner-size" recipes are now presented in "family-size" versions as well.

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Confederate Cookbook, The: Family Favorites from the Sons of Confederate Veterans Review

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(More customer reviews)In The Confederate Cookbook: Family Favorites From The Sons Of Confederate Veterans, Lynda Moreau has gathered up 340 diverse and delicious recipes from contemporary Confederate kitchens that range throughout every region of country but evoke the flavor of the Old South as past down to the descendants of the Confederacy through the more than 27,000 member "The Sons of Confederate Veterans", an hereditary organization. From Lynchburg Layered Salad, Southern Meat Loaf, and Skillet Chicken and Gravy, to Great Granny's Confederate Sweet Potato Souffle, Copper Carrot Pennies, and Fried Apple Pies, The Confederate Cookbook is a grand compendium of highly recommended dishes which are further enhanced for the family cook with historic anecdotes and images of identified Confederate soldiers.

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Over 340 of Dixieis finest recipes courtesy of kitchens from Florida to Alaska.

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What Can I Bring? Cookbook (Cake Mix Doctor) Review

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(More customer reviews)I'm a good cook and baker, but every time I have to bring something to a get-together, I end up obsessing over what to bring.I fall back on the same old things so much that I get bored, even though people seem to enjoy what I bring.Recently, I have been asked to bring food for various organizations/activities--probably at least once a month.This book, which is under $20.00, is well worth the price.It has more than 200 recipes, and there is a very good variety of recipes, including vegetarian ones or ones that could be easily made vegetarian/vegan.That's important to me because I have a vegetarian daughter.It is great that the author provides information on how to increase the amount of servings if practical, and provides a time-line of how long to expect to take to make the dish.Her notes on "how to tote" the dishes are helpful, since getting the dish there intact is important.There are some recipes at the end of the book for gift-giving and they will be wonderful for Christmas gifts.I like that the author did all my trial-and-error work for me--testing what goes over well at a pot-luck, is fairly simply to make, and travels well.I want to buy more of her books after purchasing this one, because her recipes are "real life, without too many exotic ingredients, and food that people would actually eat.

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Potlucks and picnics, dinner parties and church socials, fundraisers, toasts to the teacher, reunions, cookouts-it's the busy age of shared meals, which means with every invitation comes the question: " What can I bring?" Anne Byrn, an inspired cook, problem solver, and bestselling author of The Cake Mix Doctor cookbook and other books with over 2.6 million copies in print, knows exactly how to answer the question. Cutting through menu block-a condition familiar to everyone who cooks-here are over 200 delicious suggestions for crowd-pleasing food that's designed to travel.

There are finger foods, canapes, and "trios"-Trio of Marinated Goat Cheese, Asian Summer Rolls with a Trio of Sauces, Trio of Pastry-Wrapped Camemberts. 25 surprising salads: White Corn Salad with Fresh Thyme, Asparagus and Grilled Peppers with Asian Soy Dressing. Main dishes for a party, from Southern-Style Pulled Pork to Creamy White Bean and Spinach Lasagne. Desserts (of course, 25 of them), and a full chapter of loaves and other gifts from the kitchen, including Chocolate Sour Cherry Bread and Sun-Cooked Peach Preserves. Each recipe comes with Tote Notes (how best to transport the dish), Big Batch (how to multiply the dish), and When You Arrive (how to put the finishing touches on the dish). Plus there are "Grab & Gos"-super-quick recipes-for each section, etiquette tips for working in someone else's kitchen, and a "Notes" area for each recipe, to jot down tips and log in when you made the dish and for what occasion, so you don't repeat yourself.

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Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly: Recipes from Southern Appalachia Review

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(More customer reviews)"My place, in the midst of this abundance of nature, is back in a mountain hollow on a bad dirt road surrounded by forest, wild blackberries, mountain critters, wildflowers, a few neighbors, and a passel of 'dawgs.'"

So writes Joan Aller, author of this season's must-have cookbook, "Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly: Recipes from Southern Appalachia."

And it's not like Joan Aller is an East Tennessee native who's walked the Appalachian trail with the likes of Bill Bryson or South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. She's from the West, and might be living there still but for urban sprawl and environmental ugliness. So she first moved to Nashville, which is very much a city, and then further East.

Joan Aller is an artist by profession and fearless by nature. No soon had she painted her mailbox than she was off, photographing barns and bridges and learning the ways of her new neighbors. That led quickly to food --- and five years of research. At the end, she had gorgeous photographs of Southern Appalachia, luscious photographs of Southern food, and 8,000 pages of recipes and history.

The good news is that Ms. Aller and her editors put her work on a diet. The result is a 212-page book that was extravagantly handsome until my wife and I started dog-earing the pages. Silly us --- we want to cook almost everything here. Our only non-starters: Appalachian wine, root beer and --- no kidding --- moonshine.

See if just the names don't make you look at your watch to see if it's time for some meal or other:Kentucky "hot brown" (turkey-bacon-Colby cheese sandwich drenched in Tabasco-spiked milk gravy), Mississippi Sin (French bread, cream cheese, cheddar cheese, cooked ham, sour cream, accented with sweet onion, bell pepper and Worcestershire sauce), Butternut Squash Soup with Sweet Tea and Ginger, George Washington Carver's Sweet Potato Pie, Bourbon Sweet Potato Casserole, Corn Cob Jelly, And a dip made of equal parts chopped sweet onion, grated cheese and mayonnaise, baked for 25 minutes at 350.

And....but you see the problem --- with the possible exception of boring old blue cheese balls, this book rocks like the Allman Brothers.

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Product Description:
There are many cookbooks about Southern cooking, but precious few celebrate the southern Appalachian food that has sustained mountain folk past and present. Thankfully, we now have Joan E. Aller's Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly.
Featuring more than 150 recipes for down-home, soul-satisfying dishes, Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly is more than just a cookbook. Complete with passages on the history, places, and people of southern Appalachia, along with lush full-color photography of the food and scenery of the southern Appalachian Mountains, Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly serves as both a cookbook and a guided tour of the local lore, traditions, and culture of this uniquely American region.

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Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans Review

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(More customer reviews)Marcel Bienvenu writes the "Cooking Creole" column in the "Times Picayune", and and Judy Walker is the food editor for that publication. They've written other books together, but in a sense this one was written by their readers as they sought to recover from Katrina.

On Oct. 7, 2005, Walker invited her readers to take part in a program they called "Rebuilding New Orleans, Recipe by Recipe." Essentially, the idea was to pair readers who needed a particular recipe with folks who still had theirs. Walker writes that the response was over-whelming. "It became a sort of community project; everybody wanted to help.... It was amazing, so many of the requests were for the same recipe, sometimes the same recipe on the same day."

The book contains 250 of the best recipes, each with a short essay that puts the recipe into a human perspective. Only two of the thousands of requested recipes have not been found; a gumbo recipe from a New Orleans Saints football player and a pasta salad recipe.

Some of the recipes are famous, Jamie Shannon's recipe for Tasso Shrimp with Five-Pepper Jelly; Leslie's mirliton gumbo; and the Roosevelt Hotel's shrimp remoulade, for example.

Others are clearly from home cooks, some handed down from generation to generation; these ten were taken from a file of newspaper clippings: Fair Grounds corned beef; Crabmeat Remick; Johnny Becnel's Daddy's okra gumbo; turkey bone gumbo; Jolene Black's cream biscuits; salt and pepper shrimp; Rosie's sweet potato pies; Brownies to die for; Ursuline Academy anise cookies; and rosemary cookies.

Walker describes the importance of this collection in the following words:

"Here in south Louisiana, we still have an intact food culture, thanks to every one of you who's ever made a roux. Restaurants and home cooks keep the cultural and literal flame burning under the emblematic red beans and rice on Mondays. People make their mama's oyster dressing at Thanksgiving. That's reason No. 1: We have something unique, worth saving.

"And, the region is blessed with many only-in-Louisiana ingredients -- crawfish, hot sausage, cane syrup, andouille, Creole mustard -- this list could go on and on until lunchtime. But there are not a lot of recipes in "Joy of Cooking" for crawfish or cane syrup. So that's another reason: Even when you do find a recipe for stuffed peppers, they're not stuffed with seafood as they are here. So these unique recipes, the lost ones, are specific to south Louisiana."

This is a wonderful book for people like me who have gone to New Orleans just to spend a long week-end enjoying restaurant foods on offer. The recipes and stories capture a wonderful city, its cuisine and its citizens.

Robert C. Ross2008

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Product Description:
After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleansthousands of people lost their keepsakes and family treasures forever. As residents started to rebuild their livesThe Times-Picayune of New Orleans became a post-hurricane swapping place for old recipes that were washed away in the storm. The newspaper has compiled 250 of these deliciousauthentic recipes along with the stories about how they came to be and who created them. Cooking Up a Storm includes the very best of classic and contemporary New Orleans cuisinefrom seafood and meat to desserts and cocktails. But it also tells the storyrecipe by recipeof one of the great food cities in the worldand the determination of its citizens to preserve and safeguard their culinary legacy.

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Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread Cookbook Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is as fun to read as it is to cook from. Dragonwagon has a nice colloquial writing style and gives a lot of background on where each recipe comes from, trivia about the Ozarks and the inn she ran with her husband for many years.
Although this book does have a few pages focusing on breads and salads, the soup recipes (which make up about 75% of the book) are truly the shining stars here. The recipes are divided into chapters on chicken soups, fish soups, vegetable soups, bean soups, dairy soups, nut soups, and fruit/dessert soups. There is also a chapter devoted entirely to making the ultimate gumbo, and one on a very versatile "diet" soup. The majority of recipes fall into the vegetable/dairy/and bean soup categories - making this book quite suitable for vegetarians or people interested in cutting back on the amount of meat in their diets. She doesn't eat red meat, and you won't find any recipes that call for beef, pork, or lamb... although there are a couple of exceptions.
As other reviewers have mentioned, these recipes are all easily adaptable to what vegetables you already have in your refrigerator, though you will probably need to make regular trips to the store to stock up on fresh veggies if you intend to use this book often. The recipes call for lots of ingredients, but you can easily leave some out and still have a great tasting finished product. Many variations are given for each soup and some have ideas for using leftovers. Although she doesn't recommend it, bouillon cubes or canned stock could easily be substituted if you're short on time. However, if you ever wanted to learn how to make a great homemade stock, this is the place for it.
The recipes themselves are excellent and I have had fabulous results and many compliments when serving these soups to others. I highly recommend the Mexican-Style The Soup, Greek Navy Bean Soup, and Pea Soup Caraway Adelle. These soups are a wonderful way to save money and eat healthy while still pleasing your tastebuds.
The book has a nice design, but if you're looking for fancy photographs or art, you won't find them here.

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Product Description:
The owner of an inn in the Ozark Mountains called the Dairy Hollow House presents two hundred of her most scrumptious recipes for bread and soups.By the author of Half a Moon and One Whole Star. Original.

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