CookShelfSummer's just about upon us, and even the latest high school and college graduations are finishing up. Each year, I wonder: how many of those new graduates are getting cookbooks as presents? And how many of those…
As long as I could remember, "pops" were something you bought off a truck--some kind of unnaturally-colored ice on a stick you didn't know whether to lick or bite, but ate anyway after a swim on a hot day. Then, I…
It started happening last week already. I'd planned to bake a couple loaves of bread for sandwiches. But around mid-morning, when I got around to pulling down the flour and finding the yeast, it was already muggy and…
In the days before I developed a systematic winnowing process for choosing my favorite cookbooks, I often found myself making a familiar argument, as I stood - book in hand - over the discard pile. "But having all these…
Book News Shelf Life With Susie
Remember the old, unillustrated days of cookbooks, when you opened to a page of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, or Joy, and your eyes always fell on an unbroken page of solid words? Oh, you might get a diagram of…
With spring firmly underway and greenery springing up in every direction, I'd like to say a few words in praise of one of my favorite types of cookbooks--kitchen garden books. Unlike, say, grill books or preserving…
I'm a bit late with this week's post. It's because I'm in the final throes of the summer cookbook roundup, that mad mid-May marathon smackdown from which just ten perfect summer cookbooks will emerge on NPR's summer…
We had no idea what we were getting into when the blog post on recipes that fail went up last week. What spawned the controversy was a single phrase I put in at the end of the piece: "the home cook will blame herself…
I recently tested a recipe of such surpassing inscrutability that I felt it merited a post of its own. Like last week's memorable disaster it was a sort of pie. But unlike last week's, the fault could not be chalked up…
I don't know about you, but when I first learned to cook I had no idea what to look for in a cookbook. I had my old roommate Conrad's 365 Ways to Cook Chicken on permanent loan, and I'd been given The Essentials of…
I am testing pies this week. (Yes, I know, poor me. Taking one for the team again.) Today was key lime tart and strawberry-rhubarb crumble pie. All day I made dough and fillings. The tart dough and filling for the key…
Every once in a while you come face to face with your own subtle biases. When I'm reviewing, I hunt hard for them...I figure that to be aware of a bias is a big step towards neutralizing it. But the one I discovered…
