Lair of the Lost Girl

"Better Homes & Gardens Five Seasons Cranberry Book," BH&G Test Kitchen

Ye gods, I am so far behind on this it's not even funny. I've actually been doing a decent amount of cookbook-project cooking; I've just been failing to write it up. I'm pretty sure I used this book over a month ago now....

Anyway, this is somewhere between a magazine and a cookbook. I picked it up for 50 cents, I think, at the library's Book and Bake Sale a while ago, mostly because, well, I really like cranberries. Sadly, once I got it home I realized that most of the recipes call for canned cranberry sauce, of which I am less fond.

Still, there are some good-looking desserts in here. And I was tempted to try one of them. But, because this project is about challenging myself, and because I felt obligated to live the full 1971 experience, and because my husband didn't say no when I asked if he'd be willing to eat them, instead I made "Stuffed Burger Bundles."

These are, essentially, large meatballs filled with a mixture of stuffing (standard, Stove Top bread stuffing) and chopped cranberries, baked in a sauce that's a mixture of evaporated milk, cream of mushroom soup, ketchup, and Worcestershire sauce. I figured they'd probably taste like nostalgia, given that half of the meat my mom cooked as a kid was baked in a combination of cream of mushroom soup and Worcestershire sauce.

You guys? These were kind of gross.

The meatballs themselves were okay, though the stuffing, having been double-cooked, had lost any texture and was more just a poorly-integrated panade. But the sauce was fatty and gloppy and weirdly salty-tangy and bleh. Overall, the meal was edible but not anything I'd ever want to experience again.

And I am never buying another can of cream of mushroom soup.

Though I may come back to this book and make the cranberry dumplings; those actually sound like they might taste good....

"The Book Lover's Cookbook,"  Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Kay Jensen

I think I first saw this book on a trip to Plimoth Plantation - but that was when I was in the middle of the original Cookbook Project, and had declared a moratorium on buying new cookbooks.  Still, I put it on my wishlist, and shortly after the original project ended, a good friend bought it for me as a Christmas present.

The real problem is that, since it's a mixed collection of recipes, anecdotes, and quotes from books that relate to said recipes, that it's a much denser book to look through than most cookbooks, and more fun to read than to browse for recipes.  Which means that, for a couple of years now, I've been slowly and lovingly working my way through it, reading quotes and pages from James Herriott and Ogden Nash and Fannie Flagg and Margaret Mitchell and idly glancing at the recipes as I mostly savor the writing *about* food.  But I promised myself that I'd use this book next.

Since my garden has, for the first time in years, finally given me a bumper crop of zucchini this summer, it was easy to decide what to make.  About 13 pages into the book is a recipe for Priceless Zucchini Bread (with a quote from Andrew Rooney).  Given that it looked like a fairly straightforward and reliable recipe, I gave it a try.

This may be one of the best zucchini bread recipes I've ever found.  Sweet but not cloying, moist but not greasy, with a little bit of chewy crust.... perfect.  And the recipe makes two loaves, so there's now about 2/3 of a loaf in our freezer.  And if I don't think of something to do with the 2 zukes currently in my fridge soon, there may be more.

I want to use this book more - I just have to finish reading through the quotes and excerpts first.....

"Starbucks Passion for Coffee," Dave Olsen, John Phillip Carroll, and Lora Brody

Okay - I don't drink coffee, so this is kind of weird.  Except it's not a book of coffee recipes, thankfully.  It's about 40 pages about what coffee is and how to brew it and how apparently espresso is better than all other coffee, and then a whole lot of recipes for things that you can eat while drinking coffee.  Because apparently there are restrictions, or something.  I'm not sure whether the idea is that you can't, say, eat grilled cheese with coffee, or that pear-ginger muffins are only to be eaten with coffee; the book is unclear on that.  (Though I will say that I had my recipe from this book with a mug of tea; hopefully the Starbucks police won't come down on me and revoke my License to Beverage.)

But the book was a gift from <lj user="hungrytiger">, whose family was debulking their own cookbook stock, and it is full of tasty-looking baked goods, and pretty pictures, and the recipes are actually pretty well written, so I figured I'd give it a try.  There were a bunch of things that looked tasty enough, for generic muffins and coffee cakes, but the recipe that caught my eye was for Cinnamon Swirl Biscuits.

These looked like a cross between biscuits and cinnamon buns - take a super-rich buttermilk biscuit dough, roll it around a cinnamon filling, slice it, and bake it.  Best of both worlds, right?

Sadly not.  The biscuit dough was dry, and the cinnamon filling didn't have any butter or fat to hold it together so it just spilled out, and didn't integrate into the dough at all or melt and get gooey.  They weren't *bad* - it's hard to be actively bad with baked goods and cinnamon and brown sugar - but they weren't particularly good, either.  I kind of want to remake this, but with a richer biscuit dough and a better filling.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure whether this book will get another try.  This was more of a recipe failure than an execution failure, and it makes me question the quality of the other recipes.

I'm really hoping that my next book here will be a winner; I seem to be having rather a streak of mediocrity.....

"The Star Wars Cookbook: Wookie Cookies And Other Galactic Recipes," Robin Davis

The only thing I can say in defense of this book is that I did not buy it for myself. It was a gift from a former acquaintance who used to play in our Star Wars tabletop roleplaying game; moreover, said acquaintance had a diet that consisted entirely of baked chicken marinated in bottled Italian dressing, cheeseburgers, bread, and candy. Hence, he had no way of knowing that it was not actually any kind of useful.

It's a decent enough kids' book, and the pictures, with cute little action figures posing with the food, are fun. But it doesn't really include actual recipes - Yoda Soda, Han-Burgers, and Death Star Popcorn Balls, while cute, aren't really... cooking.

I wound up making Mos Eisley Morsels on the grounds that it was the closest thing I could find to a real recipe in the book. They looked like a kind of variant banana bread, baked in a square pan instead of a loaf pan. And they looked decent enough; there were actually a decent handful of spices in there. And it's hard to wrong with banana bread, right?

You'd be amazed.

In retrospect, I should have realized that there was no sugar or dairy in the recipe. The end result was the driest, blandest banana brick I have ever had. It wasn't terrible, especially served warm with peanut butter, but it was... blah. Dull. If it's possible for something to be extravagantly dull, this was.

If I have any friends with kids who like to play in the kitchen and like Star Wars, I'm happy to hand this book off to you....

"The Pioneer Woman Cooks," Ree Drummond

This book was a gift from hungrytiger; I think it was a hand-me-down - he knows I collect cookbooks, so he brought me a few to add to my stockpile. I've never been a follower of the Pioneer Woman, either on her blog or TV show, but I've at least heard of her, and her stories and the like sounded interesting; plus, I've never turned down a cookbook - either they're a delight or a challenge, or sometimes both.

This is an odd book - it's more Celebrity Personality Venue than it is cookbook, and most of the content is glossy pictures of Real Farm Life and horses and kids, and stories about her learning to be a country gal - she seems to be aiming for the 'younger sexier Paula Deen' image. But there were some good-sounding recipes, and it was still fun to flip through.

While the breakfast recipes were the ones that mostly caught my eye, what I really needed was a dinner recipe. And, while the name was corny in the extreme, "Marlboro Man's Favorite Sandwich" just sounded too good to pass up. It's essentially a steak sandwich, which is something that I'd oddly never tried to make at home, and it sounded perfect for cold, bleak weather.

The recipe is horribly written. There are almost no specific amounts for anything (one of the ingredients is "butter, lots of it"), the layout is atrocious (pictures, in vertical columns, except where it crosses a page turn, when it goes horizontal), and the Old Country Look And Feel invades into the details so that it's cutesy instead of helpful. Trying to follow this was a royal pain in the butt.

That said? The sandwiches were DELICIOUS. Amazing. Juicy and well-seasoned and every kind of excellent. I don't know how it worked out, but it did. Damnit. I'd make them again. I'd make them again tonight. And this means that, no matter how lousy the writing, I'm going to have to try some of the other recipes I've flagged in there....

"Best of the Best Cookbook Recipes," Food & Wine Magazine, 2011

This book is seriously amazing. Apparently each year Food & Wine Magazine rates a whole bunch of cookbooks. And then they take the top 25, and publish a handful of recipes from each of them, plus a few previously-unpublished recipes from the authors, in one big, glorious, splendidly-illustrated book. It's food porn and delicious recipes and a way to audition a ton of new books, restaurants, and authors all at once.

And I got it for $1.50 at my library's book sale, in brand-new condition. Seriously, this was a victory of epic proportions.

The only downside is that a lot of the recipes are for larger quantities than umbran and I can use at home. Well, that and the fact that I just had a hard time narrowing down my list of recipes-that-sounded-amazing.

Ultimately, though, this is the season of tasty and simple food, so when I found the recipe for Pea Pesto Crostini, I decided to go with that. (Originally from 'Giada At Home,' a book I'd never look at twice under normal circumstances.)

It was super-simple - pureed peas, Parmesan, salt, pepper, garlic, and olive oil. Spread on grilled bread, top with sliced tomato or halved cherry tomatoes. That's it. And because it was so simple, and because we had fresh tomatoes from our garden and really good bread, it was delicious. For a hot summer night and a light dinner, it was perfect. I'd make this again, and I'd serve it to friends.

Now I just need to find excuses to make all of the other recipes I've marked in here.....

"Bento Love," Kentaro Kobayashi

I love bento. I've been making bento lunches for umbran and myself for almost two years now, aside from the time that I was out of work, and I am still completely enamored with the entire concept. It's more fun than just sandwiches, it's healthy, and it suits my style of eating better (I'm much more of a slow-nibbler than a 2-3 meals-a-day person). And for the longest time I was just working off one cookbook and a handful of web pages. But before I went out of work on medical leave, I found this book while I was browsing at Barnes & Noble one day. And the recipes looked reasonable, simple, and tasty, so I decided to pick it up. Sadly, then, I was out of work for several months, so I didn't have the chance to give it a try until recently.

A few weeks ago I was cooking something that called for half a head of cabbage, leaving me with the other half left over, so I pulled out this book and decided to make Stir-Fried Pork and Cabbage.

Sadly, it was not nearly as good as I hoped it would be. The recipe was honestly *too* simple - there was almost no seasoning, and the cabbage itself stayed kind of bland and rubbery. It was edible, but nowhere near as tasty as the stuff I'm used to making.

I'll keep the book; there are enough other recipes that I'm willing to give it another try. But I'm likely to be a lot more careful in picking and choosing which ones to try, and I may just take seasoning into my own hands.....

"Cook's Country: Best Lost Suppers," America's Test Kitchen

I may have mentioned previously that I have a serious love for America's Test Kitchen. They have never led me wrong, recipe-wise, and I adore my subscriptions to their magazines. But occasionally they publish additional books, with recipes that they either haven't collected elsewhere or have altered in helpful ways. Also, since I was late to the Cook's Country train, there's just a lot of stuff I missed.

So about a year and a half ago, when umbran and I went on vacation, we found the local second-hand bookstore, and I found this on the shelf. It's a collection of, in their words, "old-fashioned, home-cooked recipes too good to forget." The recipes were sent in by readers, but then subjected to ATK's testing and polishing - and they're honest about that, too. If they make any changes, there's a note after the recipe explaining what they changed and why.

I read through the whole book enthusiastically, but the recipe that kept catching my eye was one of the first ones in the book - Granny's Tamale Pie. I love Mexican and Tex/Mex flavors, it looked delicious, and it was complicated enough to intrigue me.

And since I have more time than I know what to do with right now, and since this is a recipe that takes 3-4 hours to make, I made it for my gaming group last week (with help from metaphysick when it came to prep-work and heavy lifting).

It's a layered casserole - seasoned cornmeal with chicken broth, tomatoes, bacon, onion, and garlic, layered with poached chicken and baked until everything has melded into a delicious whole, served with a spicy tomato sauce, and it's wonderful. Rich and moist and complex and interesting, and the sauce really makes the whole dish. I don't know if I'd make it again; as I said, it's four hours of poaching chicken and reducing broth and simmering aromatics and whisking cornmeal and then hefting around a cast-iron Dutch oven full of food inside a water bath in a roasting pan. But it was absolutely worth making at least the once. And there are a handful of other recipes, less labor-intensive, that I fully intend to make as well.

Yet another win for America's Test Kitchen....

"Flour," Joanne Chang

I have to admit, I came at this book rather backwards. I love the Flour bakery. When umbran and I were doing practice walks while I was training for the 3-Day, one of our routes would take us past Flour, and I have yet to find anything in the world that tastes better than one of their raspberry seltzers on a hot summer day. (Oh yeah, and their baked goods are excellent too.)

When I found out that there was an official Flour cookbook, I fell in love with it at the bookstore - the level of detail! The shiny, beautiful pictures! The conversational tone of the writing, the diversity of the baked goods, everything about it was custom-designed to appeal to me. And, because metaphysick is awesome, at one point when I was feeling particularly low last summer, he bought it for me as a surprise gift.

I've read through it more times than I can count, and I admit I've already dabbled with a couple of the recipes from it (the cornmeal lime cookies were excellent), but I finally decided that, for an official Project Recipe, I should make something a little more unique.

So this morning for breakfast I made Brown Sugar Popovers. Popovers are one of my favorite baked goods, and I always somehow wind up surprised at how easy they are to make, in spite of all the mythology and superstition around them, but I've never tried any recipe other than the hand-written one given to me by the same coworker who bought me the popover pan as a wedding gift lo those many years ago. And I had never thought of making them as a sweet pastry instead of a savory dinner accompaniment.

These were nothing short of amazing. They were simple enough to make while I was still groggy, semi-medicated, and working out morning pain; they came together in minutes, and we had all of the ingredients already in the pantry. They rose up higher than any popovers I've made before, and they were rich and sweet and buttery and warm and flaky and nothing short of perfect.

I love this book, and I can't wait to make just about every other recipe in it, but goodness knows I'll be making these popovers again. (And again, and again....)

"Comfort & Spice," Niamh Shields

In my Home Alone time, I've been going through recipes and realizing that I have a couple of Cookbook Project entries that I'm way overdue to write up. How far overdue? Well, I used the recipe from this book for Thanksgiving last year. I'm good at getting things done; I just sometimes lag behind in actually acknowledging that I've done them.

I found this book when metaphysick and I were in Martha's Vineyard last fall. There's an adorable little independent bookstore that we wander through every time we visit, and I love the fact that it has books that I've never seen anywhere else. For some reason, this book caught my eye.

It's not glossy or shiny; if anything, it's a rather rough-looking paperback. The cover is an unprocessed gray with orange details, I've never heard of the author, and it doesn't claim to follow any one particular food theme. Heck, there are hardly even any pictures inside. But still, I picked it up to glance through it - and I realized that almost every recipe sounded delicious. It also helped that several of the dinner recipes were sized for two; there's a dearth of good, small-meal cookbooks.

Anyway, I brought it home and immediately bookmarked a handful of recipes to try. The one that won my heart, though, and that I've already made at least twice, is Cannellini Bean Dip with Chorizo.

It's impressively, almost offensively simple. White beans, olive oil, toasted garlic, rosemary, and lemon juice, blended together. The chorizo is browned and used as the substrate for the dip. Simple, super-quick, and mouth-wateringly delicious. I would make it again in a heartbeat.

Now I just need to finish the rest of this project and get back to the rest of the recipes I've bookmarked in here.....