When Weber puts their name on something it has to be quality. From the Grills to the Grill tools to the Cookbooks. When they say step-by-step they really mean step-by-step. They include photos on how to prepare the grill, prepare the meat and vegetables and proper ways to cook the meat and vegetables. I love this book as each recipe is written in a similar way to my blog posts. Straight forward, step-by-step photos with a little character thrown in for a little extra pizazz.

As soon as I opened this book I started planning meals.  The first recipe that I tried was the BLT salad.  With charred bread croutons and fire roasted tomatoes, this was a salad for men and women alike.  Heck, the main ingredient is bacon.  Who could not love this salad.  After making it, I declare, All salads made by me must have fire roasted tomatoes on them.  It was one of the most delicious salads I have ever eaten.

Overall this is my new favorite cookbook ever.  Just like Weber’s/Purviance’s other book, It takes the mystery out of grilling.  It is a single resource that includes everything a griller would need to know.  If you know a person that just picked up a grill or a long time griller that could use a few new tricks to spice up the summer barbecue, you should get them this book.  I consider myself a pretty experienced griller and this book has taught me a few new tricks.

On a side note – If you are Jamie Purviance and you ever find yourself in Richmond, VA email me.  I would love to share some recipes and grill.

Weber’s Charcoal Grilling is available wherever books are sold and is available on Amazon here.

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.

This book is uniquely written.  Most cocktail books group drinks together based on their main ingredient.  A grouping of all vodka drinks, then all rum drinks, and so on.  Klemm organized his book based on flavors, technique and complexity.  For example, Mr. Klemm discloses that both Martinis and Gimlets are made out of vodka, but they don’t taste the same at all.  A person who enjoys a crisp martini would hate the sour sweet flavor of the lime gimlet.

The book is broken into 6 main types of drinks.  Martinis, Manhattans, Simple Sours, Complex Sours, Muddled Drinks and finally High Balls.  Each chapter highlights a cocktails, history and tips to help you become a better bartender.  Once you realize an origin of a drink, you can start to group the drinks together, thus helping you create new drinks based on those flavor profiles.  Just like cooking a good bar manual will help you create the perfect drink.  This book does a great job helping the home bartender link flavors and spirits.

I made a drink from this book last Wednesday.   It was the True Sour.  The drink utilized fresh lemon juice to make a refreshing drink.  Definitely one of my favorite drinks in the book.  Check it out here.

I am a big fan of this book.  From setting up a home bar, to building flavor profiles, this book has it all.  If you want to take your bartending skills up a notch, you should definitely pick up this book.

The Cocktail Primer is available where ever books are sold.  You can click here to pick it up at Amazon.com.

Tips cooks love

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.

As a baker my favorite part of the book was the volume and weight equivalents. Knowing how many ounces of a ingredient are in a cup is valuable. For instance, if you spoon confectioners’ sugar into a measuring cup and sweep it level you have 4 ounces per cup. If you sift the confectioners’ sugar you only have 3 ounces per cup. Knowing this shows why my cookies are different each and every time that I make them.

Overall this is a great companion for the kitchen. You can pick it up at your local bookstore or from Amazon here.

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. 

The Berghoff Cafe book and food is based around three principles: Reuse, Recycle and Reinvent.  What does this mean.  Well extra potatoes become Lyonnaise Potatoes, Potato Soup and more.  The roasted turkey breast goes on to star in the turkey reuben.  Basically everything is used for multiple purposes and never wasted.  This is a great principle in this economy.

Almost every recipe in the book contains a little history about the recipe, an ingredient or a historical period when the recipe was originally developed.  For instance they include history about “shot and a wash”.  Shot an a wash is basically whiskey dropped in beer.  Basically it is a refined boilermaker.  This was done as back in the day water was often impure and drank at ones own risk.  Further whiskey was primitive and had a lot of impurities making it have a bad taste.  So back in the day after a people would take a shot they would rinse their mouths out with beer instead of water.  Thus, a shot and a wash. 

This book is organized in a standard fashion from appetizers to entrees to desserts.  Although the majority of the book is appetizers.  The appetizers sections starts with Bar Snacks moves on to Soups, Sandwiches, Salads and Sides.  Then it moves on to Daily Specials to Pizzas.  Then it finishes up with Desserts.

Any book that starts out with bar snacks has to be awesome.  They have recipes for everything from deviled eggs to soft pretzels.  They even include a recipe for a classic relish tray.  When I was growing up my Grandma Donna always had a relish tray at every meal. I loved the gerkins, block olive and baby pickles.  Although not a real recipe, it contains the ingredients to assemble the perfect relish tray.

My favorite thing at the Berghoff Cafe is the Beer Cheese Soup.  They include the recipe for this in the soup section.  The soup is contains four cups of cheese and a whole bottle of beer.  While it is missing some bacon, it is a great recipe.  They garnish the soup with a freshly baked pretzel or freshly popped popcorn.  If this is the exact recipe from the restaurant then it is an amazing recipe.

The book also includes a whole section on pizzas.  Yep, I spent a couple of hours analyzing this section.  They have a great pizza that utilizes bratwurst and sauerkraut.  It is very similar to the Reuben pizza that I made.  It starts out with a caraway crust, topped with brown mustard and then layered with brats, kraut and onions.  Along with this tasty recipe they also have others that include smoked sausage and potato pizza and cafe’ onion and bacon pizza.  Every pizza in this section sounds amazing.

Overall this is a great book.  It contains easy and wholesome recipes that are amazing. This book totally reminds me of the comfort foods that I grew up with in the midwest.  If you are looking for easy comfort food with a midwestern twist this book is for you. 

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

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.

This book starts off with some great introductions.  The forward is written by Paula Deen.  From this I found that the Neelys were discovered by Paula’s Sons.  During their brief stint on the show Road Tasted the Deen boys came across the Neelys.  They told their mom and after a single episode of Paula’s Party their new TV career was started and the rest is history. 

This book includes great quotes and tips from both Pat and Gina.  Their personalities shine through in each chapter and really adds to the book.  Pat and Gina also include recipes and stories from their family members.  This includes grilling and barbecuing tips from Pat’s brother Tony.  Tony has excellent tips on how to start a smoker and how to cook on an offset fire.

Since the Neelys know barbecue, the book is centered around barbecue.  I see nothing wrong with this.  I love barbecue so this totally sparked my interest in this book.  The book starts out with Neelys barbecue seasoning and barbecue sauce.  These recipes are then used as a base for most of the barbecue recipes.  The sauce is a sweet Memphis tomato based barbecue sauce that sounds awesome.  I am going to make this sauce this week. 

The book is not all barbecue.  There is also great recipes for everything from coconut shrimp with spicy peanut sauce to corn chowder to chicken and noodles.  There are also great southern recipes like fried chicken, creamed corn, seared okra and tomatoes, Gina’s collard greens and barbecue spaghetti.  I have had some great barbecue spaghetti in my days and the one in this book sounds delicious.

Overall this a great book.  I must admit that my initial thoughts on this book were completely wrong.  The recipes are great and are easy to read.  The food is not complicated and the recipes use basic ingredients.  This is a book for common cooks with normal food budgets.

Down Home With The Neelys is available wherever books are sold and is available on Amazon here.

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.

When Weber puts their name on something it has to be quality. From the Grills to the Grill tools to the Cookbooks. When they say step-by-step they really mean step-by-step. They include photos on how to prepare the grill, prepare the meat and vegetables and proper ways to cook the meat and vegetables. I love this book as each recipe is written in a similar way to my blog posts. Straight forward, step-by-step photos with a little character thrown in for a little extra pizazz.

The Book is broken into perfect sections. If you can’t tell already, I love this book. The first section is Grilling Basics wherein Jamie introduces the different types of grills, the proper maintenance, the proper way to start them and the different methods of cooking on them. He then goes right into the meat sections starting with Red Meat, Pork, Poultry and Seafood. After the meat sections he goes on to Vegetables and Fruit. He covers the whole spectrum of grillable (totally a new word, not in spellcheck) food.

The Red Meat section contain 40 fabulous recipes.  My first favorite includes lamb, which I don’t grill much.  It is a take on a Greek gyro.  It is Lamb Meatballs served on flat bread with a chopped salad and minted yogurt.  I have never thought of making and grilling meatballs.  The key to grilling meatballs is to skewer them.  Seems self-explanatory now, but it took this book to bring me out of my comfort zone of brats, hot dogs, chicken and steak.  My second favorite is also a new way of cooking on the grill for me.  It is Barbecued Meat Loaf.  Basically you form your meatloaf with a few panko bread crumbs to hold the meat together and you grill right on the grates.  I guess a meatloaf is just a giant hamburger, but I never in a million years would have thought of that.  Scattered throughout the chapter are also great grilling tips.  Take for instance the method of making perfect crosshatch marks, frenching a rach of lamb or how to check a steak for doneness.

Another great section in the book is seafood.  I find seafood on the grill to be the hardest task ever.  I am just not experienced enough to be able to cook the whole spectrum of seafood.  This book does a great job easing my nerves when it comes to grilling seafood.  Jamie covers everything from scallops to whole striped bass.  One of my favorite recipes in this section is Thai Squid.  Yep, squid.  They dedicate a whole page of pictures and captions to show you how to prepare the squid.  Once prepared they take only 2-3 minutes to cook.  What a perfect appetizer.

The last section of the book is dedicated to grilling resources.  This section is money.  Jamie lists recipes for tons of rubs, marinades and sauces.  Further he lists everything you need to know about meat and vegetables.  From cooking times, cuts of meat, how to freeze steaks and how meat is graded.  The best part is that there are pictures showing you how to determine if each type of meat is done.

Overall this is probably my favorite cookbook ever.  It takes the mystery out of grilling.  It is a single resource that includes everything a griller would need to know.  If you know a person that just picked up a grill or a long time griller that could use a few new tricks to spice up the summer barbecue, you should get them this book.  I consider myself a pretty experienced griller and this book has taught me a few new tricks.

Weber’s Way To Grill is available wherever books are sold and is available on Amazon here.

White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cookie

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

White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cookies – (Adapted from the Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe from the Art & Soul of Baking)

• 1 1/2 sticks of butter, softened (12tbs) -
• 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 2 large eggs, room temperature
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 2 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 12 oz white chocolate chips
• 3/4 cup (3.5 oz) macadamia nuts

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Next cream together the butter, brown sugar and sugar with a mixer.  Beat until smooth.  Scrape the sides.

Next turn the mixer on low and slowly pour in the eggs one at a time.  When the eggs are incorporated, add the the vanilla and continue beating for a couple of seconds.

Next in a separate bowl whisk together the flour, salt and baking soda.  The whisking will airate the flour making it so that you don’t have to sift it.

Whisking is easier than having to sift the ingreadients

Next pour the whole flour mixture into the mixer and beat on low until all of the flour is incorporated.  Make sure to scrape down the sides with a spatula.

Now add the white chocolate chips and the macadamia nuts to the mixer.  Beat on low for a couple of seconds, or until the chocolate and nuts are evenly distributed throughout the batter.

Everything all mixed in

At this point you should chill the batter for 10-20 minutes in the fridge.  A cold batter will spread out less and give you a cookie with a nice thick center.  Or, you can take some wax paper and create cookie logs.  I like this method as you can roll the cookies into a uniform thickness, then cut with a knife for perfect cookies.  To do this divide you batter in half and place each one on a sheet of wax paper.

Place in the center of the wax paper

Next fold one edge over the cookie batter and pull back.  Almost like making sushi.  Then roll the batter into a log.  Next twist the ends and you are set.  Place in a freezer for at least 20 minutes to stiffen up before cutting.  The cool part about this is that you can leave them in the freezer for up to 3 months.  Just pull them out about 20 minutes before you want to bake them to let them thaw before cutting.

Roll into a tight log and twist the ends until the shape is uniform

When you are ready to make cookies take the batter out of the oven, and cut into uniform pieces.

Next place in the preheated oven for 12-16 minutes based on the thickness of your cookies. If the cookies came from the freezer after being frozen solid, you need to add a couple of more minutes. I usually rotate the pan halfway through as my oven has some hot spots. Remove from the oven and let cool on the pan.  I find the cookies cool faster if you elevate the pan on either a cooling rack or a couple of cans of veggies from the pantry.

I like to let them cool on the pan as I always break them if I move them while they are hot.

Now it is time to eat.

Stacked and Ready to Eat!!!

A side note

If all you can find is salted Macadamia Nuts. Rinse them under cold water to remove the salt.

Rinse with cold water to remove the salt

Then place them in a single layer on a sheet pan and roast them in a 200 degree oven for 30 minutes until they are dry and starting to turn a bit brown.

Single layer

Let cool completely before using.

Roasted

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.

Is it a cookbook? No. No recipes included.

Does it contain words? Yes, but very little. Mostly are captions. The book is broken up into sections by continents that Bourdain visited. Bourdain does include a little intro with each chapter reminiscing about the places he visited that relate to the chapter. Descriptive? Not really. Mostly lost thoughts. To me it was more reminiscent of Jack Handy more than Anthony Bourdain. Each picture also has a caption. Although they all are not that descriptive. Take for instance this one, “women with shea nuts at market”, or “working the sandwich counter at Salumi”. If you love one liners this book is for you.

Does it have pictures? Yes. Are they good? Some are. Most are taken indoors or at night and are pretty poor in quality. They are either over or under exposed, poor color and some are just not that focused. For a book of pictures I wanted to see some better ones. But, there is a but, there are some amazing pictures in this book. The picture show a story about food and about culture. Plus, there is a food porn section starting on page 239. The pictures are about the same quality as the others, but you can see enough to make yourself hungry.

Overall this book seems quickly pushed together. Like they just wanted to get another book out. For a coffee table book that is full of images, this book falls quite short. I would totally recommend this book if it had great photos throughout, but it doesn’t. As a fan of Bourdain this book is really disappointing. If you love Bourdain, pick it up. You will see a lot of photos of him exploring the world. But if you want a great coffee table book, I would pass.

No Reservations is available wherever books are sold and is available on Amazon here.

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.

Every Wednesday I review a cookbook to help weed out the good the bad and the ugly. This week I am reviewing The Art & Soul of Baking by Cindy Mushet. I love baking. I guess it is the engineer in me that loves the precise measurements and the ability to use cool cooking tools. Honestly, the fact that the recipes are so precise and need to be that precise is comforting to me. When it comes to precise measurements and exactness, this book does not disappoint. It includes conversion tables and measurements of ingredients based on weight. I love using kitchen scales. I may be weird, but this book is awesome.

After reading the first chapter of this book, I knew that it was going to be my new favorite baking book. They discuss every basic ingredient from flour to sugar to milk. Each section has a description of the basics for the ingredients, the history, how they are made, how they interact with other ingredients, and best of all, the differences between the varying types of each ingredient. For instance, butter has coloring added to it as winter and summer butter varies in color. This is because of the types of food that cows eat during the varying seasons. During the winter cows normally eat dried grain leaving the butter pale in color. During the spring and summer cows normally eat green grass leaving the butter yellow and more appealing in flavor. So yellow coloring is added to butter to make is so that spring/summer butter can be found year round.

This book is part of the Sur La Table culinary series of books. This is awesome as there is a section on culinary equipment. This might now sound like much, but they describe each piece of culinary equipment and provide you with a maximum amount of dough/batter that can and/or should be placed in the equipment. Pages 12-13 of the book include a baking pan volume chart. This describes each type of baking pan and the maximum capacity by volume for each pan. Extremely helpful when you are trying to figure out how much bread dough to put in a 8.5 x 4.5 x 2 loaf pan. Just so you know, 6 cups.

The book is laid out nicely based on type of baked good you are trying to make. Yeast breads, layered pastries, quick breads, pies, tarts, fruit desserts, cookies, cakes, custards, souffles, and finishing techniques. In each section they list the recipes for each food and further include random “what the pro’s know” tips and Tips for success throughout the book. These include tidbits that can make or break your baked goods. For instance, the easiest way to inhibit fruit from turning your muffins blue is to use buttermilk. The acidity in buttermilk stops the color change.

I would like to point out that the book has a sole section of souffles. Souffles scare the crap out of me. Every time that I make them they fall, aren’t cooked properly or are just plain bad. This book in just 3 pages describes the process and techniques used in making the perfect souffles. After reading this section I felt as if I could go and make a perfect souffle right then. I have never read a cookbook that explains hard techniques in such a way that I immediately felt that I could make them without a problem.

Overall this book is amazing. It includes great recipes, great pictures and great information on baking. The book is a great reference for not just recipes but for conversions, cooking equipment and various other tips that are included with almost every recipe. I would recommend this book to everyone that is interested in baking. Plus it includes a great recipe for pizza dough. I love pizza.

The Art & Soul of Baking is available wherever books are sold and is available on Amazon for around $26.