Camp cooking
This week brought a brace of camping cookbooks, which I regarded with curiosity. Though our family lives on 20 rustic acres, all my outdoor cooking--whether on propane burner or kettle grill--takes place no more than…
Shelf Life With Susie
Subliminal marketing and the "Every Day"
I've just been noticing that suddenly the words "Every Day" are appearing in the new cookbooks I see, well, every day. This week it was Heidi Swanson's Super Natural Every Day and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River…
Memoirs from chefs, recipes from home cooks.
I guess there's no two ways around it: chefs live more interesting lives than the rest of us. On the whole, that's because their lives are also harder: late hours, low pay, high stress, a demanding public. With success…
The death of the cupcake
Every once in a while I open a cookbook envelope and find something so, so, so strange I just have to drop everything and tell you about it. That happened this week, when out popped: Zombie Cupcakes! Unless you've been…
Spring and Summer 2011 Cookbooks: Special Preview
One of the peculiarities of being a cookbook reviewer is that you're forever looking into the near future of food as the new press releases roll in. Invariably, they offer tantalizing glimpses of seasonal foods that are…
Rolls redux
A few weeks ago, you might recall, I was struggling with the Kaiser Roll Quandary--and, thanks to EYB, had found and got ready to test some hamburger buns from The Commonsense Kitchen. Well, what with one thing and…
Primal meat
It takes a certain amount of guts, if you'll excuse me, to publish a book about meat in January, when the typical cookbook features words like "lean," "slim," and "salad". But on the other hand, it *is* the dead of…
In praise of red fermented bean curd
Did you know, EYB friends, that EYB is good not only for cataloging your gazillion recipes, but also for helping you create entirely new ones? That's what happened to me today. I was trying to come up with a Chinese…
The Kaiser roll quandary
I love baking in midwinter, don't you? The heat of the oven, the smell of yeast, the golden brown perfection of baked goods...did I mention the heat of the oven? I got a kaiser roll stamp for Christmas, and I'm trying…
The first cookbooks of the year
Well, the holiday rush of cookbooks is past and the publishers are looking ahead to spring. This week the mail held the galleys of spring--April cookbooks in their raw, pre-edited state. I don't test recipes from…
The January 2nd diet
Happy New Year, everybody! Mine started inauspiciously. 5 minutes to midnight found me with a throbbing Class A headache, passing up a hoarded bottle of Veuve Cliquot for some sparkling non-alcoholic cider. It's not…
Time for a snack and a book
The holiday season this year has been a compressed blur, with Thanksgiving segueing instantly into Hanukkah into Christmas. I bet you haven't had a chance to do much more than crack your cookbooks to the right page as…