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Make It Japanese - January 2024

2/10/2024

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Over the last two years, some of my favorite faces in food media just… disappeared. Whatever happened at Buzzfeed cleansed familiar, comfortable personalities from the space while they recovered in their own way and moved on. Alvin got going with the Babish Culinary Universe. Andrew sometimes shows up at Watcher, and Inga is going solo. I wondered– where is Rie? Then I found out she had a cookbook coming out. Of course I bought it. I loved Rie.

​Best known for her Make it Fancy series at Tasty, I wasn’t sure what to expect when Make It Japanese arrived on my doorstep. I knew that she was a knowledgeable cook. I knew that she originally came from Japan, and as a result, I first got to know her while she worked on the Worth It series as their interpreter. Food media is often about making something ridiculous and rarely about making it simple. Make it Japanese makes it simple.
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I don’t eat heavily, and I live alone. Cookbooks that often include recipes to serve a family of four are too much for me in my current life. In all of the recipes I have tried while cooking from Make it Japanese, I come out with smaller portions of leftovers than I have while trying recipes from other sources. I am learning how to cook simple, worthwhile foods from Rie’s culture and her current lifestyle as a new mom. I’m not wasting my time.
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Her pork bun recipe stood out to me right away. I love making steamed buns, and I’ve used the bao recipe from the Pixar short for this purpose for years. I almost always struggled with the dough, however. Something wasn’t quite right. The recipe made so many buns that my freezer would be full for a year with the remnants. Rie’s pork bun recipe included fewer ingredients and a smaller amount of dough, resulting in eight large steamed buns. The dough came together easily, and closing each bun did not feel like a struggle for my life. I told everyone who would listen that this was the easiest recipe for a pork bun I had ever tried.

I found that most recipes came together quickly and easily for someone at my skill level while I still pushed myself into trying new flavor combinations. I’ve made Onigiri before, but never of the grilled variety.
Accessibility - 5/5

As is the case with all cookbooks focused on a certain country’s cuisine, there can be some ingredient barriers. Asian ingredients are becoming more accessible across the country, and where your store may not be able to provide, online markets can. There are still plenty of recipes within the book that can be made using basic Asian pantry ingredients, such as her Japanese Potato Salad, that are widely available without having to order bonito flakes off of amazon.

I did not struggle with finding ingredients to cook a different recipe from this book multiple times a week at my local grocery store. For that reason, I rated Make it Japanese a full 5/5.
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Difficulty - 5/5

There are a variety of recipes within Make it Japanese that can both challenge a seasoned home cook and help ease a newbie into the world of cooking simple Japanese food. I learned everything from how to make mochi donuts to the basics of cooking short grain sushi rice on the stovetop. I often utilize my Zojirushi, but the skill is now there.

Originality - ⅘

Variations on some of these recipes exist out in the world already. The originality of this cookbook’s recipes lies with the way they come together and are written to produce smaller servings than others. It’s a perfect book for someone like me who lives alone and often cooks only for themselves.

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The Essential Cookbook NYT-- Revised Edition

1/7/2022

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Our first cookbook of the month for 2022 was originally published more than ten years ago, but the revised edition of The Essential New York Times Cookbook compiled by Amanda Hessler, CEO of Food52, was released in November of 2021 to incorporate more of the New York TImes’ iconic recipes. I’m a sucker for historic cookbooks and antique cookbooks, and after watching a video on Food52 of Amanda cooking from this book, I was immediately curious about the book’s contents.


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It promised to be full of historical recipes published across the history of what may be America’s most famous newspaper, and that was good enough for me. I preordered the tome of knowledge right after watching Amanda’s video, and it arrived in a thicker box than I ever received for a single cookbook. That’s because its like four cookbooks stacked on top of each other, page after page of recipes with very little illustration or photography. It’s in the style of those old cookbooks that I love so much, and I loved it.

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An Unapologetic Cookbook: Final Review

11/7/2021

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We’ve covered the Starches and Staples from Scratch sections of An Unapologetic Cookbook in deep detail up to this point because of my initial concerns with accessibility in the cookbook for a normal home cook. Hardware and ingredient accessibility was less of an issue than initially anticipated-- and I’m happy for that. The rest of this book is broken down into primary protein sections such as fish, chicken, etc. It’s built upon the first two sections in minor ways.

You can expect to see some of the items from the From Scratch portions of the book called for in nearly every recipe. Among the ingredient lists in each recipe, you’ll see those guys in big bold letters to remind you to refer back. You do not have to do that if you don’t want to. Many of the times this happens, its for the sauces, butters, or condiments you could have created earlier on. We live in a world of convenience. Use those conveniences when you want to, or don’t.

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A relieving aspect of these bigger recipes is that Weissman does provide options for some of the stranger ingredients he calls for. An example of this comes in his mojo braised pork recipe that mentions seville oranges, but he also allows for limes. Nobody is getting seville oranges in their neighborhood grocery store. You’re a lucky person if you do. This lowered my concerns about the accessibility of the book a lot. Thank you, Weissman.
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That Sounds So Good - Nov 2021

11/1/2021

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Our November Cookbook of the Month is from an author we’ve already reviewed once before, That Sounds So Good by Carla Lalli Music. We enjoyed her first foray into cookbook writing while she was still at Bon Appetit-- Where Cooking Begins-- and she won a James Beard Award for the thing. I’ve gifted her first book to several family members first moving out on their own either during or after college as a flexible meal planning aid, and I hoped that That Sounds So Good will follow the same format.

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I was pleased to see that one of the ways that she writes recipes that I enjoyed so much, the Spin It sections in the ingredients, remained. They no longer appear beside the initial ingredient list but now at the bottom of the recipe. That’s okay. It’s still there, and it was a relief to find it again in her second outing. It’s perhaps the most identifiable Carla Lalli Music Thing in a cookbook, and it makes her style so accessible to everyone. No extra grocery store trips for one ingredient you forgot. Chances are, you’ve got something in your pantry to spin with when you’re cooking.

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Starches from Scratch

10/19/2021

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If you thought the from scratch cooking of An Unapologetic cookbook ended with the staples, you don’t know Joshua Weissman. Nearly every episode of his youtube show includes some kind of bread or pasta making from scratch to level up whatever kind of meal he’s showing you how to replicate. As an amatuer bread baker, this is more interesting to me than the Staples from Scratch portion that opened up the book. 

Right toward the front of this section is his own sourdough starter method which includes rye flour. Rye flour can be hard to find in a traditional grocery store as well. I had intended to replicate his method for his own sourdough, but I’m ressurecting my sourdough baking habit through the Tartine Bread method using the organic, artisan bread flour I get from Produce with Purpose every few weeks. I have no doubt that the rye flour makes a difference on sourdough production, but it’s another barrier to cooking in most small US cities that we don’t need if we’re going to test this book in earnest.

We have made some of the other breads in this chapter already after copying the recipe from his videos: his famous milk bread variations into multiple shapes and sizes. Dinner rolls, hamburger buns, or a full loaf are all possible with the dough that he produces. Having made more versions of milkbread in the past-- one of which included that illusive rye flour-- I enjoy the consistency of his with pure bread flour instead. You can test this method without purchasing the cookbook, as he has the recipe for the dinner rolls on his website. I started making these rolls every few months since giving them a shot for my husband and I’s at home Thanksgiving last year, and it’s also my go to burger bun dough. Aren’t they pretty?
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I was intrigued by his bagel loaf the minute I turned the page onto it. We’re bagel people in this house, and my husband is an everything bagel man to a fault. He wants nothing but that, and if I get plain ones, he pours that everything bagel seasoning all over the cream cheese to get even a shadow of the taste into his bagel. I thought, could this bagel loaf be the answer? This was a promising weekend treat to whip up on a Friday and slice Saturday morning.

The bagel bread is a special thing I won’t do all the time. His sandwich loaf, however, is such a simple bread recipe that I would recommend it to anyone who’s just putting their toes into the bread baking water for the first time. It comes together quickly. There are two separate proofing periods, but you get an excellent result out of it. I mean, just look at this loaf. This sucker will be the best for its intended purpose: sandwiches. I did a poor job rolling it up so that little hole going through the dough is more user error than recipe error.

There are many options in this portion of the cookbook-- too many for me to try them all. I do, however, trust Weissman’s baking recipes implicitly after so many successful creations from his milkbread multipurpose dough. You can whip that fucker into all kinds of shapes to fulfill the roll that you need it to fill, as we mentioned earlier. Know your limitations in skill, and I believe you can bake out of this section with ease. 

His pasta dough recipe that gets a lot of work in his videos is also in this part of the book, and it’s suitable for any cut pasta. It’s too wet for extruding in my opinion, but you can easily repurpose this dough into any shape you cut or fill. It’s fundamental to some of the later recipes just like it is for his videos. Familiarize yourself-- but be warned. You’ll need the fancy pasta roller gear. If this is beyond your price point as a starting home cook, no one will judge you for buying premade pasta for his later recipes. Not even Papa himself will judge you for that one.

As with the staples from scratch portion of the book, utilizing these recipes for later on in the book will simply be up to the amount of time you’re willing to spend to get to a final result. Papa will tell you that it’s more satisfying if you start from scratch. I don’t agree that that holds up all the time. Sometimes you just want a tasty dinner, and shortcuts are okay when you can make them. There are fewer pleasures as great as fresh bread, however, so weigh that expense of time and energy against convenience a little heavier.

Next week, we’ll dive into the other recipes in the book and utilize what we can from these earlier sections. I will be sure to note where these staples come in and may need replacement of store bought ingredients if you’re in a hurry. Thanks for sticking with us this October. We’ll announce our November book soon too!
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Staples from Scratch

10/11/2021

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Beyond Weissman’s introduction to his book lies the first segment, Staples from Scratch-- and let me tell you, there’s a lot here to try to make from scratch rather than buy in your local grocery store. Some of these are things you see in most higher end cookbooks, such as homemade mayo methods and making cheeses by hand. Some of these processes include intense labor and time management, but I’m down for that now that I’m working from home with most of my time. 

Right out of the gate, I know that making the cheeses may be out of the reach of some of us. The milk requirements are a little steep and hard to find at a normal grocery store. Raw milks aren’t sold in most grocery stores, and ultra-pasteurized is out of the question for these processes. You may get lucky and find a normal pasteurized milk, which is good enough. You probably won’t find goat milk for chevre, though. I’d have to find an actual goat farmer for that even in the great state of Wisconsin.

I started a condiments journey as one of my first cooks for this book, and yet again hit an ingredient issue. Sherry vinegar is for some reason not stocked at the nearest grocery store I live by, and road construction by the next closest makes me not want to go out there at normal human hours. I decided to try to do his ketchup recipe with apple cider vinegar, another lightly flavored vinegar that is more easily accessible so that I didn’t skip over one of the things that I was most interested in trying in this cookbook.
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An Unapologetic Cookbook: October

10/4/2021

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Joshua Weissman of youtube fame released his first cookbook in September, An Unapologetic Cookbook, and this cookbook is of course our October Cookbook of the month for 2021. I expect this book to be more technically challenging than many that we’ve reviewed as part of this process after watching Weissman on youtube since the pandemic began. I’ve adopted his dinner roll recipe permanently after trying it for our at home Thanksgiving last year. I’ve watched him push himself as a chef through cooking challenges in his old fine dining stomping ground.

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And now I ask the question, how much of his cookbook is achievable for the typical home chef? He often employs kitchen equipment that is out of reach for most home cooks in his videos, so I expect to find this issue present in the cookbook as well. That doesn’t stop me from wanting to give it a shot, however. His voice as a chef on youtube is present in the early writing of the cookbook so far, and that’s one of the things that makes his work attractive in the first place

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Cook This Book: Final Review

9/30/2021

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Woops. Here we are again at the end of a month with another cookbook and I didn’t write a single article about a single dinner I made out of the book. The god’s honest truth? The simplicity of the dishes I tested made it difficult to write about. I have a few paragraphs about each, so what better way to discuss the book at the end of the month than to string them all together? Cook this Book from Molly Baz, I have found, is an exercise in simplicity, accessibility, and fun.
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Our first cook became dinner for dungeons and dragons night: a quickly prepared pasta dish from this month’s cookbook of the month: Orecchiette with Bacon, snap peas, and ricotta. The ingredients are exactly that with little prior preparation. This proved to be a perfect dish to start with in Cook This Book to get to know the author better. Simple in both its ingredients and its preparation, I realized quickly this would be a theme for my time with Molly’s recipes.


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Brown bacon that you’ve cut into small bites. Boom. Snap peas in the bacon fat. Boom. Orecchiette done boiling? Drop it in the pan with the bacon and the snap peas and a few spoonfuls of ricotta. Boom, dinner done. Hit it with some pepper. Eat good tonight.

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Cook This Book: CBOM Intro

9/2/2021

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Cook this Book by Molly Baz came out several months ago, and it’s sat on my shelf waiting for me to get the drive back to try another Cookbook of the Month. I even posted a picture of it on my facebook once claiming it’d be coming the next month. It didn’t, nor did it come the month after that. Only now, September 2021, and I sitting down to write an introductory article to a cookbook that I already have some mixed feelings about.

Molly Baz, famous for her time at Bon Appetit, has been one of the personalities on their youtube channel at the time that I didn’t know how I felt about them. I thought she could get annoying. I thought she was a little bougie for my midwestern sensibilities. Then the scandal with Adam Rapoport happened. She so rarely did any videos without that asshole there, and I realized that maybe he was the problem.


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Homestyle Cookery: March  CBoM

3/6/2021

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September of 2020 was the release of Matty Matheson’s Homestyle Cookery, which he debuted alongside several cooking videos with recipes from his book. I watched every single one. I love that guy. I guess it has as much to do with his cooking as it does that he’s a loud and occasionally obnoxious dude. My husband was a loud and occasionally obnoxious man when I met him. He still can be, sometimes, but the professionalism of news broadcast has toned him down a bit. Matty Matheson is never toned down.

I ordered Homestyle Cookery shortly after it’s release, but I haven’t really sat down with it and cooked yet to decide how I feel about its contents. Prior to writing this article, the only recipe I tried was his Chicken Fried Steak, which we’ll discuss in another article later on. The recipes Matty selected for his youtube channel all looked amazing, but some of them were a little labor intense or the ingredients difficult to get in Northeast Wisconsin. I don’t know any hunters yet that can get me rabbit. I don’t see rabbit in the store. I wish I did, but I don’t. I wondered if this was a common problem throughout the whole book, and that was enough for me to order it.

So March will be our month to decipher the secrets of Matty Matheson’s Homestyle Cookery. As usual, I’ll try to do one recipe a week to discuss on our website. If you’re a fan of Matty and want me to try one of the recipes from his videos, let me know. You can order Homestyle Cookery from Amazon or find it at your local bookstore where cookbooks are sold. It’s done pretty well in sales and was out of stock for a bit there through Amazon. Let’s support a loud weirdo.

If his youtube persona is sometimes hard for you to get behind, know that his actual cooking is pretty awesome. There are a variety of recipes available in this cookbook that aren’t going to have the ingredient trouble like I described with his rabbit dish above. The book is broken down into sections such as bread, stock, vegetables, etc. You’ll be able to find something to try, and we found many somethings to try. Below is a list of recipes you might see us cover this month.

Recipes we’re looking at:
  • Bannock ‘Ghost Bread’ Page 26
  • Ricotta Egg Yolk Raviolo Page 161
  • Sesame Seed Rolls page 21
  • Beautiful shrimp dumplings page 154
  • Kombu steamed fingerling potatoes page 91

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