![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Cookbook Project, Books #185 and 186
Aug. 11th, 2010 08:05 pm"Golden Door Cooks At Home," Dean Rucker with Marah Stets
This book was a gift from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sdavido and vettecat, and one that I only got a few months ago. It's awesome beyond compare, because in addition to being a gift from friends and a snazzy, trendy, cool book that I never would have thought of looking through on my own, it's an uncorrected galley proof.
I've had a fondness for galley proofs ever since I was in high school - I was on the library's Young Adult Advisory Board, which meant that I was one of a small, select gang of extreme nerds who got to help choose the books that the library ordered for their YA department. Our greatest accomplishment as a group was convincing TSR that we had some actual power, and getting them to send us galley proofs of all the new Dragonlance novels several months before actual publishing. We would then get into all-out shouting, begging, threatening, shoving fights over who got to read them first, and since then there has always been a special, sneaky, awesome, in-the-cool-crowd feel to reading uncorrected proofs for me.
Luckily, the only differences between this copy and the final product are that all of the pictures are in black and white, and the page numbers aren't in existence yet. There are one or two recipes where the quantities for a couple of ingredients are missing, but not enough to make it much of a problem.
Also luckily, it was easy to choose a recipe. Right now our garden is producing like crazy, teetering on the edge of 'dear God I'm about to be buried alive in eggplant and tomatoes.' So when I saw the recipe for Vegetable Pave with Roasted Garlic Lentils, I knew I had to try it. We had eggplant, plum tomatoes, zucchini, and basil all from the garden, and if nothing else it would be a good way to use up a lot of produce.
The final dish was pretty darn good. It's clearly Healthy Spa Food; if I were making this on my own I would have added an extra layer of cheese, and probably a few other less healthy ingredients. But the lentils were delicious, and it was definitely a celebration of the vegetables and their flavors. And this is definitely a book I'll use again.
"Recipes for Home Canning And Freezing," Lancaster County Amish Recipes
This is a little paper booklet that was a gift from my mother. In particular, she bought it for me when she heard about the cookbook project, out of a sense of mischief and meddling - she quite clearly stated that she wanted to make the project as challenging as possible, by buying me more books. (It is quite clear where I get my occasionally-evident trickster streak from, when you look at my family.)
It's a cute little booklet, quite clearly assembled by people who are not professional chefs. The biggest problem, though, is that I don't make preserves. I have enough friends who make pickles and jams, so the social market is already glutted. Plus.... I'm a surgeon, and I come specifically from a school where sterile technique is harped upon like crazy. So while I know that home canning is pretty darn safe, I get the screaming heebie-jeebies at anything less than operating room-level sterile technique, and convince myself that if I can't autoclave my jars then everyone who eats my food will die. So, for my own sanity, I avoid that subsection of food preparation altogether.
Also, the recipes in here are rather vague, and much more like suggestions than instructions. Still, I managed to find a recipe for Frozen Cucumbers that looked both simple, manageable, and worth trying - while I have no interest in canning, I love making quick pickles.
These were quick, it's true, and easy. They were also, though, sweet enough to make my teeth ache. I love super-sour pickles, so these tasted way too much like candied cucumbers for me to be able to eat more than a single slice. Friends who like sweet pickles, though, have assured me that they were quite good, and the concept of frozen cukes in general was pretty darn nice on a hot evening. The book, of course, is a keeper; it was both a gift from my mom and the first in the series of 'don't finish the project, here's more fodder' books.
Speaking of finishing, only two more left to go, plus one coda that will have to wait until Christmas....
This book was a gift from
sdavido and vettecat, and one that I only got a few months ago. It's awesome beyond compare, because in addition to being a gift from friends and a snazzy, trendy, cool book that I never would have thought of looking through on my own, it's an uncorrected galley proof.I've had a fondness for galley proofs ever since I was in high school - I was on the library's Young Adult Advisory Board, which meant that I was one of a small, select gang of extreme nerds who got to help choose the books that the library ordered for their YA department. Our greatest accomplishment as a group was convincing TSR that we had some actual power, and getting them to send us galley proofs of all the new Dragonlance novels several months before actual publishing. We would then get into all-out shouting, begging, threatening, shoving fights over who got to read them first, and since then there has always been a special, sneaky, awesome, in-the-cool-crowd feel to reading uncorrected proofs for me.
Luckily, the only differences between this copy and the final product are that all of the pictures are in black and white, and the page numbers aren't in existence yet. There are one or two recipes where the quantities for a couple of ingredients are missing, but not enough to make it much of a problem.
Also luckily, it was easy to choose a recipe. Right now our garden is producing like crazy, teetering on the edge of 'dear God I'm about to be buried alive in eggplant and tomatoes.' So when I saw the recipe for Vegetable Pave with Roasted Garlic Lentils, I knew I had to try it. We had eggplant, plum tomatoes, zucchini, and basil all from the garden, and if nothing else it would be a good way to use up a lot of produce.
The final dish was pretty darn good. It's clearly Healthy Spa Food; if I were making this on my own I would have added an extra layer of cheese, and probably a few other less healthy ingredients. But the lentils were delicious, and it was definitely a celebration of the vegetables and their flavors. And this is definitely a book I'll use again.
"Recipes for Home Canning And Freezing," Lancaster County Amish Recipes
This is a little paper booklet that was a gift from my mother. In particular, she bought it for me when she heard about the cookbook project, out of a sense of mischief and meddling - she quite clearly stated that she wanted to make the project as challenging as possible, by buying me more books. (It is quite clear where I get my occasionally-evident trickster streak from, when you look at my family.)
It's a cute little booklet, quite clearly assembled by people who are not professional chefs. The biggest problem, though, is that I don't make preserves. I have enough friends who make pickles and jams, so the social market is already glutted. Plus.... I'm a surgeon, and I come specifically from a school where sterile technique is harped upon like crazy. So while I know that home canning is pretty darn safe, I get the screaming heebie-jeebies at anything less than operating room-level sterile technique, and convince myself that if I can't autoclave my jars then everyone who eats my food will die. So, for my own sanity, I avoid that subsection of food preparation altogether.
Also, the recipes in here are rather vague, and much more like suggestions than instructions. Still, I managed to find a recipe for Frozen Cucumbers that looked both simple, manageable, and worth trying - while I have no interest in canning, I love making quick pickles.
These were quick, it's true, and easy. They were also, though, sweet enough to make my teeth ache. I love super-sour pickles, so these tasted way too much like candied cucumbers for me to be able to eat more than a single slice. Friends who like sweet pickles, though, have assured me that they were quite good, and the concept of frozen cukes in general was pretty darn nice on a hot evening. The book, of course, is a keeper; it was both a gift from my mom and the first in the series of 'don't finish the project, here's more fodder' books.
Speaking of finishing, only two more left to go, plus one coda that will have to wait until Christmas....
