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Cookbook Project, Books #14 and 15
Feb. 3rd, 2009 04:24 pmI promise I'll eventually have something to talk about other than cookbooks. I'm just getting all of the cooking out of my system before I go back to actually working instead of sitting around the house all day with nothing better to do than play in the kitchen.....
"Crockery Cookery," Mable Hoffman
I don't remember quite when or where I got this book, but I know I've been in love with my crockpot for many years. It was especially useful when I was living by myself in vet school, and again the first year after I graduated - without someone else to help with dinner on late nights, it was wonderful beyond measure to be able to toss something in there on my way out the door and come home to a hot dinner.
Sometime last week, when I was grocery shopping, I picked up a pork shoulder roast. I had no idea what a pork shoulder roast was, but they didn't have the cut I was looking for, and it was on sale, and I figured I'd be able to find a recipe for it. I was wrong. After scouring almost every cookbook I owned, I came up with... maybe one? That called for prolonged, complicated, pain-in-the-butt all-day multi-step shenanigans to yield pulled pork (not my favorite dish). However, a last-ditch glance through this book yielded a recipe that looked too simple to be true - Cranberry Pork Roast. It didn't call for any particular cut, just "pork roast." And the recipe itself, which mostly consisted of tossing the meat, some honey, orange peel, and chopped up cranberries in the crockpot for ten hours, seemed ludicrous. I figured there was no way it could possibly work, but decided to try it anyway.
Admittedly, it would probably have worked better if I had remembered to both turn on the pot and plug it in, but such is life. As it was, it wound up finishing much later than I had planned and being reheated a couple of days later. And.... it was amazing. Falling-apart tender, juicy, tangy, and utterly delicious, and it made a perfect dinner with polenta and homemade creamed spinach. And the leftovers will probably make some darn good burritos.
"Betty Crocker's New Cookbook"
This is a giant, battered three-ring binder full of recipes that I got at Buck-A-Book, shortly after I graduated from college and before I got into vet school. I was new to living on my own, and wanted something that would give me decent, everyday, cheap, easy recipes. Plus, because the cover was broken, it cost 50 cents. Seemed like it was worth trying. And it was - while nothing in there is going to win any prizes, there were some good-enough recipes for a starving grad student. I haven't used it in years, though.
But I wanted to get ahead of the meal-planning game, given that I'm going to be shorter on time soon, and I decided to spend today making a batch of meatballs. And, in the interest of using up more cookbooks (and trying to figure out whether this book is as useful as I remember it being) I looked up the recipe in here.
They're.... not bad. They're meatballs. Not the most flavorful in the world, but they're tasty enough, and we're set now for spaghetti, or meatball subs, or soup. But given that this book is battered beyond recognition, and I've probably got better recipes elsewhere in my collection, I think this may need to be culled.
(Incidentally, meatloaf was one of the first things I ever learned how to cook. I was eight and a half years old, and my mom wanted to make sure I knew how to make at least a couple of dinners for when she went into the hospital to give birth to my sister. And I thought that shoving my hands into the gloppy, squidgy mixture of raw meat and eggs and milk and breadcrumbs was the most icky-awesome thing in the world. Two-plus decades later, it still is....)
"Crockery Cookery," Mable Hoffman
I don't remember quite when or where I got this book, but I know I've been in love with my crockpot for many years. It was especially useful when I was living by myself in vet school, and again the first year after I graduated - without someone else to help with dinner on late nights, it was wonderful beyond measure to be able to toss something in there on my way out the door and come home to a hot dinner.
Sometime last week, when I was grocery shopping, I picked up a pork shoulder roast. I had no idea what a pork shoulder roast was, but they didn't have the cut I was looking for, and it was on sale, and I figured I'd be able to find a recipe for it. I was wrong. After scouring almost every cookbook I owned, I came up with... maybe one? That called for prolonged, complicated, pain-in-the-butt all-day multi-step shenanigans to yield pulled pork (not my favorite dish). However, a last-ditch glance through this book yielded a recipe that looked too simple to be true - Cranberry Pork Roast. It didn't call for any particular cut, just "pork roast." And the recipe itself, which mostly consisted of tossing the meat, some honey, orange peel, and chopped up cranberries in the crockpot for ten hours, seemed ludicrous. I figured there was no way it could possibly work, but decided to try it anyway.
Admittedly, it would probably have worked better if I had remembered to both turn on the pot and plug it in, but such is life. As it was, it wound up finishing much later than I had planned and being reheated a couple of days later. And.... it was amazing. Falling-apart tender, juicy, tangy, and utterly delicious, and it made a perfect dinner with polenta and homemade creamed spinach. And the leftovers will probably make some darn good burritos.
"Betty Crocker's New Cookbook"
This is a giant, battered three-ring binder full of recipes that I got at Buck-A-Book, shortly after I graduated from college and before I got into vet school. I was new to living on my own, and wanted something that would give me decent, everyday, cheap, easy recipes. Plus, because the cover was broken, it cost 50 cents. Seemed like it was worth trying. And it was - while nothing in there is going to win any prizes, there were some good-enough recipes for a starving grad student. I haven't used it in years, though.
But I wanted to get ahead of the meal-planning game, given that I'm going to be shorter on time soon, and I decided to spend today making a batch of meatballs. And, in the interest of using up more cookbooks (and trying to figure out whether this book is as useful as I remember it being) I looked up the recipe in here.
They're.... not bad. They're meatballs. Not the most flavorful in the world, but they're tasty enough, and we're set now for spaghetti, or meatball subs, or soup. But given that this book is battered beyond recognition, and I've probably got better recipes elsewhere in my collection, I think this may need to be culled.
(Incidentally, meatloaf was one of the first things I ever learned how to cook. I was eight and a half years old, and my mom wanted to make sure I knew how to make at least a couple of dinners for when she went into the hospital to give birth to my sister. And I thought that shoving my hands into the gloppy, squidgy mixture of raw meat and eggs and milk and breadcrumbs was the most icky-awesome thing in the world. Two-plus decades later, it still is....)
