Roots and Sprouts and Fire
It's March! and that means fresh starts and kitchen adventures and maybe a break from the routine. It's the smell of dirt and the fresh air. Blogger Sarah Britton has My New Roots, full of seed butters and sprouts and…
Shelf Life With Susie
New York: 48 hours and approximately 12000 calories
So this weekend my 14-year-old and I took a long-anticipated trip to Manhattan. I prepared my usual database of places to eat, and was mildly dismayed to realize that, between old favorites and new must-try's, I had put…
Round the world and back again
Every once in a while, after a long drought, we get a spate of internationally-flavored cookbooks to enjoy. In fact, I'm starting to wonder if February/March might be an ideal time for publishers to release these books…
White Pages & Glossy Photos: A Rubric for Titling Cookbooks
"Well, this is lovely," I thought as the new cookbook slid out of its padded envelope. "Rose Water and Orange Blossoms," it read, in a curling thick cursive. I scanned downward to see what kind of Middle Eastern food we…
Chefs, simplified.
Geoffrey Zakarian - chef-entrepreneur, TV food show judge (and contestant), big-shot restaurant consultant. (You might remember his very classy last book, Town/Country, where he presented the same ingredients in…
Under pressure
I know, I know, it's a completely ridiculous question. What does that even mean? I ask because this season has been remarkably light on slow cooker books, which I had always thought of as a 4-season staple of the…
Blizzard cooking
Snowmageddon hasn't been so terrible in our valley so far. Some wind and a lot of powder in the air. But my 8-year-old, bundled in her snowsuit, has been happily making snow angels and tunnels and castles for an hour.…
Men in T-shirts, cooking
I noticed something funny in my "Discards" pile this morning - a trio of men in T-shirts and jeans. looking at out me with bright eyes and white teeth. What's going on with that? I thought. It turns out that two of them…
The "champagne of tea"
An advance reading copy of Jeff Koehler's Darjeeling (due to publish in May) arrived this week. Sometimes publishers send me food books that aren't cookbooks, even those most everybody knows I almost never review them.…
New leaves turning all around
For the last few days the thud of packages on the porch has subsided. The fall cookbook surge is over, and the last Christmas stragglers have arrived (a bit too late for their intended recipients). The publishing…
Sleeper books of 2014
The year has come and gone, and along with it the rising and falling tides of popular cookbooks, the best of which appear in EYB's awesome comprehensive list. Every year, there are a few cookbooks that catch my eye but…
Risking it all on feast day
So I'm trying a completely new recipe for Christmas this year - Andrea Nguyen's Peking duck from her vietworldkitchen.com blog. That is how I found myself in the kitchen last night inflating two ducks with my exercise…