With Thanksgiving just around the corner, I wanted some inspiration for holiday meals. Thankfully, there are some new cookbooks that are full of great ideas.
The New Essentials Cookbook: A Modern Guide to Better Cooking from America’s Test Kitchen, Wine Food: New Adventures in Drinking and Cooking by Dana Frank and Andrea Slonecker, and Feast: Food of the Islamic World by Anissa Helou provide a wide range of creative approaches to entertaining.
Publisher’s Summary: Take your cooking skills to the next level while developing a knockout repertoire of 200 essential dishes that satisfy what our modern palates crave, from simple meals to dinner-party centerpieces.
We’ve made improvements to well-loved dishes by incorporating innovative techniques in recipes such as Butter-Basted Rib-Eye Steak and added modern classics such as Vegetable Bibimbap and Olive Oil-Yogurt Bundt Cake. A chapter on weeknight dinners offers smart paths to great flavor–from Bucatini with Peas, Kale, and Pancetta that cooks in one pot to a pizza that bakes in a skillet–including plenty of vegetarian options.
Most of us–not just newbies–could stand to bone up on certain culinary basics, and our methods may surprise even more experienced cooks, from seeding fresh chiles (we use a measuring spoon) to hulling strawberries (a plastic straw works well). And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of what these recipes teach. You’ll discover how to “reverse sear” thick pork chops so they turn out juicy all the way through, grind meat in a food processor for the ultimate burger, and shape fresh corn tortillas without a tortilla press or rolling pin.
As you progress through this book, you will also gain a deeper understanding of ingredients, better techniques, and the secrets we use in the test kitchen.
Publisher’s Summary: The wine lover’s and food lover’s playbook, with 75 wine styles and 250 producers to try with 75 recipes that go with them perfectly. “Wine food” is the new way to talk about wine pairing, coined by the evolving breed of wine drinker and cook who wants to discover a wider range of wines and match them to the rustic, casual, global food they love to eat. In Wine Food, natural wine bar and winery owner Dana Frank partners with author and stylist Andrea Slonecker to deliver 75 recipes for brunches, salads, vegetable dishes, picnics, weeknight dinners, and feasts with friends, all inspired by delicious, affordable wines that go with them beautifully. Each recipe opens with a succinct overview of the wine style that inspired it, describing the grapes and naming the countries the wine comes from, followed by a brief explanation of how it complements the flavors and textures in the recipe. Recommendations for three to eight producers for every wine style highlighted will help cooks find a wide range of bottles in corner wine shops, grocers, and online. Frank and Slonecker also include a wine flavors cheat sheet, a label lexicon lesson, a short course on wine tasting like a pro, and illustrated features on matching wine with types of favorite foods (typical take-out, beloved pasta dishes, and popular sweets). With more than 75 atmospheric and recipe photos and 20 watercolor illustrations, Wine Food makes wine education experiential, fun, and especially delicious for wine drinkers of all knowledge levels.
Publisher’s Summary: A richly colorful and exceptionally varied cookbook of timeless recipes from across the Islamic world.
In Feast, award-winning chef Anissa Helou—an authority on the cooking of North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East—shares her extraordinary range of beloved, time-tested recipes and stories from cuisines throughout the Muslim world.
Helou has lived and traveled widely in this region, from Egypt to Syria, Iran to Indonesia, gathering some of its finest and most flavorful recipes for bread, rice, meats, fish, spices, and sweets. With sweeping knowledge and vision, Helou delves into the enormous variety of dishes associated with Arab, Persian, Mughal (or South Asian), and North African cooking, collecting favorites like biryani or Turkish kebabs along with lesser known specialties such as Zanzibari grilled fish in coconut sauce or Tunisian chickpea soup. Suffused with history, brought to life with stunning photographs, and inflected by Helou’s humor, charm, and sophistication, Feast is an indispensable addition to the culinary canon featuring some of the world’s most inventive cultures and peoples.
I believe there is something for almost everyone in these three new cookbooks.
Happy reading and happy cooking! Susan C.
The O'Fallon Public Library News 