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.
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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! 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.
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
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.
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.
 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:
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