Cookbook Club - Home Cooking with Trisha Yearwood

In March the Cookbook Club read and cooked from Home Cooking with Trisha Yearwood by Trisha Yearwood. While last month's selection fell a bit flat this one was a hit. Many members said they were planning to buy the book for themselves and one even said it was her favorite so far.

We tried the following recipes:

Magic Lemon Meringue Pie

Country Quiche

 Crockpot Candy

Ty's Thai Salad

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Charleston Cheese Dip

                                  Cockpot Mac & Cheese

                                      Tennesse Jambalaya 

                                      Broccoli Cheese Casserole

Next Book:
Rachael Ray's Book of 10 by Rachael Ray

Copies can be picked up at the "Ask Here" desk.
Next Meeting: Sunday, April 10th at 1:00pm

Cookbook Club - Comfort Food Make Overs: All Your Favorites Made Lighter

In February, the Cookbook Club read and cooked from Comfort Food Makeovers: All Your Favorites Made Lighter by America's Test Kitchen. This book was no one's favorite of our selections so far. The general consensus seemed to be, if you're going to treat yourself to some comfort food, then have the real thing. Another point the group made was, that while the book gave how many calories were in the original versus the makeover dish, the original recipe was not included and it would be helpful to see what was being substituted for what. A few members were a bit disappointed with their dishes this time, but they were far from unenjoyable.

We tried the following recipes:
7 Layer Dip
Oatmeal Fudge
Lemon Squares
Pad Thai
Spinach Salad
Cheeseburger Pie
Tomato Soup

Next Book:
Home Cooking with Trisha Yearwood by Trisha Yearwood

Copies can be picked up at the "Ask Here" desk.
Next Meeting: Sunday, March 13th at 1:00pm

Cookbook Club selections from "Comfort Food Makeovers" by America's Test Kitchen. #bpldbookgroup #cookbookclub

A photo posted by BPLD (@bartlettpublib) on Feb 14, 2016 at 1:45pm PST

Cookbook Club - Weeknights with Giada

 

January's Cookbook Club brought in recipes from Giada de Laurentiis's Weeknights with Giada: Quick and Simple Recipes to Revamp Dinner. Overall this book went over well. The recipes were actually simple and easy to follow, with little to no tweaking needed to make them work - most of the changes were done by preference of the person cooking (e.g. the Apricot Oat Bars were made with cherries instead of apricots and the Creamy Sweet Potato and Rosemary Soup was made with a bit less broth to make it thicker). The only small complaint was that not every recipe had a picture, and sometimes it helps to know what the final product should be. Everyone enjoyed the dishes that were shared and thought the book was true to its name, they could could easily be made during the week.

We Tried the Following Recipes:
Creamy Sweet Potato and Rosemary Soup
Penne in Almond Sauce
Pastina with Peas and Carrots
Peach and Cherry Frittata
Apricot (in our case Cherry) Oat Bars

Next Book: Comfort Food Makeovers 



Copies can be picked up at the Adult Services Desk
Next Meeting: Sunday, February 14 at 1:00pm

Cookbook Club - Bake It, Don't Fake It

This Sunday’s Cookbook Club baked recipes from Bake It, Don’t Fake It by Heather Bertinetti. Overall, this cookbook wasn’t a favorite. In fact, one member gave it an F for failure. The general consensus was that this cookbook isn’t for inexperienced bakers. Some recipes required longer baking times than were stated, and a few of the batters seemed to be too thin. Three members made the biscotti, and all agreed that the dough was too sticky, and almost unmanageable. Each batch of biscotti turned out ok, but the recipe was very difficult.

However, it wasn’t all bad. The scones didn’t look like they would turn out, but they did. The crepes were surprising in their versatility. They could be “doctored” in many different ways, and the member who made them preferred the savory options to the sweet options. One member was impressed with some of the never-before-seen recipes in this cookbook.

We tried the following recipes:

Chocolate Biscotti - 3 different bakers

Chocolate Cake - collapsed, so Brownies were made instead

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Dulce de Leche Powder Puff Cookies

Gorgonzola and Bacon Scones

Chocolate Chip Muffins

Pistachio Cupcakes

PB & J Whoopie Pies

Palmiers

Crepes - 2 different fillings: applesauce and cinnamon, and blackberry jam

Next book: Weeknights with Giada by Giada De Laurentiis

Copies can be picked up at the reference desk.
Next Meeting: Sunday, January 17 at 1 p.m.

Cookbook Club - The Chew

At Sunday's Cookbook Club meeting members reviewed recipes they tried out from The Chew: Food, Life, Fun. While, many enjoy watching the show on ABC, this was not a favorite among the cookbooks selected. All the foods came out tasting good, but many found that times were longer (in some cases much longer) than times estimated in the book and there were quite a few recipes listed at the easy level, however several of them were a bit more complicated than easy. Another issue some had was a lack of pictures in the book; it can be nice to know what your final product should look like. On the other hand each host gave a little opening to their recipes, which added some fun personality to each one.

From this book the group enjoyed:
Fresh Frozen Fruit Sorbet - The book called for honey instead of agave and a mix of frozen mangoes, strawberries and peaches were used.
Whoopie Pies - 2 different cooks
Skillet Irish Soda Bread
Coconut Pound Cake - We tried a less sweetened version with powdered sugar on top rather than glaze.
Warrior Salad
Holiday Mac & Cheese Casserole
Wine-Stained Pasta

Next Month's Book: Bake it, Don't Fake it! by Heather Bertinelli









Copies can be picked up at the reference desk.
Next Meeting: Sunday, November 15th at 1:00pm

Cookbook Club - Barefoot Contessa at Home

Barefoot Contessa at Home by Ina Garten is the third book our Cookbook Club has tried out (previous books were Smitten Kitchen by Deb Perelman and The Pioneer Woman Cooks by Ree Drummond). While some members of the group preferred the everyday feeling of the meals Drummond offered in her book, others found Barefoot Contessa at Home to be their favorite one so far. A few members described the recipes as very Hamptons (where Garten owns a home), but all the dishes brought were delicious and very few adjustments had to be made, most of the dishes even looked like the pictures (which were excellent). Recipes sampled (and enjoyed) included:

Tomato Feta Salad
Heirloom Tomatoes with Blue Cheese Dressing
Jalapeno Cheddar Cornbread
Roasted Shrimp and Orzo
Mexican Chicken Tortilla Soup
Cranberry and Orange Scones
Easy Cheese Danish
Lemon Yogurt Cake

Next months book will be: The Chew: Food, Life, Fun

Copies can be picked up at the reference desk!
Next Meeting: Sunday, October 11th at 1:00pm

Cooks in the Kitchen

I'm currently reading My Berlin Kitchen by Luisa Weiss, and I'm falling in love with it. Besides being an excellent book, it's making me think of the other food writing memoirs I've read. I'm not much of a cook, but there's something about a cooking memoir that I love. If you are interested in these types of books, too, here's a list for further reading. Enjoy!

Apron Anxiety: My Messy Affairs In and Out of the Kitchen by Alyssa Shelasky

Apron Anxiety is the hilarious and heartfelt memoir of quintessential city girl Alyssa Shelasky and her crazy, complicated love affair with...the kitchen.

Three months into a relationship with her TV-chef crush, celebrity journalist Alyssa Shelasky left her highly social life in New York City to live with him in D.C. But what followed was no fairy tale: Chef hours are tough on a relationship. Surrounded by foodies yet unable to make a cup of tea, she was displaced and discouraged. Motivated at first by self-preservation rather than culinary passion, Shelasky embarked on a journey to master the kitchen, and she created the blog Apron Anxiety (ApronAnxiety.com) to share her stories. 

 

A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table by Molly Wizenberg


When Molly Wizenberg's father died of cancer, everyone told her to go easy on herself, to hold off on making any major decisions for a while. But when she tried going back to her apartment in Seattle and returning to graduate school, she knew it wasn't possible to resume life as though nothing had happened. So she went to Paris, a city that held vivid memories of a childhood trip with her father, of early morning walks on the cobbled streets of the Latin Quarter and the taste of her first pain au chocolat. She was supposed to be doing research for her dissertation, but more often, she found herself peering through the windows of chocolate shops, trekking across town to try a new pâtisserie, or tasting cheeses at outdoor markets, until one evening when she sat in the Luxembourg Gardens reading cookbooks until it was too dark to see, she realized that her heart was not in her studies but in the kitchen.

Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell

Nearing 30 and trapped in a dead-end secretarial job, Julie Powell reclaims her life by cooking every single recipe in Julia Child's legendary Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the span of one year. It's a hysterical, inconceivable redemptive journey - life rediscovered through aspics, calves' brains and crème brûlée. 



  

Making Piece: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Pie by Beth M. Howard

When journalist Beth M. Howard's young husband dies suddenly, she packs up the RV he left behind and hits the American highways. At every stop along the way—whether filming a documentary or handing out free slices on the streets of Los Angeles—Beth uses pie as a way to find purpose. Howard eventually returns to her Iowa roots and creates the perfect synergy between two of America's greatest icons—pie and the American Gothic House, the little farmhouse immortalized in Grant Wood's famous painting, where she now lives and runs the Pitchfork Pie Stand.

Making Piece powerfully shows how one courageous woman triumphs over tragedy. This beautifully written memoir is, ultimately, about hope. It's about the journey of healing and recovery, of facing fears, finding meaning in life again, and moving forward with purpose and, eventually, joy. It's about the nourishment of the heart and soul that comes from the simple act of giving to others, like baking a homemade pie and sharing it with someone whose pain is even greater than your own. And it tells of the role of fate, second chances and the strength found in community.

My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story (With Recipes) by Luisa Weiss


My Berlin Kitchen tells the story of how one thoroughly confused, kitchen-maid perfectionist broke off her engagement to a handsome New Yorker, quit her dream job, and found her way to a new life, a new man, and a new home in Berlin—one recipe at a time.

Luisa Weiss grew up with a divided heart, shuttling back and forth between her father in Boston and her Italian mother in Berlin. She was always yearning for home, until she found a new home in the kitchen. Luisa started clipping recipes in college and was a cookbook editor in New York when she decided to bake, roast, and stew her way through her, by then, unwieldy collection over the course of one tumultuous year. The blog she wrote to document her adventures in (and out) of the kitchen, The Wednesday Chef, soon became a sensation. But she never stopped hankering for Berlin.

My Life from Scratch by Gesine Bullock-Prado 

As head of her celebrity sister’s production company, Gesine Bullock-Prado had a closet full of designer clothes and the ear of all the influential studio heads, but she was miserable. The only solace she found was in her secret hobby: baking. With every sugary, buttery confection to emerge from her oven, Gesine took one step away from her glittery, empty existence—and one step closer to her true destiny. Before long, she and her husband left the trappings of their Hollywood lifestyle behind, ending up in Vermont, where they started the gem known as Gesine Confectionary. And they never looked back. My Life from Scratch follows Gesine's journey from sugar-obsessed child to miserable, awkward Hollywood insider to reluctant master baker. Chock-full of eccentric characters, beautifully detailed descriptions of her baking process, ceaselessly funny renditions of Hollywood nonsense, and recipes, the ingredients of her story will appeal to anyone who has ever considered leaving the life they know and completely starting over.

 My Life in France by Julia Child

Julia Child singlehandedly created a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she was not always a master chef. Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the USIS, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever with her newfound passion for cooking and teaching. Julia’s unforgettable story – struggles with the head of the Cordon Bleu, rejections from publishers to whom she sent her now-famous cookbook, a wonderful, nearly fifty-year long marriage that took them across the globe – unfolds with the spirit so key to her success as a chef and a writer, brilliantly capturing one of the most endearing American personalities of the last fifty years.

 The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection by Michael Ruhlman

In his second in-depth foray into the world of professional cooking, Michael Ruhlman journeys into the heart of the profession. Observing the rigorous Certified Master Chef exam at the Culinary Institute of America, the most influential cooking school in the country, Ruhlman enters the lives and kitchens of rising star Michael Symon and renowned Thomas Keller of the French Laundry. This fascinating book will satisfy any reader's hunger for knowledge about cooking and food, the secrets of successful chefs, at what point cooking becomes an art form, and more. Like Ruhlman's The Making of a Chef, this is an instant classic in food writing-one of the fastest growing and most popular subjects today.

 Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table by Ruth Reichl


At an early age, Ruth Reichl discovered that "food could be a way of making sense of the world. . . . If you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were." Her deliciously crafted memoir is the story of a life determined, enhanced, and defined in equal measure by a passion for food, unforgettable people, and the love of tales well told.  Beginning with Reichl's mother, the notorious food-poisoner known as the Queen of Mold, Reichl introduces us to the fascinating characters who shaped her world and her tastes, from the gourmand Monsieur du Croix, who served Reichl her first soufflé, to those at her politically correct table in Berkeley who championed the organic food revolution in the 1970s.  Spiced with Reichl's infectious humor and sprinkled with her favorite recipes, Tender at the Bone is a witty and compelling chronicle of a culinary sensualist's coming-of-age. 

Yes, Chef: A Memoir by Marcus Samuelsson


Marcus Samuelsson was only three years old when he, his mother, and his sister—all battling tuberculosis—walked seventy-five miles to a hospital in the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Adaba. Tragically, his mother succumbed to the disease shortly after she arrived, but Marcus and his sister recovered, and one year later they were welcomed into a loving middle-class white family in Göteborg, Sweden. It was there that Marcus’s new grandmother, Helga, sparked in him a lifelong passion for food and cooking with her pan-fried herring, her freshly baked bread, and her signature roast chicken. From a very early age, there was little question what Marcus was going to be when he grew up.

Yes, Chef chronicles Marcus Samuelsson’s remarkable journey from Helga’s humble kitchen to some of the most demanding and cutthroat restaurants in Switzerland and France, from his grueling stints on cruise ships to his arrival in New York City, where his outsize talent and ambition finally come together at Aquavit, earning him a coveted New York Times three-star rating at the age of twenty-four. But Samuelsson’s career of  “chasing flavors,” as he calls it, had only just begun—in the intervening years, there have been White House state dinners, career crises, reality show triumphs and, most important, the opening of the beloved Red Rooster in Harlem. At Red Rooster, Samuelsson has fufilled his dream of creating a truly diverse, multiracial dining room—a place where presidents and prime ministers rub elbows with jazz musicians, aspiring artists, bus drivers, and nurses. It is a place where an orphan from Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, living in America, can feel at home.

With disarming honesty and intimacy, Samuelsson also opens up about his failures—the price of ambition, in human terms—and recounts his emotional journey, as a grown man, to meet the father he never knew. Yes, Chef is a tale of personal discovery, unshakable determination, and the passionate, playful pursuit of flavors—one man’s struggle to find a place for himself in the kitchen, and in the world.

Bon Appetit!

Carrie