On My Rickety Shelves: Fat

Thanks to the lovely people at Random House, a copy of this month's cookbook selection was delivered to my kitchen.

Fat: An appreciation of a misunderstood ingredient with recipes
By Jennifer McLagan
McLelland & Stewart/Random House Canada
240 pages; $37.95

Fat is vilified. Whether it’s a woman’s natural curves or a recipe’s call for lard, this basic stuff which of which we’re made and need is the same stuff entertainment and corporate-sponsored “food experts” tell us to ostracise and eliminate.

Ironic, this, given in stressful times when we need comfort, we are drawn towards fat (as well as it’s taboo’d compatriots, sugar and fat)—whether it’s a bowl of rich ice cream covered in hot caramel sauce or a bolstering embrace by soft arms.

Jennifer McLagan’s Fat: An appreciation of a misunderstood ingredient with recipes
takes on populist thinking of the past 30-40 years, and tells us that fat, unadulterated by undue processing, needs to regain its rightful place in our diets.

She reminds us that up until the last century, fat was good: we wanted a “fat paycheque” so we could buy the plumpest chicken and those who didn’t get enough fat in their diets were often ill (something I still maintain), as well as what the food industry has done to degrade our collective health such as introducing quantities of trans-fat laidened hydrogenated fats and easily oxidised polyunsaturated oils.

McLagan’s well-written and thoughtful work focuses on four animal fats, some in regular, purposeful home kitchen use, but others not so: butter, pork fat, poultry fat and beef and lamb fat. While photographs do not accompany each recipe, the images provided are vibrant and lovely. The book is also dotted with mini-essays about the importance of fat in history, whether it is pemmican, Haseka “The Butter Saint” or the origins of Fat Tuesday.

What I find most helpful are the instructions for once-common bits of kitchen business such as rendering fats or removing marrow from beef bones, the latter I needed to make her Risotto Milanese. Her no-nonsense words guided me through the process well enough to produce an amazing dish.

As with my other reviews, the proof of a book’s value is in the recipes. Here are the ones I attempted:

Mixed Spiced Nuts (p36)
I’m not a fan of processed spiced nuts—manufacturers tend to mistake salt and sugar for flavour. Combining the resinous hints of rosemary, cumin’s and coriander’s smokiness, salt sugar and a bit of heat, these buttered nuts were easy and almost disparagingly deliciously addictive.


Pumpkin and Bacon Soup (p83)
I liked this soup, but I didn’t love it. It was nearly effortless, but even though smoky bacon and its rendered fat were used, it lacked depth of flavour. I will make this again, but instead of using plain water, I’ll use vegetable or chicken stock or perhaps apple juice.

Simple Roast Chicken (p138)
Often simple is best. McLaglan’s recommendations very closely mimicked my own standard roast chicken recipe, and it produced a bird with juicy meat and crispy, golden skin. My only qualm is I felt 100g of butter was too much, and I’d easily halve the amount.

Risotto Milanese (p195)
I’ve rarely found a risotto recipe that matches the dish I had in Milan six years ago. McLagan’s recipe uses beef marrow, along with butter to make this perhaps the most luxurious risotto I’ve ever had.





So how does it rate?
Overall: 3.6/5
The breakdown:
Recipe Selection: 4/5
Writing: 3.5/5
Ease of use: 3.5/5
Yum factor: 3.5/5
Table-top test: Lies flat

Kitchen comfort-level: Intermediate
Pro: A good range of recipes ranging drawn from a number of cuisines.
Con: This isn’t a book for those who need or want to be coddled in the kitchen.


cheers!
jasmine


I'm a quill for hire!

On My Rickety Shelves: Seasonal Food

Thanks to the lovely people at Random House Canada, a copy of this month's selection appeared on my doorstep.

Seasonal Food: A Guide to What's in Season When and Why
By Paul Waddington
Eden Project Books/Random House Canada
256 pages; $21.95

The ongoing dirge that announces and mourns (the inaccurately collective) "our" lost memory for food has been playing for a while, its needle skipping every so often, occasionally doing a whole dustbunny sweep across the album of (again, the inaccurately collective) "our" psyche.

As big business jumps on board to brand themselves as socially-responsible, with their earnest yet sparkly social media marketing-driven communications plans and advertising budgets, I find myself numbed to the hyperbole, distrusting every corporate-shined message I encounter. Don't get me wrong, food is incredibly important and I think we should be interested in what we eat, but like any message constantly broadcast, I become immune and disinterested.

Much has been written and broadcast contrasting what used to appear on tables, with what appears now, along with the various feel-good, blame-absolving movements that result. Some border on the cult-like: locovorism/100-mile dietism and organics; others seem like roleplaying: pulling out your front flower bed for carrots and cabbages, and home preserving.

But when you distill these, the concept of "seasonal eating" rings true. Essentially globalisation and advances in botanical and agricultural sciences have blurred seasons, making pretty much any food available at any time. If you've never gardened or been in contact with the natural food cycle, it could be confusing. Paul Waddington's Seasonal Food hopes to eliminate this barrier and help people think more about eating what's currently in season.

Waddington's style makes the book a pleasurable read. His introduction leads the reader through a quick history of food industrialisation and the basics of globalisation but also the importance of the Earth's natural cycle on plants and (as a result) animals. Probably my favourite section in the preamble is "The Seasonal Pig" and documents the once-important porker, fattened for an autumnal slaughter to its current fate as omni-seasonal, factorized fare.

Most of the book lists seasonally-available foods, organised by month. Descriptions are conversational and cover features like flavour, growing conditions and how to enjoy these ingredients. With some foods, such as leeks, pumpkins and Jerusalem artichokes, he provides simple and workable recipes. I've not cooked any to his suggestions, but in perusing them, I could tell they were easy and would work well.

What I particularly like is his inclusion of meats in his seasonal eating lists. To be honest, I've not put much thought into seasonal meats, and when I do it's primarly spring lamb and autumn and winter turkeys.

There is one caveat I feel I must make, simply because I suspect it will throw some people off. This book was created for the British marketplace. As such there are terms or foods referred to such as rocket, medlars and aubergines which some readers may take issue with. Also because it is British-focussed, what grows in their seasons may not map correctly onto what grows in the non-British reader's seasons.

Regardless of where you call home, this is a good reference book to have on hand when faced with ingredients and why something may not taste as good now, as it did when it was actually in season four months ago.


cheers!
jasmine

I'm a quill for hire!

On My Rickety Shelves: Little Cakes From the Whimsical Bakehouse

Thanks to the lovely people at Random House Canada, a copy of this month's cookbook selection was delivered to my kitchen.

Little Cakes from the Whimsical Bakehouse: Cupcakes, Small Cakes, Muffins, and Other Mini Treats
By Kaye Hansen and Liv Hanson
Clarkson Potter/Random House Canada
176 pages; $27.95

My readers know my cake decorating skills are the antithesis of those produced by Charm City Cakes. So frustrated I am with the prospect of prettifying my baking that I've deemed the mere attempt at piping "foofing"... as in: I don't do foofy cakes. Normally I glaze...at best I schwoop...but pipe? Never. So why did I accept the offer of Little Cakes from the Whimsical Bakehouse? Simple: I wanted to prove to myself that I could produce a cake that, while not of Duff Goldman's calibre, would not be a total embarassment.

Kaye Hansen and Liv Hansen are the creative and baking forces behind The Riviera Bakehouse in Ardsley, NY. Kaye is a self-taught baker while her daughter Liv uses her art school training to create eyecatchng cakes. They've appeared on various US Television shows and have produced a series of cake books under the "Whimsical Bakehouse" name.

Their latest tome was written for people like me, who find the entire prospect of cake decorating daunting, but would like to learn. The book itself is broken out into four main areas: getting started, anytime little cakes and muffins, special occasion little cakes and templates; they also include a section on suppliers. Recipes include cakes and other pastries, fillings and icings; decorating instructions and templates are also provided.

The most useful information this book gives about cake decorating. Basic tools of the trade from bases to pans to brushes and scoops are all explained, including tools and special ingredients. The fundamentals of filling, crumbing and icing cakes are covered to some extent, but some of their baking tips are overly basic, almost to the point of "dumbed down" more than is necessary...at times I felt like they were talking down to their readers, in a schoolmarmy tone that just puts my back up--"carefully measure all of your ingredients" and "most cake and muffin recipes can be baked in cupcake papers."

For me the most important part of this book is the confidence it gives the neophyte decorator. Instructions are easily followed for desired effects. Granted some techniques are less daunting than others--dolloping and smoothing icing on a cupcake vs piping hydrangeas--and some require an artistic temperament--piping and shading acorns.

The recipes are laid out in a non-standard format--instead of starting off with an ingredient list and following with instructions, ingredient information is provided in a sort of "as needed" basis, lists appearing, just before they're called for in the recipe. This may be problematic for some bakers.

The recipes themselves are rather lacklustre. Normally I would make three or four recipes to test a book but after two, I'd decided I didn't need to try any more. Even though the foods come together well enough, the flavour tasted as soul-less as if they were made by assistance of a store-bought pouch. I may be odd, but when I bake at home, I want the products to taste like someone cared about the end product, not bought from the grocery store.

Almond Coffee Cakes (p57)
This recipe is easy but may hold some people back, simply because the requisite baking tin (a 12 mold mini-square tin) is not necessarily in every home's baking rack. As you can tell from the photo I don't have one and I decided to make this recipe in my 12-bun cupcake/muffin tin. The other issues I have with this recipe is--and I'm not sure if the fault is mine, or with the batter or instructions was the cakes fell apart where the centre of cumbs separated the two halves of batter. Not the end of the world, but not enjoyable. The flavour was so reminiscent of pastries bought at overpriced coffee shops--flat and very sweet.



Banana Muffins (p52)
I substituted the called-for walnuts with almonds, which I don't think detracted from the muffin. The authors suggested topping the cakes with some chopped walnuts...instead I spooned the dregs of my last batch of granola). The muffins were incredibly moist and but again, lacked any sort of twinkle that would set this apart from something made from a cafeteria reliant upon packet mixes.





Ella's Birthday Cake
Okay. I know what you're thinking--there can't be a recipe for something called "Ella's Birthday Cake." You're right. There isn't. I wanted to give you an idea of what someone, with no confectionary talent can pull together based on what she learned from this book. It's not the fanciest or "cleanest" cake, but it's decidedly prettier than I'd produced before. I learned how to smooth on the icing and adapted the acorn technique for the multicoloured polka dots. Not bad for a first try, I think.

The Hansens give home bakers ideas about how they can make cupcakes and cakes a bit more festive. They can start off with basic techniques and then go on to create their own masterpieces.

So how does it rate?
Overall: 2.75/5
The breakdown:
Recipe Selection: 2.5/5
Writing: 3/5
Ease of use: 3.25/5
Yum factor: 2/5
Table-top test: Lies flat

Kitchen comfort-level: Novice
Pro: Decorating instructions that can take decorators from square one to beyond.
Con: The cakes taste so absolutely...boring.

cheers!
jasmine

What I'm reading: The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

I'm a quill for hire!

On My Rickety Shelves: Gale Gand's Brunch

Thanks to the lovely people at Random House, a copy of this month's cookbook selection was delivered to my kitchen as part of Cookbook Spotlight.

Gale Gand’s Brunch!: 100 Fantastic recipes for the weekend’s best meal By Gale Gand with Christie Matheson
Clarkson Potter/Random House Canada
208 pages; $32

Each meal comes with its own baggage. Formal dinners evoke multiple courses of sometimes stodgy preparations, complete with esoteric place settings. Normal dinners—created under time constraints—may rarely see the entire family, together, at one sitting. Weekday lunches more often than not can be microwaved leftovers or unidentifiably consumables lifted from a frybasket hastily, wolfed in a cubicle while finishing up that report or this presentation. Breakfast (for those of us who care to break the fast) may be a quick pre-packaged grab-and-go affair or simply a highly caffeinated liquid meal.

And then there’s brunch.

Brunch: the hybrid early-ish meal that’s neither breakfast nor lunch. It combines languidness with occasion. Yes, I fully realise the oxymoronic overtones I imbue the meal, but it is a repast that can incite contrary behaviours. At a time when meals are increasingly solitary events, brunch gathers a crowd—whether it’s a crowd of two or 12. It’s celebratory and social. Those whose first instinct is to avoid a proper morning meal and quite possible treat the mid-day break as an opportunity for errand-running or brisk-walking will make time for a table featuring waffles and poached eggs, brown sugared bacon, tartlettes, light soups, pastries and grilled sandwiches.

It is, quite possibly, one of my favourite reasons to eat. As if I ever really need a reason to eat.

Gale Gand, James Beard Award-winner pastry chef, restauranteur and American TV personality, takes on brunch in her sixth cookery book Gale Gand’s Brunch! 100 Fantastic recipes for the weekend’s best meal. Her inspirations come from travelling Europe and the US, taking with her ideas rooted in “a hot milky cup of coffee served with warm butter pastries and intensely flavoured jams.” She presents it as a near-perfect entertaining meal, one that’s sweet and savoury, easy and relaxed.

Her recipes cover a number of topics, including drinks, eggs, breads, savouries, salads and condiments. Not all her recipes are photographed—and Ben Fink’s images are quite lovely—but as someone who rarely allows fripped imagery to sway a cooking decision, this doesn’t bother me (yet I suspect those who use images as a crutch to preparing new-to-them foods may see it as a detriment).

Apart from generally being clear and accessible, the recipes can offer inspiration beyond the same-old same old. Gand helps home cooks go beyond traditional and sometimes predictable flavours to delicious and sometimes inspired combinations, from ginger scones with peaches and cream to roasted pears and rhubarb with orange to watermelon gazpacho.

I think her strength is her ability to take something simple and with a little bit of zhuzhing, turn it to something slightly out of the ordinary. For example, from her basic omelette—seasoned eggs cooked in a pan—to easy and elegant fillings including tri-colour bell pepper, ham and cheddar; oven roasted tomatoes, scallion and goat cheese, and caviar with crème fraîche.

I tried to choose wisely in my recipe selection, by varying dishes as a good representation of what she offers: easy and involved, food and drink, as well as differing main focal ingredients. In general, the recipes I tried produced tasty foods, but in a couple of instances I thought were a little too fussed for me, or could have grabbed me more. I suppose if you are cooking to impress, then a certain amount of extra steps are necessary, but if I’m inviting you for brunch, my goal is not to impress. My goal is to visit with you and have a meal at the same time.

Baked eggs in ham cups (p68)
This is a fancy way of doing oeufs en cocotte. Here, I didn’t follow the recipe exactly as written: the ham I had wasn’t big enough for the muffin bowls I think Gand called for, so I prepared them in cupcake tins, which means I could only break one egg into the hammy bowl. I also didn’t have little tomatoes, so instead used a sundried tomato pesto, instead of basil pesto. It was tasty and relatively easy, but I think I’d prefer to do them in little ramekins and not deal with removing them from the cupcake tray.

Cranberry-Almond Granola (p102) This was a perfectly adequate breakfast cereal, but it was slightly lacking—I would remove some of the oatmeal and introduce sunflower seeds and perhaps some flax seeds to the mixture. I’ve had it for breakfast every day for a week, either with warmed milk or vanilla yoghurt, and haven’t tired of it.

Hot Cocoa with brown sugar (p22)
Quite honestly…once you try this, you’ll probably not go back to powdered mix again.

Torta Rustica (p65)
Augh. Maybe it was my mood, but this was fussier than it needed to be. AND it seemed to take a full afternoon to assemble. AND I could have done it with one sheet of puff pastry instead of two. It was very pretty when sliced—with strata of ingredients nearly perfectly set—and quite the tasty main dish. It would pair nicely with a green salad with balsamic vinaigrette.

Gand takes the home cook from basics and then with a few switches leads them through deliciously simple variations that will satisfy both the cook and guests alike


So how does it rate?
Overall: 3.75/5
The breakdown:
Recipe Selection: 4/5
Writing: 3.5/5
Ease of use: 3.5/5
Yum factor: 4/5
Table-top test: Lies flat

Kitchen comfort-level: Novice-intermediate
Pro: Solid basic recipes that can be tweaked to taste or adventure level.
Con: Just thinking of that torta makes me tired.

cheers!
jasmine

On My Rickety Shelves: Animal Vegetable Miracle

Thanks to the good people at Harper Collins Canada for providing me with this month's book.

Animal, Vegetable Miracle: A Year of Food Life
By Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver
Harper Perennial
370 pages; $17.50

Transplantation stories—kit and caboodle packed up and moved to strange and alluring surrounds—are a bit of weakness. Tim Parks, Peter Mayle and Georgeanne Brennan have all sucked me into their travels and travails as they navigate new customs, meet the local colour and slowly try and work their ways in to the weft of their new neighbourhood fabric. Amusing, eye-opening and painfully self conscious these books help to satisfy my armchair travel-cum-voyeurism. Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle walks in this genre, but also tramples on socio-political foodism that is de rigueur.

The book’s premise is simple: Kingsolver, her partner and children leave Arizona for an Appalachian farm to grow their own food, eat locally and basically become better people for it. They grew a lot of vegetables, raised chickens and had various “a-ha” moments regarding food production and food consumption.

Multi-authorship is a tricky premise to execute effectively and in my opinion, this is a prime example of too many cooks. Kingsolver is the main narrator, recounts mushroom hunting, travelling to Montréal, market shopping and other slices of life. Interjections about modern food production appear from her partner Steven L. Hopp, including treatises on locavorism, food pricing, and genetically modified foods. Her daughter Camille provides her own insights into the familial adventures along with recipes and menu ideas.

I had a hard time getting into this book. I started it several times, and at each attempt I set it back on the table with great exasperation.

Barbara Kingsolver is a very good writer. Primarily known as a fiction writer, her words engage the reader and bring her new community (and her family) to life. If this book were “only” a story about a family moving out to a farm and their adventures and learnings, it would be a fabulous read. Unfortunately, it’s not. Hopp’s essays contain a degree of earnest, evangelistic scholastic work usually voiced by those who’ve just learned about how food gets to our plates. Readers would be better served by Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dillema or Gina Mallet’s Last Chance to Eat. Camille Kingsolver’s essays are marked by purpled prose indicative of schoolgirl essays; quite honestly, I was quickly disinterested in the younger Kingsolver’s words and barely skimmed most of her passages. I think I’d have rather read Lily Kingsolver’s (Barbara Kingsolver’s youngest daughter) views of the process. Really.

The differences in styles and abilities interfere with the text’s flow, and to me create a chopped and disparate book. The anecdotal recounts of their experiences are fun to read, but I’m not sure if they balance out the food politics presented, nor are they salves to what seem like her daughter’s indulgent passages.

cheers!
jasmine

On My Rickety Shelves: Nigella Christmas

Thanks to the lovely people at Random House Canada, a copy of this month's cookbook selection was delivered to my kitchen.

Nigella Christmas: food, family, friends, festivities
By Nigella Lawson
Alfred A. Knopf/Random House Canada
288 pages; $50

Christmas does strange and occasionally deluded things to people. Overcome with seasonal cheer, nostalgic traipses to family dinners which may or may not have actually happened, or simply psychic pressures for those who need a GPS to find their kitchens to become instantaneous domestic goddesses (or gods) sees many people planning grand yet intimate entertaining. Booksellers line windows with covers featuring beautifully simple yet ornate tables complete with celebrity authors with whiter than white teeth bared in a welcoming grin that exudes “There’s no way you can mimic in a few hours what the small militia of cooks, stylists and other sorts take weeks or months to do…but I’ll let you believe you can…” Television specials are little better: perfectly coiffed, presenters with nary a drop of exertion or stress-induced dew punctuates the ease in which Stepford homemakers can pull together a perfect Christmas for the perfect set of family and friends.

Perfection is never my goal. Deliciousness is. Mind you…when others seem to push their culinary envelope, I’m more than content to fall into familiar routines. Don’t get me wrong. I love my November-December foodish rituals: fruitcakes and sticky toffee puds, dozens upon dozens of cookies, turkey with the trimmings…cognac. There’s a sense of comfort in doing the same old-same old. But at the same time there’s a part of me that searches for something new or, at the very least, a new-to-me way to prepare something not so new…that doesn’t eat up the last remaining moments of a far-too-crammed schedule.

Nigella Lawson’s latest recipe collection, Nigella Christmas: food, family, friends, festivities, promises readers practical, no-nonsense holiday inspiration. A companion tome to her 2007 three episode Nigella’s Christmas Kitchen, Lawson provides additional recipes and advice to those hoping for entertaining that can run from elegant to homey.

The book itself is what I’ve come to expect from a post How To Be A Domestic Goddess Lawson: gorgeous, glossy with La Lawson herself as the ultimate bit of food porn, tucked between sparkly-topped biscuits, glistening and glazed cocktail sausages, and juicily studded gammon. Recipes are divided into nine sections, each focussing on a different part of cheery holiday entertaining, including suggestions for “mass catering” and not-so mass catering for cocktail parties, side dishes friendly suppers, Christmas baking edible gifts, pages on both the main holiday meal along with a Christmas brunch, hot drinks and, as is her way, foods to combat the season of overindulgence. Heck. She even offers a stress-relieving Christmas rota to help plan the big day.

For me, Lawson’s lure is her words. My goodness, she’s not afraid to use her vocabulary…nor does she seem overly concerned with dumbing herself down for the masses—where else, in modern writing, would one read

“So the following, I hope, will allow the abstemious to raise a garish glass
with the rest of us.”

Her turns of phrase are voiced with experience, practicality and an honesty that never seems forced or contrived. One of my favourite lines is about the Tiramisu Layer Cake (p93):

“I wish I were the sort of person who could make enough but no more, but that’s
never going to be the case: when I made this for my brother’s birthday, he came
back round for a couple slices the next day. And that’s the way I like it.”

The recipes are trademark Lawson: practical, delicious and rooted in tradition but updated to modern flavours and tastes. For example her “luscious dinner for 6-8” (p70) features a lamb and date tagine, red onion and pomegranate relish with gleaming maple cheesecake for dessert. No, in this case it’s not everyday food, but it’s warm and hearty food to be shared with friends. Each recipe is easily followed and has make-ahead or freeze-ahead tips within the margin. Most, if not all, are photographed. Most of the recipes serve at least six people, with relatively few for smaller groups of diners.

One thing I was quite concerned about prior to receiving the book was North American publisher’s preoccupation with translating weights into volumes—grams of flour to cups of flour. Rarely, in my experience, are the Americanised instructions as accurate as the original (and dare I venture a guess that there are problems when going the other way ’round); mentions of problems in her earlier tomes are scattered far and wide throughout the blogosphere. Thank goodness the good people at Random House Canada did not winkle away at the original text. As far as I can tell everything is left in its original English. Yes this may pose problems for some, but really…all you need to do is buy a scale (mine’s from Canadian Tire) and look up the Centigrade to Fahrenheit conversion.

All that said, the value of a cookbook is in the cooking. Wherever possible, I scaled down the recipe to serve four or so people.

Cuban Cure Black Bean Soup (p264)
This is what I call a “pantry soup”—pretty much everything can be procured from a tin (okay, not the sausage, herbs or onions, but still) and combined into something quite tasty. This is my new favourite soup—spicy, hearty and a flavourful broth.

Potato, Parsnip and Porcini Gratin (p64)
Loved the smokiness and sweetness from the star anise and parsnips. The only thing I didn’t like was how the fat separated from the cream, leaving a bit of an oil slick. I’d probably increase the amount of milk while decreasing the cream.



Rolled stuffed loin of pork (p 158)
My friend called this pork-stuffed pork, wrapped in pork, which is an incredibly accurate description. A great balance between sweet and salty and very, very easy to make. Chose to forego the ruby sauce...wasn't in a saucy mood.







Incredibly Easy Chocolate Fruit Cake (p180)
As its title beckons, it is incredibly easy to make. I’ve made it for our Christmas pudding so I can’t say how it will taste…but it’s bound to be moist—not for its regular boozification, but for the chopped prunes.








Truth be told, I’m usually sceptical about holiday cookbooks—they overpromise on dreams and underdeliver on ease. Not Nigella Christmas. Her home-friendly recipes and guidelines make this book extremely easy to use…at Christmas and whenever you need to cook a special meal for family or friends.

So how does it rate?
Overall: 4.5/5
The breakdown:
Recipe Selection: 4/5
Writing: 5/5
Ease of use: 4.5/5
Yum factor: 4.5/5
Table-top test: Lies flat

Kitchen comfort-level: Intermediate
Pro: Gorgeous words that accompany easy and delicious recipes
Con: This is crowd cooking—not many options for intimate entertaining

cheers!
jasmine

On my rickety shelves: The Food You Crave

Thanks to the lovely people at Random House Canada, a copy of this month's cookbook selection was delivered to my kitchen.

The Food You Crave: Luscious recipes for a healthy life
By Ellie Krieger
Taunton Press/Random House Canada
320 pages; $33

Admittedly, whenever I hear any combination or derivation of the terms detox, recipe low-fat, low-salt, low-cholesterol or healthy I cringe. Years of reading about this diet and that lifestyle, vilified foods, praised foods, not to mention the eventually contradictory nutritionism conditioned me to block out most of the good-for-you, you-should-eat-this-way noise that bombards us daily. My personal eating mantra is pretty simple…and very reminiscent of Michael Pollan’s “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” along with avoiding packaging that tries to convince you of the contents’ edibility.

Granted, it can be difficult finding food (and yes, it depends upon what you declare “food”—My Dear Little Cardamummy is convinced lobster isn’t food). Finding food-like things is easy. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for food-like things—I fervently believe a healthy diet does include the occasional Swedish berry—but too many food-like things can be an issue: hence the proliferation of the above, cringe-worthy-to-me terms.

The thing is, food (by my definition food is healthy) should taste good. Unfortunately, it seems as if many of the healthy-monikered foodstuffs I’ve eaten don’t taste good—they are bland, soggy, mealy...boring.

I’ve never understood it.

Shouldn’t one reward good behaviour? As in: if you avoid overreliance on polyhydrogenatedsalisucraloseinatified foods by eating (umm…) real ingredients, the food should not only taste good, but also make you feel good and hopefully happy.

Take the vast majority of the Milk Calendar recipes I’ve been cooking through this year: they were developed to use dairy and have some sort of nutritional balance. Well…some weren’t bad, but others tasted so horrid, I wonder what on earth happened to the recipe developers’ and taste testers’ mouths (and brains) to ever declare those recipes…tasty.

So when I flipped through this month’s cookery book selection, I was a little nervous. Ellie Krieger’s The Food You Crave: luscious recipes for a healthy life had the warning signs of a book that “meant well”—earnestly written with an eye towards nudging readers towards the healthy lifestyle du jour. She is a registered dietician and hosts Healthy Appetite, on the US’s Food Network.

Her expository was heartening to me…in fact, Krieger won me over in the introductory paragraph to her food philosophy:

“In my food world, there is no fear or guilt, only joy and balance. So no ingredient is ever off-limits. Rather, all of the recipes here follow my Usually-Sometimes-Rarely philosophy. Notice there is no Never.”

Here’s a compliment: Quite honestly, if it weren’t for her tips on things like building a better muffin and Mediterranean-inspired eating and boxes of nutrient numbers that accompany each recipe, I’d not think of this as a healthy eating book. I’d think it was a “normal” general-purpose cookbook. Really. The unappetising nature of many “healthy” or “diet” recipes is pretty much absent in her suite of recipes. Breakfast can include Poached egg with herb-roasted turkey breast and sweet potato hash, dinner can be Spinach with warm bacon dressing, and supper can be Tuscan roasted chicken and vegetables. And dessert? Banana Cream Pie. Need I say more?

The book itself is fresh and light. Well-written and easy to follow recipes punctuated with the occasional (lovely) photograph. The entire book itself is simply designed and, well, inviting.

Every recipe I tried worked really well produced delicious food that made me feel…good. What more can I ask for?

Curried Butternut Squash Soup (p 78)
Incredibly easy and very tasty, and (like many good soups) was incredible the next day. I used a the hot curry powder I have in my pantry…probably should have reduced the quantity a bit.





Sage-rubbed pork chops with Warm Apple Slaw (p 195)
The chops were so intuitive, I wouldn’t call it a recipe…but it was a good reminder of how tasty simply prepared food can be. Apart from the unending chopping, the slaw was easy to pull together. I think it could have used a little sugar or honey, but otherwise was very tasty.











Mocha cake with Mocha Cream Cheese Frosting (p 282)
This was a very good and moist cake. As I’m of the school that believes cake should have a tender crumb, so the whole wheat nubblies in the crumb turned me off. I’m not a fan of dolloped frosting, so the relatively thin layer was just perfect for me.






The Food You Crave is exactly that. The food you crave.

So how does it rate?
Overall: 4/5
The breakdown:
Recipe Selection: 4/5
Writing: 4/5
Ease of use: 4/5
Yum factor: 4/5
Table-top test: Lies flat

Kitchen comfort-level: Novice
Pro: Easy and delicious healthy foods
Con: Can’t think of any.



cheers!
jasmine

On My Rickety Shelves: Simply Delicioso

Thanks to the lovely people at Random House Canada for providing this month's selection in my mailbox.

Simply Delicioso: a collection of everyday recipes with a Latin twist
By Ingrid Hoffmann with Raquel Pelzel
Clarkson Potter Publishers/Random House Canada
256 pages; $37.95

One of today’s problems/pleasures is that different and new-to-many cuisines arrive by way of fast fooderies, frozen dinners and homogenised chain restaurants that try too hard to be “authentic.” Take Mexican for example. My first taste was via a mall’s food court: plasticized, salinized and bereft of fresh flavours and varying textures. I was a teenager: I ordered. I paid. I ate. But that first taste provided glimmers of a hope of what could be a vibrant and absolutely delicious cuisine, and it began an on-again, off-again wistful search for good Mexican food and eventually tasty foods from Latin and South America: Yo quiero el buen alimento latinoamericano (thank you, Babelfish).

Ingrid Hoffmann’s Simply Delicioso hopes to tear people away from such corporate-ised Latin foods and convince them that tasty foods from Mexico, Central and South America are easily made in their home kitchens. Hoffman is a television chef, with shows on both Food Network and Galavision/Univision; her book takes its name from her Food Network show.

The book offers 11 chapters of foods and drinks ranging from breakfasts to appetisers to fish and meats, along with two sections on pantry staples. Every chapter is introduced by Hoffman, explaining the role of the following recipes in her family’s or a culture. Beautiful photographs punctuate the book—not every recipe has a photo (nor should they have). The instructions are clear and well-written, with many including “chica tips”—advice and suggestions about some ingredients. Some are helpful such as creating a whirlpool in simmering water to create “perfectly” poached eggs; some are banal such as liberally spraying baking trays with pan spray to avoid heavy duty scrubbing, while others read somewhat bizarrely for a cookery book such as combing mashed avocados through your hair and wrapping your head in cling film for 20 minutes before rinsing out the green goo. The last tip would have been fine if this was a health/beauty book or a treatise on avocadoes, but it’s not.

Now this segues nicely into what bugs me about this book. Most of the expositional writing is good, but it is littered with enough sugary cutsey-isms that turned my stomach. From “appeteasers” the interjections of “que rico” and “fantastico” the voice in my head quickly morphed from warm and friendly to slightly hyper and rather bubbleheaded. I’m sure Hoffman is a lovely and intelligent woman who obviously loves life and food. I can take her food seriously, but I can’t take her seriously. Add to this a niggling thought that if she were not a TV chef she probably would not have been given this book contract. It feels like part of a big marketing machine. She tells readers to go to her web site to get updates to pantry staples). There are unnecessary photographs of Hoffman—not showing a technique, nor her with the completed recipe (or at any stage of the recipe) but odd photos that have nothing to do with what’s on the page. Yes, she’s very pretty but…

Every recipe I tried worked really well (because of the machine behind her, I’d be surprised if they didn’t) and produced delicious foods (as promised in the book’s title).

Dad’s Absolutely Amazing Brandied Shrimp (p 118)
As long as you have thawed shrimp (and the other ingredients) you have an incredibly quick and delicious meal. It was so good I’ve made it twice in the past month…and may make it again tonight. She suggests pairing it with rice or pasta—I prefer it with crusty white bread to sop up the all the lovely saucy bits.

Eggs Benedict with Chipotle Hollandaise (p 32)
I’m an eggs benny fanatic—if I see it or a variant on a menu I’m compelled to order it. So when I saw this recipe, I knew I had to have it. Her hollandaise instructions were easy and produced a nicely spicy sauce which worked well with the oozy eggs. When added to the spicy slabs of bacon and I was a very happy girl.


Peanut-crusted Chicken Breasts (p 131)
As I’m not really a mayonnaisey person I chose to not serve it with the suggested chipotle mayo (besides, I’d made the hollandaise for the eggs benny and an aioli for another dish). As nicely spicy-crunchy as the chicken was, it probably would have benefitted from a squeeze of lime in lieu of the sauce.


Tropical Pineapple Gazpacho (p 91)
Wow: gorgeous colour and sweet-hot-sour tasty goodness. This was incredibly easy—my only wish was that I was more patient and didn’t let it sit long enough—the leftovers which I had the next day—were so incredibly delicious.

Simply Delicioso promises on its delivery of delicious and simply-prepared Latin and Latin-inspired foods.

So how does it rate?
Overall: 3.5/5

The breakdown:
Recipe Selection: 4/5
Writing: 2/5
Ease of use: 4/5
Yum factor: 4/5
Table-top test: Lies flat

Kitchen comfort-level: Novice
Pro: Allows home cooks to easily prepare delicious Latin and Latin-inspired food
Con: Don’t get caught up in the exposition.



cheers!
jasmine

On my rickety shelves: Beyond the Great Wall

Thanks to the good people at Random House Canada, I received a copy of the latest offering by Jeffery Alford and Naomi Duguid.

Beyond the Great Wall
By Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid
Random House Canada
304 pages; $70.00

Beyond the Great Wall: recipes and travels in the other China by husband and wife team Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s is one of those books that jumped my review queue. I try not to let that happen: my usual rule review them as they come in but every so often a book beckons to be let in a little early. And since the 2008 Olympic Games are in Beijing, I thought this was the perfect book for August.

Alford and Duguid are travelers, cooks, photographers, and writers, and are fascinated in understanding and appreciating home cooking within their cultural context. They’ve travelled throughout the world, but spend several months each year in Asia. Several of their previous titles are award-winners: Flatbreads and Flavors: A Baker's Atlas was named James Beard Cookbook of the Year and won the Julia Child First Book Award; Seductions of Rice was named Cuisine Canada's English Language Cookbook of the Year, and Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey through Southeast Asia was named James Beard Cookbook of the Year. They guest-teach and lecture about food traditions around the world.

As the title suggests, the authors take readers and cooks beyond food fare commonly found in their typical local Chinese restaurants. You won’t find mushu anything, nor will you find nuclear day-glow red sugary sauces clinging onto deep-fried globules of meat and fat. You will find introductions to the cultures and histories of the various peoples that make up modern China, including Dai, Miao, Taji, and Uighur. It’s the authors’ treatment and respect of these cultures, told in a mix of essay and reminiscence that drew me in and kept me reading.

Like many of their other titles, Beyond the Great Wall is one of those utterly gorgeous works, filled with intimate and engaging pictures of various foods and the people who cook and eat them. Not all the photos are theirs—studio photographs are credited to Richard Jung—but the food photography is not cold and impersonal like so many food porn offerings tend to be. Images of tree ears, a kitchen kit, and deep fried whiting all look as if they were made and served in someone’s home; the bowls and trays are worn and the light is generally warm. The people who appear are filled with character—from Tibetan monks and nuns to a man happily slurping from his noodle bowl all illustrate snatched moments from places and lives many of us in the West may never encounter.

The problem with an oversized book brimming with full-page images is that it’s bound to be seen as the equivalent of the conventionally pretty blonde girl with the big doe eyes: not much use for anything but an aesthetic decoration. But guess what…this pretty girl not only can hold a conversation but also probably write an anthropological dissertation on tribal nomads of the Gobi desert. In other words—it’s more than a functional cookbook because it gives the readers cultural and social information about the foods and people who cook them. There is a plethora of foods presented including condiments and seasonings, soups, salads, mostly vegetarian dishes, noodles and dumplings, breads, drinks and a number of different meats.

What I really enjoyed was combining simple and tasty ingredients to make hearty and filling dishes. The recipes generally work well but I must say some of the instructions confused and frustrated me. I also noticed an oven temperature (385F) that didn’t seem to follow standard Fahrenheit or Celsius scales.

When choosing my four sample dishes, I looked for different cuisines to try as most of my Chinese-food eating have been labelled as Cantonese, Sichuan, Sinagapore or Canadian-Chinese. Two came from Tibet, while the others were Sichuan and Hui.

Beef with Mushrooms and Cellophane Noodles (p 280) Comfort food. Plain and simple. This Tibetan dish of meat and mushrooms in a gingery broth is also known as ping sha (ping meaning cellophane noodles and sha meaning meat). It came together so easily and quickly—I will probably continue to make variants of this as a mid-week lunch.


Cheese Momos (p 212)
With the words “cheese” and “momos” how could I not make these? These Tibetan dumplings are made from basic dough and filled with an equally simple filling of savoury cheese and green onions. Deep fat frying made them good.




Flaky Fried Sesame Coils (p 202)
These are a stovetop-fried version of the oven baked Sichuanese shaobing flatbread. The bread was very easy to make, but the coil-shaping ritual drove me a bit loopy. After a batch or two, I just made spirals. I know it affected the flakiness, but it didn’t matter—they were still tasty with bits of astringently spiked heat from the Sichuan peppercorns and sesame seeds.

Hui Vegetable Hot Pot (p 117)
This soup—as delicious as it was—was more than a pain and a half to put together. You are essentially making a shish kabob soup, skewering like veggies together and cooking them in separately, according to cooking time. I’m not a good skewerer, I guess as many veggies fell off the sticks and into the soup…and I found stabbing broccoli with a pointy stick futile. Next time the broth will be made and the veggies added and kept in the broth.

Beyond the Great Wall delivers a fascinating travelogue, an ode to traditional Chinese cookery and an accessible series of cultural studies. Anyone interested in learning and trying “real” Chinese cooking would do well by this book

So how does it rate?
Overall: 3.5/5
The breakdown:
Recipe Selection: 4/5
Writing: 3.5/5
Ease of use: 3/5
Yum factor: 4/5
Table-top test: Pretty much lies flat

Kitchen comfort-level: Novice-intermediate
Pro: Contains a wide range of foods representing a number of different Chinese cultures
Con: Some of the instructions could be better written.

cheers!
jasmine

On my rickety shelves: The Fruit Hunters

Thanks to the good people at Doubleday Canada I found myself on a juicy and luscious, sweet and addictive, and disturbing and thought-provoking adventure.

The Fruit Hunters: A story of nature, adventure, commerce and obsession
by Adam Leith Gollner
Doubleday Canada
280 pages
$29.95

Adam Leith Gollner is a fruit hunter, travelling the hemispheres in search of the sweet, the sour, the juicy and the sublime. His collection of adventures, people and revelations are bound in his first book The Fruit Hunters: A story of nature, adventure, commerce and obsession.

A “fruit hunter” you ask?

Yes. This is a man fascinated by fruit...a foodie with a fruit fixation.

Gollner is the Canadian correspondent for Gourmet Magazine, and has written for The New York Times, Bon Appetit, and Good Magazine. It’s through his work where he met some (if not many) of characters and delicacies he commits to page.

The book’s Brazilian prologue marks a low point in Gollner’s life: a grandfather’s death, divorcing parents, friends with mental illnesses and a long-term girlfriend who has run off to Europe to spend New Year’s with her lover. Then he spies it: a tree that seems to grow petrified bran muffins that are packed with orange segment-like seeds (the paradise nut). He searches for some in a local shop and leaves with a sac filled with native fruits—sweet, Styrofoam-textured jambos, wine gummy-cum-crème caramel abius, and the lavender-fruit-punch-flavoured maracuja.

The flavour revelations mark the start of an adventure that will take him to jungles and orchards, to marketing offices and plantations—all the while tasting delicacies that some of us have never heard of, meeting some decidedly scary people and discovering far more about geopolitical realities intertwined with pods, bushes and trees.

The Fruit Hunters is about sex, drugs and rock and roll: coco-de-mers, which look like a woman’s midriff, hips, reproductive area and thighs, African cherries for prostate illness, and the yohimbe tree for its…ummmm…invigorating…effects.

In many other hands, fruit could be treated with a blinkered botanical eye. Not Gollner. His fruit finding tales comes to life through of the people he meets along the way—a nonagenarian fruit hunter, fruitarians (people whose diets are totally fruit-based), botanists, smugglers, cross breeders and marketers.

This book is also about what’s happening to the fruit trade. There’s the obvious: mass production’s impact on what’s in my bigscarymegamart’s produce section—January’s sour, crunchy Californian strawberries, apple-hard, sometimes mealy and utterly flavourless peaches. Then there’s the unsettling: the untested effects of colorants on humans. And of course, there’s what sounds scarily unappetising: coating apples in what is a human-safe solution (but still technically a pesticide) to morph the flavour of an apple to be more grapelike.

Gollner is a strong writer whose vivid and entertaining prose made me feel as if I was his travelling companion, sometimes tasting his finds. It's an adventure story, a mystery, a thriller and comedy in the guise of a food/food history book. For me, one of the biggest compliments I can give a writer is reading passages aloud to the poor soul who just happens to be within earshot…thank goodness my friends know I do this as some of them heard a lot from this book.

I’ve been food shopping a few times since I got the book and have perused the fruit aisle “hunting” for my latest find. I’m more enthralled with our local in-season offerings. But truth be told, I haven’t picked any of the exotics—the dragonfruit, the passionfruit, the things without signage but look hairy, gnarled, spiky or just plain cool—because I know from prior attempts, they weren’t picked for their flavour, just their transportability.

Will the sour or flavourless and unripened exotics offerings top me from trying these fruits? Nope. It just means that I’ll have to stalk my prey a little longer or go slightly farther afield to bag my game...that should keep me going until Gollner writes his next book.


cheers!
jasmine

On My Shelves: Anita Stewart's Canada

Thanks to the kind people at Harper Collins Canada, I found a copy of Anita Stewart's Canada in my hot little hands.

Anita Stewart’s Canada
By Anita Stewart
Harper Collins Canada
336 pages; $34.95

I must admit when I heard that Anita Stewart (aka “Wonder Woman of Canadian Cuisine”) was undertaking what sounded to me like the equivalent of The Big Book of Canadian Cooking, I looked forward to what she’d present.

For those of you who don’t know Stewart, she’s a culinary icon up here. Passionate about Canadian food along with the people who grow, produce, cook and eat it, this culinary activist and “gastronomer” spent 30 years discovering and trying to define Canadian Cuisine. Her journey includes penning 14 cookbooks (including this one) and a regular gig on CBC Radio One’s Fresh Air. The founder of Cuisine Canada, an organisation for food professionals that promotes fine Canadian food and wine, while administering Canadian cookbook awards, she also sits on the jury of the World Food Media Awards.

Anita Stewart's Canada is part cookery book, part reference book encompassing bits of anthropology, botany, history and sociology, and part call to arms regarding local eating and food production, all punctuated with photographs taken by her or Robert Wigington.

Because of how the book is put together, I think the writing is of greater importance than in most other cookbooks. Stewart’s writing is easily divisible into three voices –the storyteller, the research historian and the food activist:

Stewart the storyteller includes some of the interesting people she’s met in her travels such as Diane Bernard who harvests seaweed, Roger Dufau who owned Toronto’s Le Petit Gourmet and Devini DeSilva, a research associate at the University of Saskatchewan. Stewart’s storytelling draws in the reader to how these people or their foods have added to Canadian eating.

Stewart the research historian can weave an interesting story such as the Three Sisters soup and its ingredients' roles in First Nations’ culture but she can mire the reader in dry facts and figures such as the nutritional benefits of oats. One of the more interesting facets of this book is how she tracks immigrant groups and their stories: sidebars on groups such as the Brazilians, Iranians, Jamaicans, Malaysians, Portuguese and Swiss in Canada help to provide readers a fuller picture of who it is that makes up this nation.

Stewart the food activist is earnest but quite honestly comes off as a bit preachy. Because of that I think it’s the least impressive and effective of the three—granted this could be because I am generally fatigued by the seemingly unending influx of food activist-warriors. Whether she’s telling us that the Atlantic Salmon Federation is “ringing alarm bells and mobilizing volunteers” or being “blown away” by a sac of potatoes endorsed by the World Wildlife Federation, I think there could be a more successful way of relaying this information to readers.

A reference book is really only of use if it has a good and thorough index. Unfortunately, this one doesn’t. A few weeks after reading it, I wanted to find a particular recipe, but could only remember its originating culture. Other recipes were listed, but not this one. After a couple of attempts with main ingredients, I finally found it. Add to this my trying to find a specific reference to Samuel de Champlain (who is mentioned throughout the book) and the L’ordre de bon temps, and I was more than frustrated when neither appeared in the index.

This book’s strengths lie in its cookery portion. Quite honestly: I like it. I think it identifies the many flavours and facets of Canadian cuisine and makes people think beyond the obvious.

The book isn’t divided into the traditional breakfast, lunch, supper, snacks, dessert and other. Nor is it really broken into headings such as breads, meats and drinks. Stewart has instead cleverly divided the collected 150-ish recipes into main ingredients, to certain extent mimicking their introductions to Canada’s dinner table. She starts with the Original Palate (what was here before European settlement), then discusses Maple Honey and Molasses, Corn Beans and Squash, Salmon, Fish and Shellfish, Meat and Poultry, then Gran, Potatoes, Dairy and Eggs, Fruit and Nuts and ends with what she calls The Contemporary Palate (partly the product of food science, partly the product of early 21st Century tastes and fashions).

Here she delves into samplings some of the many cultures which have found their ways to Canada. You can find recipes for Australian Pavlova, Finnish Coffee Bread, Greek Bougatsa, Japanese Gyozas, Malaysian Curry Chicken with Potatoes, Ismaili Peach and Black Pepper Potatoes, Russian-Jewish Halupches and Sri Lankan Coconut Roti along side Buckwheat-Buttermilk Crêpes, Butter Tarts, Classic Chicken and Dumplings, Crispy Potato Pancakes with Smoked Salmon and Maple Pouding Chomeur. I think because so many of the recipes come from home kitchens, they work, are uncomplicated and pretty easy to throw together. They are written with common sense in mind and (at least the ones I tried) came together really easily. Better yet, they were pretty tasty.

And which recipes did I try? I’ll be very honest and tell you that I have never flagged so many recipes in a cookbook sent to me to review--20ish, I think--they all just looked good. Somehow I narrowed them down to four—two I’d consider “traditionally Canadian” and two representing the cuisines that have added to our national menu.



Jamaican Jerk Pork (p 126)
Whenever I go to a Caribbean restaurant, I gravitate towards the Jerk Pork. I know there are many other delicious things to have, but a good JP is usually why I’m there. I was very surprised at how easy it was to make. My only problem was of my own doing—the scotch bonnets I bought were pretty mild so the pork could have been zippier (but yes, my fingertips were a bit tingly). I’m going to try this again and either increase the number of peppers or try and find hotter peppers.


Karen’s Brazilian Black Bean and Chickpea Salad (p38)
In hot weather season I prefer to lunch on chickpea salads. This one is very easy and would do well at a summer barbecue. Its combination of coriander leaf, lime and apple cider give this salad was very pleasant.


Nova Scotian Rhubarb Cobbler (p267)
Yup, this is where my rhubarby bounty went. This is one of those recipes that scream springtime in Canada and springtime in someone’s home kitchen. It’s very simple to put together and very satisfying coming out of the oven.


West Coast Clam Chowder (p90)
A good creamy clam chowder is always welcome in my soup bowl on cold nights. This chowder was so easy to put together and not too bad. I’ll probably make it on a regular basis once the temperatures dip.


Anita Stewart’s Canada is a pretty major undertaking. It traces the many histories of our land—social, cultural and ethnographic as well as botanical and agricultural—and synthesizes this information into a sampling of diverse dishes that donate to the definition of what food is in Canada.

So how does it rate?
Overall: 3.5/5

The breakdown:
Recipe Selection: 4/5
Writing: 2.5/5
Ease of use: 3.5/5
Yum factor: 3.5/5
Table-top test: Pretty much lies flat

Kitchen comfort-level: Novice-intermediate
Pro: It gets people thinking beyond maple syrup, salmon and poutine.
Con: Uneven writing and inadequate index make the prose difficult to get through and specific recipes can be difficult to find.

cheers!
jasmine