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The Cocktail Primer

This weekend my friends came over and helped me build a home bar in my basement.  It is pretty sweet.  I will post pictures once it is finished.  However, this was the perfect time to Review the Book, “The Cocktail Primer” by Eben Klemm.  This is a great book on the basic cocktail.  It goes over the makeup and level of complexity of each drink and further links the drinks together by drink family.  Along with drink recipes, Klemm discloses how to set up your home bar.  Everything from what spirits are necessary, to ingredients to have on hand all the way to the equipment that you will need.

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Tips cooks love

The other day I received this book in the mail.  The concept of the book was intriguing.  Written by the culinary minds at Sur La Table with Rick Rodgers, Tips Cooks Love is a quick manual for home cooks.  It contains over 500 tips, techniques and short cuts that will make you a better cook.

This book is filled with tips and tricks to ease your time in the kitchen. Have you ever wondered how to bake even cake layers, how to perfectly roast a turkey, or the difference between the grades of meat. This book answers those questions and more. This book is organized alphabetically for quick reference. You are cooking eggs, turn to E and there is everything that you need to know. Fried, poached, hard boiled and even the difference between white and brown eggs.

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Every Wednesday I review a cookbook and/or food related books to help weed out the good the bad and the ugly. This week I am reviewing The Berghoff Cafe Cookbook by Carlyn Berghoff and Nancy Ross Ryan.  As a Midwesterner I frequent Chicago and I  have been to the Berghoff Cafe.  The Bergoff Cafe is a larger than life restaurant that is loud and extremely fun.  The best part about the Berghoff Cafe is their vast selection of Berghoff Beers.  I like the original Amber.  They also have amazing food.  My favorite is the beer cheese soup.  I discovered that they had a recipe for the soup in the book.

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Every Wednesday I review a cookbook and/or food related books to help weed out the good the bad and the ugly. This week I am reviewing Down Home With The Neelys – A Southern Family Cookbook by Patrick and Gina Neely. I am not the biggest fan of Down Home With The Neelys TV Show.  Not that I hate it, I think the food is great.  I find it quite lovey dovey and hard to watch.  You can only watch two people grind each other on the TV while they cook for so long.  I think the show would be a lot better with a little less PDA.  Based on that I figured the cookbook wouldn’t be the best.  However, I was completely wrong.  The book is nicely written, full of great stories and awesome recipes.

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Every Wednesday I review a cookbook and/or food related books to help weed out the good the bad and the ugly. This week I am reviewing Weber’s Way to Grill – The step-by-step guide to expert grilling by Jamie Purviance. I just purchased a quality Weber Grill and I figured if the grills were so nice, a cookbook with their name on it had to be of equal quality. I was not disappointed. This is probably the best step-by-step cookbook that I have ever read.

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One of my favorite cookies is the white chocolate macadamia nut cookie. Here in DC Macadamia Nuts are quite expensive so I have never picked them up. That all changed last Thursday when I went into the local giant and they had Macadamia Nuts on sale. Granted they were salted, but they still were extremely cheap.

White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cookie

As you can see, the cookies are jam packed with chocolate and nuts.

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Every Wednesday I review a cookbook and/or food related books to help weed out the good the bad and the ugly. This week I am reviewing No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach by Anthony Bourdain. I am a huge fan of Bourdain, I have all of his books. I enjoy all of them. Amazingly enough, this book was signed by Anthony Bourdain himself.  I ran into him at the DC Central Kitchen Food Fight.  He was hosting it with Jose Andreas.  He is one tall man with cowboy boots on. I will not the celebrity encounter hinder my review of this book.

No Reservations is photo book of Bourdain’s journeys while hosting the TV show No Reservations. I decided to do this review in a question/answer format. You will see why.

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Every Wednesday I review a cookbook to help weed out the good the bad and the ugly. This week I am reviewing The Scandinavian Cookbook by Trina Hahnemann.  When I saw this book I had to have it.  Being Scandinavian in descent, I wanted to learn more about traditional Scandinavian cooking.  Yes, I am Swedish.  Hej – (“hello”).  This book covers recipes from all over Scandinavia, from Denmark to Norway and yes Sweden.

This cookbook is organized very differently than most. Actually, it is organized in a unique and extremely cool way. It is organized by month of the year, and the different types of food that you would eat during each month. Not just comfort food, but by the types of food that are in season. Seasonal cooking is a great to way to help the environment. Fresh corn shouldn’t be available in the winter. If it is, it has been shipped from halfway around the globe to your table. There is a lot of energy wasted in shipping food. Enough of me preaching, back to the book.

The cookbook starts out in January and goes through the months all the way to December. Along with the recipes there are a ton of great photographs of the food and seasonal pictures from all around Scandinavia. The photographs are amazing. Lars Renek is the man behind the beautiful photographs in this book. Bravo, Lars! Bravo! Even if I couldn’t read, this book would be amazing because of the photographs.

The recipes are equally amazing. A lot of the recipes are for Smørrebrød which are Danish open faced sandwiches.  They are preferably made with rye bread and are served with aquavit and beer.  They had me at sandwich and only sweetened the deal with the aquavit and beer.  The Smørrebrød come in all different types.  From flounder and shrimp with basil dressing to chicken and lovage salad.  I must admit, I had no idea what lovage was.  Lovage is a perrenial plant that resembles celery.  My favorite Smørrebrød that was in the book had to be the smoked cheese salad on rye.  Wow, a cheese salad.  The cheese used in the book is rygeost which is a soft smoked cheese from Denmark, but they say you can substitute smoked ricotta.  Along with cheese it uses a lot of the same ingredients that you would put into a tuna or chicken salad, but you substitute cheese for protein.  Amazing!  Why didn’t I think of this.  Scandinavian people are awesome!

The book also covers seasonal drinks.  From hot chocolate in the winter to red currant and strawberry smoothies in the summer.  Not all of the drinks are alcohol free.  Take for instance the elderflower cordial that utilizes fresh elderflowers picked when they bloom in June.  The elderflower cordial is diluted with champagne for a fresh taste of summer.

Being a Scandinavian cookbook there are plenty of seafood recipes.  There are recipes for almost every type of seafood.  From flounder to salmon to mussels to lumpfish roe.  I love seafood and usually find myself preparing most of it the same way.  For some reason when it comes to seafood, I am not creative.  This book has sparked my interest.  There is a recipe in here for cauliflower soup with grilled scallops.  The creamy cauliflower soup with the smokey grilled scallops topped with lemon, sounds delicious.  I am totally going to make this and post about it.

In all, I loved this book.  I love that it is organized by month and by what is in season.  It totally takes the guess work out of what to cook.  Open the book, turn to the current month, and make something amazing.  Although the cauliflower soup is listed in November, all of the ingredients are in season here in Washington, D.C.  It is my lucky day.  I would totally recommend picking up this book.  The recipes, pictures and stories are worth it.   Trina Hahnemann has written a great book.

The Scandinavian Cookbook is available wherever books are sold and is available on Amazon here.

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