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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. |
Book Reviews
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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 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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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. |
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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 America’s Best BBQ, 100 Recipes from America’s Best Smokehouses, Pits, Shacks, Rib Joints, Roadhouses and Restaurants. This book is co-written by Ardie A. Davis and Chef Paul Kirk. Both barbecue legends. Even being barbecue legends I don’t know how they pulled this one off. They went into the best barbecue restaurants in America and came out with recipes for some amazing food. |
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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 a classic, The Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. This book has been a classic since 1930. Every other year or so they update it with new recipes. The newest version is a winner. Updated for the modern era, it contains everything that you would ever need to know about basic cooking . It further includes one of the best recipe references that I have ever used. I frequently reference my new cook book before I start to create a dish. |
The first section of the book, Cooking basics, teaches everything from meal planning, to using food labels, to shopping strategies, to setting a table. It also includes a guide to cooking terms and techniques. At first glance I was like whatever, but when I started to think about this is a great feature. If you don’t understand a term in the recipe how can you create it.
After the intro chapter, they go right into the recipes. They split the recipes up into the various types of food. Like, beans, rice and grains, breads, candy, eggs and cheese and conclude with vegetables. In all there are twenty different chapters on the different types of food. Each jam packed with mouth watering recipes and photos.
I have worn out the bread section in my copy of the book. The white bread, whole wheat bread and sourdough bread are just a few that I have tasted. They are delicious. Although I don’t technically call it bread, but pancakes are also in this section. Pancakes are technically a quick bread and are thus classified in the bread section. The pancake recipe is great and makes just enough for 2-3 people. I use the basic recipe as a starter for all of my pancake recipes.
This book is great reference for the home cook. It has easy to read recipes that are well tested and come out perfect every time. This book was the very first cookbook that I had ever purchased. It is easy to read and includes step by step photos for a lot of the recipes. This book is the result of the better homes and gardens test kitchen and their hard work to make sure that each recipe has the perfect taste, texture and appearance. They further refine each recipe to make sure that instructions are clear and easy to follow. Basically this is the ultimate beginners cook book. If you need a perfect gift for a graduate, new home owner or a friend (who quite frankly can’t cook) this book is all you need.
Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book (Better Homes & Gardens Plaid)
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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 Joy of Jams, Jellies and Other Sweet Preserves. I reviewed the Joy of Pickling a couple of weeks ago, and I must say that Linda Ziedrich is the Queen of preserving food. Her lastest book allows you to showcase the fabulous flavors of the fruit without masking them in artificial sweetners, chemicals and artificial flavorings. As a matter of fact, not a single one of the recipes in the book require store bought pectin. So this is the ultimate way to make fresh, healthy and tasty jams, jellies and preserves. |
The hardest part about making homemade jams, jellies and preserves is mastering the technique. Anyone can read a recipe, but turning that recipe into a spectacular preserve takes technique. The first part of this book contains the Preserver’s Primer. A section explaining the techniques and vocabulary that will be used in the recipes. For instance, what is the difference between grape jam, grape jelly and grape preserves. Jam is crushed or chopped fruit that is cooked with sugar until the mixture sets. Jelly is a gelled mixtured of sugar and juice that is acidic. Preserves are whole or sliced fruits in syrup or jelly.
Linda goes on to describe the advent of packaged pectin and why it became so popular. Story short, it made cooks lives easier, but it also took away from the art of preserves. She includes a chart of natural pectin content in each type of fruit. For example, Strawberries are low in pectin and actually may need some artificial pectin to make them solid. Also natural pectin reacts with sugar and heat. So, Linda describes the sugar content needed for each pectin level of fruit. All of this stuff is great information that you can not get from the directions in a gelatin box.
Another important part of the Preserver’s Primer is how to test for gelling. Gelling is the point wherein your preserve is done and ready to be jarred. It can be done by temperature, a spoon test or by a saucer test. Each test has its own negatives and postives, but Linda has explained all of them so if you are cooking you can try each. That way you can perfectly cook the preserves every time. Linda has also included a troubleshooting guide on pages 30-31 to help you determine what went wrong with your preserves if you have a problem, and the preventative measures that should be taken to avoid the problem in the future.
The rest of the book is organized in by fruit in alphabetical order. She includes over 200 recipes from everything from Apples to Zucchini Preserves. The recipes are all straight forward and include a list of ingredients and exact directions in big print.
The best part of this book is the background into jam and jelly making, along with descriptions of the techniques necessary to make perfect jams and jellies. Linda Ziedrich has written a book that describes the processes involved in making jams and jellies in a way, that any novice could pick it up in an afternoon. If you are sick of the flavorless mass produced jams and jellies in the supermarket, I recommend that you pick up this book. After reading this book, I wanted to go to the Farmer’s Market and buy all of the fresh fruits in season, so that I could start making jams and jellies.
The book is available at Amazon for less that $15. The Joy of Jams, Jellies, and Other Sweet Preserves: 200 Classic and Contemporary Recipes Showcasing the Fabulous Flavors of Fresh Fruits
