6:00 timesavers, am and pm.
I'm testing a slow cooker cookbook this week, and it's making me consider (or re-consider) the ways we try to conserve time as cooks. It was only last year that I came to slow cookery, and I instantly loved the…
Shelf Life With Susie
The winnowing
The first week of January: holiday roundups are over, and after a week of bingeing on festive food I need to get back on my treadmill, which kept getting covered in books throughout December. Time for cookbook cleanup!…
2011: The missing cuisine
The last week of the year has a special gift for the cookbook-obsessed: perspective. From our vantage point at the very end of a long, busy year of food publishing, we can see trends that weren't so obvious before.…
Holidays & Celebrations Shelf Life With Susie
Holiday food traditions
Just for fun this morning, I ran a little EYB search (Occasion: Christmas; Course: Main Course) to see what holiday proteins our cookbooks feature. The results read like some kind of crazy, carnivorous 12 Days of…
Threshold ingredients
We all love "usable" cookbooks, but "usable" is different for everybody. And one big part of "usable," I've come to realize, is the availability of specific ingredients. Each of us carries with us an internal dictionary…
3 ways with ground beef
Over the weekend, we got the yearly beefer delivery--1/4 of a steer, or approximately 125 pounds. Some 25 or 30 pounds of that is ground beef, which I *could* just turn into hamburgers or chili. Or, I could hit the new…
Holidays & Celebrations Shelf Life With Susie
Thanksgiving sides--some better ones.
If you haven't yet drawn up your menu for Thursday, you've still probably made it as far as pinning down which turkey recipe you're going to use. A lot of us, though, don't bother worrying about the vegetables…
Roundup season
I love this time of year, and not just because of the cool air and the glowing woodstove. No, what's special about early November is that it's Holiday Roundup season, when I get to pick the top 10 cookbooks of the year…
Post cards from the powerless
As you may have heard, Halloween came early to New England this weekend, in the form of an out-of-season snowstorm of heroic proportions. It wasn't the the storm that was so bad, but the damage it inflicted on the…
3 ways of looking at a shrimp
Here's an interesting exercise I thought we could try. Let's take 3 up-to-the-minute cookbooks at random off the pile and see how they address an everyday ingredient. Say shrimp. Shrimp Biryani (Indian Shrimp and Rice),…
Ground swell
Here's a completely new cookbook micro-trend: ground meat. To me, it seems surprising because meat cookbooks have been, if anything, increasingly DIY in recent years. There are smoke-and-cure books, and sausage books,…
Choosing the best cookbooks--the 7 questions
Well, I've just about emerged on the other side of my first holiday cookbook roundup, and this time, I was unusually aware of my decision-making process. You know how you're standing in front of the cookbook shelves at…