Smitten Kitchen: Earnest Summation

As you may recall, a few months ago I spent some time cooking through The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook. I always get around to the cookbook summaries eventually, if not in the timely fashion I originally intended.

There's a disconnect between Deb Perelman's tastes and mine. I was looking through the book this morning trying to put my finger on it, but there is no single "it."

I'll start with the first difference that jumps out: There are people who love brunch and there are people who don't and Perelman clearly falls into the former category. The breakfast chapter is one of the longest in her book and it is full of eggy, starchy dishes that serve a sociable crowd, i.e. brunch foods.

I am not a brunch person. It is 6:42 a.m. on August 4 as I type these words and I am fully dressed, drinking coffee, crossing items off my to-do list (including this post) like the insufferably peppy morning person I have always been. I can not imagine anything less appealing than waiting until 11 to drink mimosas and eat a slab of New York breakfast casserole. This isn't a value judgment, it's a difference in biorhythms.

But I also can't imagine anything less appealing than New York breakfast casserole at any time of day and that isn't a difference in biorhythms, it's a difference in taste. New York breakfast casserole is a savory pudding of bagel chunks, cream cheese, eggs, and half-and-half and nothing about that makes my mouth water. I'm not saying my taste is superior. Flummery? Just different. A lot of Perelman's dishes are, for want of a better word, dense. Chocolate chip brioche pretzels. Fig, olive oil, and sea salt challah. Cheddar swirl breakfast buns. These do not tempt me at all.

It sounds like I'm panning the cookbook. I'm not. Because where our tastes overlapped, I was consistently delighted. The dishes I loved from this book, I really, really loved. Broccoli salad. Red wine chocolate cake. Avocado tartine. Gnocchi in tomato broth. Eggplant and three cheese calzone. Grapefruit olive oil cake. Now that it's summer, I want to dip back into the book and try the peach dumplings with bourbon hard sauce. They look fabulous and I'm sure they are. I don't, however, want to try the tomato shortcakes with whipped goat cheese or the corn risotto-stuffed poblanos and that's the taste issue again. I can happily overlook it. Four dishes that are worth the price of the book? That's a shelf essential.

I cooked 31 dishes from The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook and here's how I'd rate them:

worth the price of the book: 4
great: 6
good: 12
so-so: 8
flat-out bad -1

The one dish that I deemed "flat-out bad" was possibly "bad" due to an error on my part. I doubt the gooey cinnamon squares are really flat-out bad because Perelman doesn't publish bad recipes. But my rule has always been that if can't figure out what I did wrong, I go with the results. I could not figure out what I did wrong and these were too sweet for anyone in this house and some of us like shoofly pie.

Earnest Summation: The Homesick Texan

Fifty-one dishes, y'all. I made 51 dishes from The Homesick Texan by Lisa Fain and it's only taken me 4 months to get around to writing the conclusion to that epic project. Talk about ending with a whimper. But I'm crossing it off the to-do list today, damn it.

I'll keep it short and sweet: I loved The Homesick Texan. I picked it up after spending the fall cooking from a Syrian Christian cookbook followed by Burma, and while I love novelty and challenge, opening Homesick Texan was like getting off an 18 hour flight from Asia, stretching out on the sofa with a cold drink, and turning on Friday Night Lights.

The book has flaws. Fain neglects to mention the size of pans in her dessert  section (where it matters!) and seems to think that adding 1/2 teaspoon of Mexican chocolate to a gallon of chili could possibly affect the flavor. The recipes are not blazingly original and maybe not even original at all, as some Chowhound naysayers have suggested. But what great recipes are? People regularly give Marcella Hazan credit for pork loin braised in milk, but the dish appeared in Ada Boni's Talisman Cookbook decades before Marcella started writing. And who knows where Boni got it? Who cares? It's a living, breathing recipe, not a military code, and the further it travels the better. Right?

Ah, but there are gray areas. I'm seeing more and more of them as I type. Much to say on the subject of recipe plagiarism, but I haven't figured out exactly what I think and in the interest of finishing this post I will do that figuring out later. Last December when I first opened The Homesick Texan, I just wanted to eat delicious tacos, chili, and enchiladas, and the recipes inside helped me do that. The end.

By the numbers:

worth the price of the book  -- 1 (marinated skirt steak from the small apartment tacos)
great -- 13 (chili, posole, meat loaf)
good -- 30
so-so -- 7
flat out bad -- 0

Shelf essential? If you've already have cherished recipes for Tex-Mex classics, you don't need this book. I don't and do.

Burma: earnest summation

I agree with almost everything this reviewer writes about Burma by Naomi Duguid. It's an important book, an informative book, a beautiful and thoughtful book about a little known country and cuisine.

Having said that, I did not find the recipes to be universally spectacular or even universally good. Of the 26 recipes I made, an alarming number fell on the bottom of the ratings chart. Check it out:

worth the price of the book (Kachin pounded beef)  --- 1

great --- 3 (the silky Shan soup, the carrot salad)

good -- 9

so-so -- 12

flat out bad -- 1 

Looking through my notes, I find "not that great" scrawled in the  margin of the recipe for three layer pork with mustard greens and tofu. On the next page beside the recipe for lemongrass ginger sliders: "not my thing in terms of flavor -- very pungent." Next to warming beef curry with tomato: "Unimpressed. Thin. Small chunks of meat in thin spicy broth."

What I'm remembering are a lot of dishes that didn't quite take off, lacked zip, needed serious tinkering. It's always possible the problem was in the execution, but there are enough mediocre results here that it can't be all my fault. And maybe it's not even Duguid's fault. Myanmar hasn't exactly prospered over the last few decades, culturally or economically, and why wouldn't its cuisine reflect its troubles? Why wouldn't its beef stew be thin? It feels snotty to dip into a book about Burmese cooking and complain that not every dish pleases my dainty Western palate.

So let's pretend I didn't just do that and move on to my rapturous praise for the handful of dishes that were totally stunning. Long after I've forgotten the meals I didn't love, I'll remember those that I did, because the winners here were among the best things I've ever cooked. They were so incredibly good I don't regret for a minute buying this book and devoting a couple of months to cooking from its pages.

I'm talking about three dishes in particular: Kachin pounded beef with herbs, carrot salad, and the strange, wonderful silky Shan soup.  These happen to be the most exotic dishes I tried in the book and I'm wondering if that might be more than a coincidence. The Kachin beef and carrot salad both involved pounding the central ingredients to break down their fibers. The soup, thickened with chickpea flour, was like a dense, scrumptious porridge. Are the real rewards in Burma found among the recipes that take us furthest from our comfort zone? Did I do myself and the book a disservice by gravitating toward the easier, more familiar dishes?

If I were to throw myself into the book anew I would go straight for the Shan tofu salad made with Shan "tofu," which is not in fact tofu but a simple paste of chickpea flour that you cut into squares. Duguid calls it "one of the great unsung treasures of Southeast Asia, beautiful to look at and a pleasure to eat." I would make the Kachin rice powder soup with chicken and ginger, which appears to be another divine porridge. I'd make the Inle lake rice with garlic oil, which involves kneading jasmine rice with boiled potato, poached fish, and garlic oil. The recipes that call for kneading or pounding -- those are the ones I'd pick if I had it to do over. I'm almost tempted to dive back in.

The book isn't perfect, but given the dearth of books about Burmese cooking, I'm calling it a shelf essential. 

The Lady of Shallots

Neither Suriani banana jelly nor Guatemalan banana jelly contain shallots. 

The choice of Burma by Naomi Duguid for my next book was poorly timed, as tackling two shallot-based cuisines in a row is sapping my cooking spirit. I just have to read the words "heaping cup of thinly sliced shallots" and my eyes start to sting. I need goggles.

Last week, I made the chicken salad from Burma,  which consists of chopped rotisserie chicken tossed with lime juice, sliced raw shallots, fried shallots, shallot oil, and toasted chickpea flour. It was great. Strewing toasted chickpea flour over a salad seemed bizarre, but made perfect sense after the first bite as the chickpea flour serves the role of a crouton, but a crouton that has been powdered and dispersed over every morsel of salad. In other words, a perfect crouton. The following day I ate leftover chicken salad in a sandwich with lettuce and mayonnaise and it was fantastic. Isabel ate the chicken salad wrapped in a cold flour tortilla. Big thumbs up for Burmese chicken salad. You can find the recipe here, although I would skip the chicken breasts and use a rotisserie chicken.

The next night I served Duguid's pork sliders (i.e. meatballs) which are flavored with garlic, lemongrass, ginger, tomato, and minced shallots. Recipe here. They were too pungent for me, but popular with the others. To accompany the sliders I made eggplant delight (mashed eggplants, minced shallot, and egg cooked in shallot oil) which was too eggplanty for the others, but popular with me. I have also  braised a pot of  Duguid's sweet-and-tart pork belly (pork, hibiscus flowers, a generous cup of  shallots) but we aren't going to eat that until tonight so I can't tell you anything about it except that it is murky and full of wilted purple hibiscus flowers.

Burma is wonderful and exotic, but I'm just not feeling energized. I think I need a palate cleanser between South Asian cuisines. Suggestions please! I have pre-ordered Smitten Kitchen, but that won't arrive until next week. I'm going to buy Jerusalem at the Omnivore Books event, but that's next week, too. What should I do in the meantime?

To try to answer that question I went to the library the other day and walked out with two books, neither of which is going to work for the blog:

-Fannie's Last Supper by Christopher Kimball is what book critics like to call a "slim volume," words I must have used 450 times in a national magazine, but somehow can't employ in my little blog without wincing. Why is that? The bok recounts Kimball's attempt to recreate a 12-course Victorian feast using Fannie Farmer's 1896 cookbook as his guide and it is hilarious and smart and eccentric. I started reading it before I fell asleep and finished when I woke up, which is the beauty of a slim volume. But there was not a single dish in its pages that I wanted to cook. I wanted to make the soup that involves boiling down a whole calf's head and garnishing it with "brainballs" least of all.

-I haven't read Michael Ruhlman's Twenty yet, so can't offer an opinion. Not that I would offer any but the most glowing opinion after stumbling across this thread. Ruhlman's rebuttal puts me off Twenty more than the review that inspired it. Later, I looked for more reviews of Twenty and found this delightful cookbook blog. She rambles so much less than some cookbook critics I could name who often seem to forget why they started a blog in the first place.

And on that note: The final dinner I cooked from The Suriani Kitchen by Lathika George was a thick stew of beef, coconut, shallots, and tapioca.

tapioca

I had to make this dish because I had to try cooking fresh tapioca. I did not know that tapioca was the same foodstuff as yuca, the tasty spud-like starch I enjoyed when I was a high school exchange student in Costa Rica, but now I do. I liked tapioca/yuca then, I like it now, and I'm glad I had the experience of cooking it at least once in my life. Tapioca is cheap, easy to peel, easy to chop, and has the mild flavor and texture of a slightly fibrous potato. It is even less nutritious than a potato.

The other dish I knew I had to make before I closed the Suriani chapter was banana jelly, as I am a little bit hung up on bananas. To make Suriani banana jelly you briefly cook bananas in water, pour the mixture into a sieve and let the juice strain off overnight. (You mustn't press on the fruit, George warns, lest you release solids that will cloud the jelly.) The next day, cook this clear fluid down with sugar and eventually you end up with a delicate, translucent preserve that is very sweet and faintly banana flavored. We liked it. Didn't know quite what to do with it after enjoying a little on toast, but definitely liked it.

This seemed like the moment to also try making the Guatemalan banana jelly from Copleand Marks's False Tongues and Sunday Bread, a recipe that caught my eye years ago. For this more primitive jelly you just boil bananas with sugar and orange juice for an hour or so until you have a cloudy preserve that resembles apple butter, but tastes like banana baby food. I love banana baby food, so I was pleased. Of the two, I would make the Guatemalan jelly again because of its more emphatic banana flavor, but probably won't because there is just no demand in this household for banana jelly. 

The only other sweet I made from The Suriani Kitchen was mango mousse, and it was probably my favorite recipe in the whole book. George doesn't call for whipping the cream, which I think is a mistake, and I added twice as much chopped mango as she called for and omitted the cinnamon which she uses as a garnish. This was absolutely delicious, almost worth the price of the book.

2 cups mango puree
1 cup Greek yogurt (or strained homemade)
1/2 cup cream, whipped
1/4 cup sugar syrup, cooled (boil together equal parts sugar and water and chill)
1 cup chopped mango

1. Mix together the first 4 ingredients and chill.
2. Fold in the chopped mango. Serves 4. 

And there you have it.  I made 23 recipes from The Suriani Kitchen:

worth the price of the book -- 0
great -- 9 (fish molee, mousse, toddy pancakes)
good -- 5
so-so -- 9
flat out bad -- 0

Clearly The Suriani Kitchen is not a shelf essential, but if you're ever in the Indira Gandhi Airport at 9 p.m. and have extra rupees to unload and happen to come across a copy. . .  

Bread and Chocolate: earnest summation

My people have been in New England visiting extended family at the beach, eating fried clams, playing tennis, and attending cousin Julianna's wedding. I stayed behind to take care of the goats, which is something to think about before you get goats. Believe me, I've thought about it a lot these last few days. I gave away Natalie's babies yesterday and the new owner put the in dog crates in the back of his pick-up and you could hear them bleating piteously even after they'd disappeared from view. Traumatic. For me, but mostly for Natalie, who has been looking for them and crying ever since. She is crying as I type. It is sad and in the middle of the night it is also irritating.  I don't think there's anything to do but keep her milked and wait it out.

In addition to milking, during the absence of the family I've been trying to accomplish writing projects, work projects, hydrangea planting, tree removals, window washing, sewing machine set-up, Moonrise Kingdom. Cooking wasn't on that list and I've subsisted on cantaloupe, grilled cheese sandwiches, Father's Day chocolates, and Gummi vitamins. Blogging wasn't on that list either. Clearly.

I bought Fran Gage's book Bread and Chocolate right when it came out about a decade ago. I read it cover to cover and remember thinking it was a sweet and gentle remembrance of a happy life in San Francisco that revolved around food. She writes a chapter about the greenmarket a few blocks fom where I used to live, and Citizen Cake where I used to buy cookies. I know the places and the vendors she describes and I feel a connection to this book because it captures a world I know, not because she tells me anything I didn't know.

The recipes were solid. The breads most solid of all. I made the rye bread for oysters, the polenta bread, the fougasse and (repeatedly) the country wheat bread. They were all great. Given that Gage is a baker, I was a little disappointed that the dessert recipes weren't more consistently unusual and delicious. A lot of them seemed like boilerplate: chocolate poundcake, lemon poundcake, shortbread cookies, chocolate pots de creme. They were fine, but neither exceptionally good nor unique, which is what I expect from the recipes in a food memoir. I expect a grab bag of highly personal, hand-picked, outstanding recipes I won't find anywhere else. There were a few of these (peanut butter and jelly cake), but in my view, not enough.

UPDATE: In recounting to list the "good and great" recipes (see below) I discovered that I made an error in my initial tally. I must have miscounted, because I only made 28 recipes from the book. Guys, I'm slipping.

worth the price of the book  -- 1 (aforementioned cake)
great -- 9
good -- 11
so-so -- 5
flat-out bad -- 2

I would buy this book again, but it's not a shelf essential.

My husband comes home tonight and I'll probably start cooking again tomorrow, though it is tempting to continue with the grilled cheese. Kids are staying in New England for a while; Isabel won't be home until August.

As requested, here is a list of the recipes that I deemed either "good" or "great:" strawberry ice cream, vanilla bean shortbread, brioches with goat cheese custard, potato salad with sake and olive oil, penne with saffron cream sauce, mushroom appetizer puffs, roast chicken with mushrooms, plum preserves, fougasse, red pepper and olive oil sauce, watercress salad with apples and pecans, salade beaujolaise, ricotta gnocchi, rye bread to serve with oysters, polenta bread, fusilli with escarole, country wheat bread, potatoes baked in parchment, chocolate pots de creme, fresh apple salsa. Bon appetit!

Cuisines of Spain: earnest summation

I'm not going to harsh on this book, which is handsome and thorough and full of information and dreamy photographs of tile-roofed stone farmhouses and braids of garlic and cafes in Sevilla and Zaragoza where I would rather be right this second drinking a glass of anything. Teresa Barrenechea did a good job. I like this book. I like to look at it and read it. I just didn't like to cook from it because the food didn't turn out very well.

I don't know if the fault lies with uninspired recipes, flawed recipes, inadequate instructions, or my own shortcomings as a cook. Probably all four. I'm pretty sure I did something stupid while I was making the caramelized orange syrup for the leg of lamb the other night. But what? It's the job of the cookbook to guide the cook through the complications, to point out the pitfalls, to explain how a mixture should look and feel at a given moment, to tell you what not to do as well as what to do. Good recipes don't just dictate or instruct, they warn, describe, encourage, explain. Barrenechea's recipes don't really do this. People have had a lot of trouble with the bread recipe in the cookbook I wrote and I believe it is my fault entirely. The bread is great; the recipe wasn't good enough.

Anyway, for whatever reason Barrenechea's torta de Santiago turned out extremely dry; the coca with parsley resembled focaccia topped with lawn mower clippings; the marmitako seemed overly oily. Dish after dish, just not quite right.

I made 15 recipes from The Cuisines of Spain.

worth the price of the book -- 0
great -- 2
good -- 4
so-so -- 6
flat-out bad -- 3

Shelf essential? Obviously I don't think so.

Mozza: earnest summation

Nancy Silverton's Mozza Cookbook veers sharply from the magnificent (pizza crust, meatballs, an incredible dish of mussels with tomato sauce) to the not-quite-right (a bland pan-roasted halibut; a glitchy brussels sprouts recipe, a slushy Meyer lemon gelato), but cooking from this book was never less than enthralling for me. It is full of exciting and exotic dishes (stinging nettle tagliatelle, caramel coppetta with marshmallow sauce and salted Spanish peanuts) that I still want to try on the chance that they'll fall on the magnificent end of the spectrum. And based on the record of the recipes I've already tried, it seems probable that a few of them would.

I cooked 27 recipes from Mozza in January and February:

worth the price of the book -- 3 (the ones I mentioned in the first sentence of this post)
great -- 9
good -- 8
so-so -- 6
flat-out bad -- 1

The book has problems, probably more than it should given Silverton's reputation. But I love this book. It's challenging and interesting and inspiring and I consider it a shelf essential.

Best of the Best from California: earnest summation

A few years ago, Isabel and I had a lot of fun cooking from Best of the Best from Alaska, which was the only Alaskan cookbook we could find at the bookstore and full of halibut recipes. It wasn't bad at all.

This cookbook, however, is terrible. I cooked from it in December and January, when I was starting my big diet, and the dishes were so mediocre it was easy to eat moderate portions, and sometimes nothing at all. The book is a compilation of recipes from California community cookbooks and spiral-bound books. Some of them are so grotesque (chicken thighs dipped in nonfat sour cream and barbecue potato chips crumbs) that you wonder if the book might be a big joke.

It's not.

I cooked 13 recipes from this book:

worth the price of the book -- 0
great -- 0
good -- 4
so-so -- 6
flat-out bad -- 3

My personal favorite recipe was the Hershey's Kiss pie, made with melted Hershey's candies and Cool Whip. It was delicious, but I can't quite give it a "great."

Earnest summation: Tender (volumes I and II)

I just didn't love Nigel Slater's Tender books as much as I wanted to, or as much as other people (like Alice Waters) did. They're very elegant and intelligent and I liked a lot of Slater's dishes, but they're not books that I'll reach for in the future. I know this because in the months since I quit cooking from them, I haven't reached for either of them once. (In the United States, the second volume of Tender -- which is about growing and cooking fruit -- was just published as Ripe.)

Why didn't I love these books more. . . . For one thing, they felt padded to me, with pages of poetic musings about roasting chestnuts and growing potatoes and the history of blackberries and I just wasn't riveted enough to soldier through. This is a matter of personal taste. I like stories and I like recipes, but these are more like reveries and I found myself skimming them. Pages and pages of them.

As to the recipes, there was something overly casual about them. I wrote about this while I was cooking through the books, but I'll repeat it here: I felt that Slater cobbled together some of these recipes in his kitchen with a blob of marmalade and a knob of butter and a few gnarly apples on a drizzly Sunday afternoon. Of course, this is part of Slater's charm. He doesn't write glossy, show-offy recipes; his are frumpy, unpretentious "make do" recipes. Eccentric great aunt recipes. Hobbit recipes. I'm thinking specifically of countless monochromatic unfrosted 1-layer cakes made with fruit, wholemeal flour, and brown sugar. And marmalade. I made a lot of Slater's cakes. Brown and flattish and very tasty, they all run together in my mind.

While I don't need glossy, show-offy recipes, I don't really need recipes like Slater's at this point in my cooking life. I've already got plenty of recipes for cakes that taste like muffins. What I'm looking for are stand-out recipes.

I'm sounding harsher than I actually feel. I liked more of the dishes than I disliked and for all my carping, these are overall very solid cookbooks. If you own them, keep them. If you don't own them, well, check them out of the library for a test run before you commit.

From Tender, volume I (the vegetable book) I made 18 recipes.

worth the price of the book  -- 2
great -- 5
good -- 7
so-so -- 3
flat-out bad -- 1 (the revolting -- and I do mean revolting -- casserole of duck, turnips and marmalade)

From Tender, volume II, I made 9 recipes.

worth the price of the book -- 0
great -- 1 (pear pecan tart)
good -- 7
so-so -- 0
flat-out bad -- 1

The two best dishes I made both came from Tender, volume 1 and they are: the pumpkin scone, which I served with sharp cheese and which was unlike anything I'd ever eaten before, a memorable and brilliant use of boring squash. And Slater's oxtail stew is the best I've ever made.

Still. Shelf essential? In my opinion, no.

Soul of a New Cuisine: Earnest Summation

I threw myself into this handsome cookbook after getting back from Africa last summer because the food in Africa, contrary to my expectations, was so spicy, so hearty, so novel, so thoroughly delicious. I wanted to explore further.

The food from The Soul of a New Cuisine was not quite so delicious. I cooked 18 of Marcus Samuelsson's recipes. I flipped through the book just now and wondered why I didn't try more, because a lot of these dishes -- ginger banana salad, trout spaghetti -- look very, very enticing. Or is that just because I haven't had lunch?

Then I read the comments I scrawled next to a handful of the recipes I actually did cook and remembered why I gave up on the book. After a few disappointments -- like a crushingly expensive rack of lamb with an off-flavored spice crust -- I lost faith. The recipes didn't work as well as they should have; the results were not always delectable. One cake failed completely; so did the injera.

The best dishes were the rustic, stewy preparations, like a delicious pot of mashed vegetables flavored with spiced butter. Wonderful, too, was Samuelsson's lamb curry. Less successful were the dishes in which Samuelsson tried to fuse his high-end chef's sensibility with African flavors. I'm thinking about that Berbere-crusted rack of lamb again. It's hard to forgive a recipe that ruins a rack of lamb.

Recipe tally:

worth the price of the book -- 0
great -- 4 (ginger beer, chunky mashed vegetables, lamb curry)
good -- 6
so-so -- 5
flat-out bad -- 3 (peanut cake with caramelized papayas, Berbere-crusted rack of lamb)

Not a terrible book. Not a shelf essential.

Guy Fieri Food: Earnest Summation

I haven't updated the cookbook reviews in months and it's been bugging me, so here comes some catch-up.

First in line: Guy Fieri Food, which Owen chose for me to cook from last summer. The cover should explain why a 10-year-old boy would gravitate toward this book and a 45-year-old woman would not.

I like Guy Fieri as a personality. I've watched his television show and he's cheerful and generous and seems like a nice man. But his recipes? Not for me. There was no way I was ever going to make his cocktail of vodka, frozen orange juice concentrate, sparkling wine and vanilla ice cream. I was never going to make his firecracker chicken wings  or Irish nachos (tortilla chips, frozen french fries, corned beef) or deep-fried string cheese sticks (wrapped in salami and egg roll skins.)

I cooked 13 of the recipes in the book, roughly 8 percent. Not enough! I should have done a few more. But I'm not going back in. For the record, we thought his gaucho steak with four herb chimichurri was fantastic. His beer can chicken was solid. His Irish Dream cheesecake (Bailey's, choclate, cream cheese) was absurd. His carrot-ginger soup was foul.

It's not a bad book. We were just ill-suited, Guy Fieri Food and me. If you want to meet cooks who  feel very differently, check out the amazon.com reviews.

Here's the recipe tally:

worth the price of the book -- 0
great -- 2 (pork blade steak piccata, gaucho steak)
good -- 5
so-so -- 3
flat-out bad -- 3 (beef brisket, the baked potatoes rubbed with Lawry's seasoned salt)

Shelf essential? No. Obviously.

Super Natural Every Day: Earnest Summation

I spent a lot of time analyzing my relationship with Super Natural Every Day while I was having the relationship. Here's what it was like: like dating an impossibly beautiful, cool, and graceful person who you really want to mesh with, but don't, quite. Like The Way We Were, and you're Barbra Streisand.

I admire this book a lot. I admire the sensibility, the aesthetic, the photography, the principles of restraint and mindfulness that underpin every gorgeous page. But I'm just not that restrained or mindful and the food -- simple vegetarian dishes --  wasn't what I, or the people I live with, wanted to eat.

Except when it was! There were some big hits. So the spread here is very unusual.

Of the 23 recipes I cooked from Super Natural Every Day:

worth the price of the book -- 2 (lemony yogurt on the outstanding farro soup; broccoli gribiche)
great -- 5 (I craved the white beans and cabbage and Swanson's oatcakes.)
good -- 5
so-so -- 9
flat-out bad -- 2

For the record, here the designations "so-so" and "flat-out bad" reflect sharp differences in taste, not recipe glitches. At this house, we simply like sweet things sweeter, cheesy things cheesier, alcoholic drinks more alcoholic, and we're not lovers of millet and tempeh. I wish we were, but we're not. Still: an exquisite cookbook, with some excellent recipes. This book stays.

Around My French Table: Earnest Summation

When I was in South Africa, I met a woman from New Jersey and we immediately connected over our love of Dorie Greenspan's cookbooks. She has a lot of fans, that Dorie. I think I've effused sufficiently about Around My French Table over the last 8 months, so I'll be quick. This has become one of my most cherished cookbooks -- for the sardines rillettes, the beggar's linguine, the cheese crackers, the perfect brioche, the super-easy curried chicken and peas that you roast in a triangle of foil. For the generosity and reliability and abundance. I keep going back to this book and suspect I always will.

During my initial fling with this book, I made 32 recipes:

Worth the price of the book -- 5 (the recipes listed above)
Great -- 12
Good -- 13
So-so -- 2
Flat-out bad -- 0

One of the best ratios since I started this blog.

Now, a little Heidi Swanson, a little Guy Fieri, and I'm current.

Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen: Earnest Summation

Last fall, I spent a few weeks cooking from Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen. Can you remember back that far? I can't, but I'm updating my cookbook reviews, which I haven't done for almost a year and which has been bugging me for almost a year. Not that anyone cares anymore, but for the internal integrity of the blog, I have to do this.

A recap: Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen is a handsome, earth-toned book full of enticing pictures of rustic food as prepared by a famous Seattle chef, the owner of How to Cook a Wolf and Tavolata, among other restaurants. Charlotte Freeman, who writes the Cookbookslut column at Bookslut, hated Stowell's book with a white hot fury. Its cheffy pretensions -- reminders about using only best quality ingredients, the "tone of haughty hyper-reverence" -- made her want to "stick hot needles" in her eyes.

I don't disagree with any of Freeman's points, which are all valid criticisms, but this book didn't make me want to stick hot needles in my eyes. (In fact, I can think of nothing that would.) To the contrary, I enjoyed Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen. Probably because I spent very little time reading the headnotes, which are indeed irritating, as I was so completely smitten with the recipes, which I found fascinating and exotic. Opening the book again this morning, I saw at least a dozen unusual, seductive dishes that I'd like to cook in the appropriate season: espresso granita with grappa cream, pear-star anise ice cream, soft-shell crab bruschetta with spring garlic aioli, canneloni with braised pork cheeks and sweet cicely.

That is, if I knew where to buy pork cheeks or sweet cicely without making a dozen phone calls and a trip to Berkeley.

Which is why, last fall, I cooked only 13 recipes from this book. (By comparison, I  made 57 recipes from the Moro cookbook; 36 out of Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc At Home; 52 out of Claudia Rodin's Arabesque.) A lot of Stowell's dishes, maybe even a majority, call for obscure ingredients I could not readily find: ramps, rabbit loin, lobster mushrooms, Thumbelina carrots, Cacio Faenum cheese, snails, live sea urchin, lamb's tongues, nettles. Et cetera. Sometimes I'm up for a scavenger hunt. In October 2010, apparently, I wasn't.

The recipe tally:

Worth the price of the book -- 0
Great -- 6 (roasted figs with chocolate espresso ganache, endive lemon salad)
Good -- 6
So-so -- 1
Flat out bad -- 0

While I don't think it's a shelf essential, Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen still shines for me. I plan to throw away cookbooks that don't review well on the blog, and Mixt Salads is long gone. This book stays.

Done! On to Dorie Greenspan.

Mixt Salads, the earnest summation

Herewith, a very short review of Mixt Salads, one sorry ass cookbook.

I made only 8 recipes rather than the planned-for 10 because this book was such a dud. I ceased to trust it after about the third recipe and began to resent it. The book calls for too many obscure ingredients, plays fast and loose with expensive ingredients (chanterelles, caviar), contains annoying errors, and, most egregiously, fails to produce tasty food.

The tally of recipes:

worth the price of the book -- 0

great -- 0

good -- 1

so-so -- 7

flat-out bad -- 0

The "good" recipe was a non-recipe: sliced tomatoes sprinkled with oil and salt. I do not doubt that Mixt, restaurants serve fine salads, though I would have to actually eat one to know for a fact. I wonder if the cookbook was just a promotional tool for the restaurants, in which case silly me for taking it seriously.

But I do take cookbooks seriously. We middle class Americans inherit a problematic home cooking tradition -- shall I pull out my grandmother's recipe for a molded lime Jell-O salad with horseradish sauce as proof? -- and we need our authorities to be authoritative. After years of cooking through and reading and collecting cookbooks I can cook without books, but I could never have gotten to this point without them. Almost all of the books I've reviewed here have shaped how I cook, taught me a new trick, brought me a new recipe, given me ideas. This one didn't.

End of review.

A couple of links:

-This is wonderful.

-A crime novelist I'd never heard of but now want to read. The only thing that worries me is his reported weakness on plot, as I like plot.

Thomas Keller & Barbara Lynch: earnest summations

I had to go back and search through the blog to ascertain that I'd never actually summed up my experience with Ad Hoc at Home. I didn't, did I? This wasn't meant to be a Keller-Lynch horse race, but since they're both chef books, I'm reviewing them together.

I made 36 dishes out of Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc At Home:

Worth the price of the book -- 1 (fried chicken)

Great -- 13 (biscuits, mint chocolate chip ice cream)

Good -- 10

So-so -- 11

Flat-out bad -- 1

I made 40 dishes out of Barbara Lynch's Stir:

Worth the price of the book -- 2 (eggplant salad, stuffed tomato)

Great -- 15

Good -- 17

So-so -- 6

Flat-out bad --- o

I think as time passes a lot of really wonderful recipes tend to fade in my memory. Looking through my margin notes in the Keller I had written "fantastic" beside dishes I only vaguely remember making and loving, like mint chocolate chip ice cream and his mother's coconut cake. So some of his "greats" might have been "worth the price of the books" if I'd done this summary in a more timely fashion. In any case, at the high end, I really think these two books shine equally brightly.

But I didn't have as many disappointments with Lynch. That I'm sure of. Thomas Keller's iceberg lettuce salad was a time-consuming flop. The roasted halibut, the roasted game hens, the pomegranate-glazed quail -- not hits. A lot of these recipes are attempts to show how to make impeccable, very simple, down-home food which would be fine, except they didn't consistently work. I don't need a $50 cookbook to show me how to make boring food that doesn't taste amazing. I can do that on my own. The exception: his Santa Maria tri-tip was simple and fabulous and that "boring" recipe might have been worth the price of the book. On the fence about that.

Barbara Lynch wraps her chicken in bread dough and puts caraway gnocchi in her soup and whipped cream in her risotto. She taught me how to stuff gnocchi and tear up pasta dough and make a pizza out of brioche topped with honey and pistachios. Even when I didn't absolutely adore the results, the experience was always interesting. Mostly I adored the results.

If you have unlimited cookbook dollars to spend on fat, beautiful chef tomes, buy both books. But after cooking 76 recipes from these two fine volumes, I would say if you have limited funds, buy Stir.

Very excited to move on to a new book. I've got something a little different in mind for the next month or so. I'll save that for the next post.

Moro: The long overdue earnest summation

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I cooked from the Moro cookbook, and it was one of my favorite cookbooks ever. I know I just gushed about Pioneer Woman, but let me leave no room for doubt: MORO IS BETTER. 

Eccentric and personal, Moro is my favorite kind of cookbook, the antithesis to the sterile, test kitchen-generated Gourmet Today. Although the desserts all failed me and the skate wing counts among the most repulsive things I've ever cooked, this Mediterranean/North African/Middle Eastern cookbook by Sam & Sam Clark (above) challenged and fascinated and educated and fed us very, very well for several months. Even after all that time there were dozens of recipes I still wanted to try but never got around to: roasted pork belly with fennel seed, fried liver with chopped salad, crab brik. The I only reason I stopped cooking from Moro was because Isabel became fixated on Pioneer Woman and practically begged me to move on.

 

I cooked 57 recipes from Moro:

Worth the price of the book: 2*

Great: 14

Good: 25

So-so: 12

Flat-out bad: 4

 

*the bread, of course, which I have baked a dozen or more times, but also the phenomenal chickpeas and spinach.

Definitely a shelf essential. 

Also, I have a story today in Slate comparing Pioneer Woman and Thomas Keller. His fried chicken is way, way better, but I still prefer her book.

Pioneer Woman: the earnest summation

Since I've already written at length about Pioneer Woman Cooks, this will be short and statistical.

I made 28 recipes out of Pioneer Woman Cooks:

Worth the price of the book -- 2*

Great -- 2

Good -- 15

So-so -- 6

Flat-out bad -- 3

That's actually a very middling performance, now that I look at it, and doesn't reflect the pleasure I took in cooking from this funny book. If I was the kind of gal who called herself a gal and said things were a hoot, I would say this book was a hoot. That's how I imagine PW talks. It would be fun to be able to talk that way, but when you grew up in San Francisco you just can't.

Shelf essential? On my shelf, yes. I wouldn't dare speak for yours.

*sheet cake and meatballs.

NEXT: Big Sur Bakery Cookbook.

Gourmet Today: earnest summation

If you have it, keep it. If you don't, it's nothing you can't live without. That's my assessment of the fat and shiny new book from the producers of the late magazine. I wish I loved this book, but unlike the mighty 2004 Gourmet cookbook, it felt like brand extension. I heard Ruth Reichl on Forum a while back trying to explain -- and she is very persuasive -- that the book embraces all the nifty new ingredients available in our supermarkets, things like pomegranate molasses and smoked paprika and while that sounded terrific, as an organizing principle, it simply doesn't work. Or she and her crew don't make it work. This isn't an everyday cookbook like Joy, because it won't tell you how to make chocolate chip cookies, but then it includes basic, soporific recipes for pancake and custard, which struck me as lazy filler. And a lot of the supposedly kicky new dishes aren't all that kicky, they just require a bottle of spendy pomegranate liqueur, or that you send away for a sack of Canadian maple sugar. Most of the recipes were solid, few inspired.

I made 46 recipes from Gourmet Today.

Worth the Price of the book -- 0

Great: 9

Good: 23

So-so: 11

Flat-out bad: 3

What did we love? We loved the mussels ravigote and the sun-dried tomato dip and the pot roast and I'd make all of them again, but they're not worth the price of the book. There's probably a recipe that is -- I never made the pork belly buns and just typing those succulent words makes my mouth water -- but time to move on to Moro. 

Shelf essential: no. 

The Sweet Life in Paris: Earnest Summation

I owe a wrap-up on Sweet Life in Paris.

Made 26 recipes out of David Lebovitz's quirky culinary memoir:

Worth the price of the book: 3

Great: 4

Good: 12

So-so: 7

Flat-out bad: 0

The three recipes we especially loved: the chocolate chip cream puffs, the bouncy, pillowy chocolate-coconut marshmallows, and the Breton buckwheat cake. That deceptively simple Breton buckwheat cake beggars my storehouse of superlatives. Recipe: here.

If I have one gripe, it's that Lebovitz includes so many chocolate recipes: Chocolate yogurt snack cakes, chocolate financiers, hot chocolate, chocolate cake, two chocolate mousses, chocolate spice bread, double chocolate crepes, etc., etc. 

I know, that's my problem. 

Otherwise, great book.