Last year, I declared with ferocity that Tartine Bread, often described as the bread bible of cookbooks, was just too much fucking effort for a home cook and you probably shouldn’t buy it if you have minimal interest in bread baking. There are much easier, realistic methods out there for people like you and I. That much remains true. Tartine Bread is a lot of effort. There ARE easier, more realistic methods out there for people with limited time in the day. What has changed is that I haven’t been working for two months, and I actually managed to get my sourdough starter to survive longer than a week. I finally had the tools available to me to tackle the contents of the cookbook appropriately: time and starter. Quaran-Tina thrived over the two months I spent nurturing her before I felt comfortable coming back to Tartine Bread in any way. Even so, I remained afraid.
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Or, Apologies to Samin Nosrat for Never Finishing Your Book December, 2018. I tried to do Samin Nosrat’s iconic cookbook, Salt Fat Acid Heat, as a cookbook of the month. I bought it on my Kindlle, and lord, did I try. I really did. I read through at least the Salt section of the monstrous 200+ pages of cooking instruction and introduction before you even get to the big recipes. I wrote it’s introduction for the month, which you can find at this link if you’re feeling froggy. I never, ever, wrote a final report. I didn’t so much as make excuses. I pretended it didn’t happen.. But it did, and I remember it. May feels like it went by at lightning speeds. The world has finally started to move again, even if it hasn’t been in the best of ways. At least it’s getting warm outside, the gardens are growing, and nature appears relatively unharmed by what’s going on out there. With a new month on the horizon, it’s time to wrap it up with our May Cookbook of the Month, Carpathia. I have included links to the other articles about this cookbook below so that you can catch up before the rest of the review. Take a look: I came to this book after seeing it discussed on twitter, and after an admittedly limited amount of recipe trials, I am glad that I did. This is not a cuisine we get much of in the United States, but its ingredients are familiar to most of us. We can make it in our own homes without much extra effort, and it’s a shame that we haven’t been doing it for awhile. There is so much to learn from the cuisine of other cultures, and Romanian cuisine deserves a light on it too. Originally Posted February 9, 2020 in the Archive A little late, I know, but I promise I have not forgotten about you, the January Cookbook of the Month, or the February Cookbook of the Month. The final review of Binging with Babish will be coming shortly, but even with the leap year, February is a short month. I don’t want to cheat you on the time to cook out of our February Cookbook of the Month with me: Overwatch, The Official Cookbook by (You guessed it) Chelsea Monroe-Cassel. If you’ve been around awhile, you know that I usually hit up a video game cookbook at least once a year. Two of the three have now been gifts from some of my best friends and supporters, the Cox Family. Overwatch is no different. This came to me as a Christmas present, and it patiently awaited the moment that I had a free month to put it on the table and get to work. February sounded like the best time to crack it open since Overwatch league started this weekend. (I cannot tell you how excited I am for Overwatch League. I never thought I’d be into E-sports but here we are.) I am an avid player of the game. It’s been a huge part of my gaming experience with friends from across the world, and for two years now, I’ve obsessed over the competitive gaming scene associated with it. When I heard last year that they were working on a cookbook, I have to admit that I was excited. The characters from the game hail from across the globe, so the possibilities were endless. The format of the book confirms what I thought would be coming: recipes for every character out at the time. I don’t think I have it in me to do a recipe from every single character over the month of February, but I know that I will visit my personal favorites for a taste of their home countries and what our author believes these beautiful creations would be eating. I have something to confess. In the modern meta, I am a Moira main. Skillless and terrible, I launch my little orbs (even the gold ones) across the screen with little aim. Its because I CANT aim. I’ve been a gamer for my entire life, and yet any computer game that requires me to aim usually ends poorly. Moira’s recipes are of keen interest to me because of this fact as well as my Irish heritage. Can you believe I have never tried to make my own serious Beef stew in my entire life? I will this month. That said, the book is first broken down by continent and then by character. Anyone from Europe will be in the same section, etc. I appreciate this breakdown since it does appeal to fans that have even a working knowledge of the game’s lore and characters. Just from my first peak at the book, I have a few complaints. I will admit some disappointment with Tracer’s recipes when I opened the book. I haven’t cooked anything from this yet, but know that Tracer is a British character. Her major recipes are dead ass Sticky Toffee Pudding and Beer-battered Fish and Chips. Every single human being who has ever watched a cooking show knows a recipe for either of these things. She immediately became the LEAST interesting section in the cookbook. She isn’t the only laughable member of the crew upon first glance. Soldier 76, the Captain America of Overwatch, is literally tasked with being the man to hold the pancakes, the sugar cream pie, and the tater tot hot dish (AKA CASSEROLE). I say again: Boring. At least the more diverse characters like Lucio and Sombra have recipes that make me actually want to cook them. I’ve never in my life made Pao de queijo or Conchas. The rest of the cast more than makes up for some of the mediocre recipe choices by bringing something unique to the table. It bares repeating that this is a cookbook surrounded by the individual characters, including the robots. There are some pretty great 'joke' recipes for Bastion, seeing as he doesn't eat. The characters from different parts of the world that often receive less culinary attention in my kitchen will come to the forefront though. These are the characters I will be focusing on as I try at least one recipe a week for the rest of February. As I said at the beginning, your review of Binging with Babish will follow shortly. It’s been a very strange year already, but I appreciate you sticking around. Let’s make the rest of it good. Originally Posted February 15, 2020 in the archive Here’s the thing. I love Binging with Babish. His presentation during his videos is frankly incredible and so different compared to most of what’s out there in food media right now. Recreating both nostalgic and new dishes from media touches a wide audience, and those videos are great ways to make myself feel better. The cookbook is a similar experience. While January was a hard health month for me, just reading the book had many of the same markers as the youtube channel. Much of what is in that cookbook is going to be a weekend project for a home cook. Very few recipes are what I would call weeknight dinners. Having watched Binging with Babish for a long time, I had a feeling that would be the case. I mean, never in a million years am I going to wake up one morning and tell myself I want to make timpano, which appears to be a fucking nightmare of hardboiled eggs, fresh pasta, hella cheese, salami, and more fresh pasta that has to cook in a dutch oven for two hours and then rest for an hour-- much less go through the effort of making the pasta and sauce on the same day. Timpano is impressive on camera. It looks crazy, and it IS crazy. What isn’t crazy is his Philly Cheesesteak recipe a few pages away from that hellish concoction, and that IS achievable in a single evening. The easier and more accessible recipes that are peppered into the cookbook are well worth the time it takes to find them, but let’s be honest with ourselves. This is not a cookbook you are going to pick up because you are looking for new recipes. No normal person is going to sit down and loyally recreate his rendition of Eggs Woodhouse from the TV show Archer, which consists of practically an entire paycheck’s worth of truffles, caviar, Iberico ham, and KASHMIRI saffron. No one is going to sit down and make Buddy the Elf’s horror show of candy pasta, but he did it for you. That’s part of the beauty of it. Babish publishes his recipes on his website with every video. You can access a lot of this for free by watching what he does weekly or just going to said website. You buy this book for the same reason I bought it-- you want to support the creator and read the story behind what he does. Every recipe comes with a short blurb from him about his process or the significance of the recipe itself. There is both good reading and good food here. You just have to dig a bit to find the good, accessible food. The most controversial video he ever did (and perhaps the quintessential Babish viewing experience) centered around Pasta Aglio e Olio, was one of the few recipes that I actually did select from the book and recreate. It’s easy to do in a short evening after work, and regardless of what Italian chefs on the internet have to say about it, it was delicious. The garlicky sauce takes minimal effort if you don’t mind slicing six cloves of garlic as thinly as possible-- and that’s it. Counting the time it takes to get your pot of water boiling for your pasta, you might be in the kitchen for a max of thirty minutes. This is the cookbook for a true fan. Whether they be lovers of movies or lovers of Babish himself, it’s a good gift and a great read. It is not, however, a cookbook I would recommend for someone who wants to fill their shelves with cookbooks of pure utility. This is a book meant to be savored as a reader, and occasionally, as a cook. Maybe you are one of those people who loves Big Night so much that you really do want to spend your entire weekend making that insane timpano monstrosity. Maybe you love the Office so much that you’d make your own chili paste in order to lovingly recreate Kevin’s famous chili-- sans the dank office carpet fiber. Maybe you’re a Game of Thrones fan so insanely dedicated that you’ll find a way to source squab, rabbit, and wild boar in order to try your hand at Sansa’s favorite pigeon pie (or the pie that killed Walder Frey). But if you aren’t any of these things, there are diamonds in the rough to satisfy both hunger and curiosity. Originally Posted February 28,2020 in the Archive So begins a journey that I started with an impulse Amazon purchase after listening to a Bon Appetit Foodcast interview with cookbook author Sonoko Sakai. Rappaport waxed poetic about Japanese Home Cooking, and the author herself sounded like a knowledgeable and thoughtful author. I remembered the struggle to work out of the Momofuku cookbook more than a year ago, and I wanted to give Japanese food another try through another vehicle. I am hoping this will be the one that makes it easier for the average home cook. Bon Appetit has yet to lead me down the wrong path when a cookbook recommendation has come up in their podcast, so I am trying to keep the faith while looking down the barrel of a cuisine that I am personally intimidated by. Dining In by Alison Roman, Indian-ish from Priya Krishna, and Where Cooking Begins from Carla Lalli Music have all been favorites of mine, and every single one of them came down from the internet’s premiere food media source. So I pulled the trigger on Japanese Home Cooking, and I swallowed down the fear. Just holding the book in my hands made me think back to the same feeling I had when I first cracked the spine of Momofuku. It’s gorgeous. The artwork and photographs are all super powerful in invoking the central idea of the book- japanese home cooking. Gorgeous scenery any western person associates with the island nation is peppered in among the introductory chapters of the book, and I love them. Still, the fear remained. Given the nature of the material, the biggest hurdle that was present with Momofuku still exists today. The ingredients are not widely available at the average supermarket, so if you decide to go down this path with me, you will need to use Amazon to fill in the gaps (or better yet, find a local Asian grocer and see if they lean Japanese or not). I live in a much larger city with a large immigrant population, though most of the Asian markets my husband has found in my stead lean Thai or Hmong more than Japanese. While writing this article, I put in an order for wakame seaweed, mirin, yuzu juice, dried shiitake mushrooms, and dried sardines. There will probably be more orders to come. As of right now, this is probably the largest amount of money I have spent on base ingredients for a cookbook. We’re at a fifty dollar ingredient barrier, which is not present when considering cookbooks like the others we have looked at so far this year. This is before I have even chosen a recipe to begin. The ingredient barrier leaves me concerned that this may be yet another cookbook that is for the enthusiast only, but we’ll see once we get cooking. Sonoko Sakai front loads the cookbook with a list of many of these ingredients she considers essential in her pantry, so if you do decide to try your hand at this well received book, you won’t have to flip through every recipe to figure out what you need in order to have the basics available. Our initial order will be in before March actually begins, so we’ll be ready to cook on the first weekend and keep you updated about every recipe as they land on the table. I’m excited to share this journey with you as we tackle our first SCARY cookbook of the year. Originally Posted March 1, 2020 In the Archive
February is over, which means its time to retire our Cookbook of the Month: Overwatch: The Official Cookbook. I’ve come to a conclusion after spending some time with this recent tome from nerd cookbook legend Chelsea Monroe-Cassel. Video game cookbooks are among some of the most accessible cookbooks to ever land on my counter. When we started the month, I talked a great deal about how much I love the game that inspired this book, and I believe that love that gets anyone into one of these cookbooks helps get them into the kitchen. Because of the multicultural characters within Overwatch itself, there is a large variety of food here for a novice to explore under the careful tutelage of the author. The recipes are easy to read, and most of the ingredients can be found in just about any grocery store. There are easy recipes and hard recipes, drink recipes and dessert recipes. No fan will be disappointed since all of the playable characters (aside from Sigma and Baptiste, who came out during the year of publication) have a section dedicated to their favorite meals and snacks. You’ll find something no matter which character you main. I’ve got to admit that I did not do as much cooking from this book as I would have liked. For about three weeks of the Overwatch League, I made it a mission to try to do one recipe from a character each weekend. The Guinness Stew for Moira turned out great. I made modifications to the recipe because our author calls for browning the meat and the veggies in a separate pan before adding it to your stew pot. That didn’t jive with me. I wanted the fond in the bottom of the pot to continue building flavor, and I believe that I created something superior as a result. Leaving the flavor behind in a separate skillet wasn’t something I could let myself do. The next week, I tried to make Reinhart’s Kasespatzle, and I did not thin out the dough enough to be able to force it through my colander. It was a complete failure, and I couldn’t get myself to rebound. (depression is a bitch sometimes) This doesn’t mean that I won’t try it again. I still believe there is a lot of potential in Kasespatzle to bring something different to the table for a weekend dinner. It may very well be a dish we revisit just to try again and see if its as good as it looks. Literally the day after the Kasespatzle failure, I dedicated my afternoon to Kroppkakor, Swedish potato dumplings stuffed with bacon and onion. These were dedicated to Torbjorn, and God bless Torbjorn. I made these as a snack for the Saint Louis Battlehawks game, and I ate two before kick off even started. This was a problem since there were only eighteen total dumplings to make it through four quarters of the XFL. I can only imagine how good they would have been if I added the allspice that’s called for in the recipe to the filling. I’ve got to admit that I was ridiculously entranced by the recipes for the Germanic characters like Reinhardt, Torbjorn, and Mercy. It’s the time of year in Wisconsin where I want something heavy and cheesy and potatoes, so while I approached this book initially interested in what the South American characters brought to the table, I bought for completely different things when it came time to make the grocery list. As far as cookbooks from this particular author go, I enjoyed this one much more than the Skyrim cookbook from last year. The options allowed for a wider, more interesting selection. I could have gone a million different ways in how I approached this book, but for whatever reason, I focused on European characters. Maybe we’ll return to some of the recipes from the more diverse cast later in the year as Overwatch League continues. If you missed it, our March cookbook of the month was announced Friday. You can check the article out here. We are also going to start ratings next month, so these reviews will become more critical for the rest of 2020. Please keep an eye on our other social media for more updates Facebook: @EatingNormal Instagram: @Eating.Normal Twitter: @EatingNormal1 Originally Posted on March 25,2020 in the Archive This article was written before the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread aggressively within the United States. Please keep that in mind while reading. ----------------- Saturday morning came. It was the one day this week where I wouldn’t hate myself for heating up my kitchen with my oven for an hour making bread. Wisconsin is about to get its first taste of spring with some near 50 degree weather, and my second story apartment heats up like no one’s business the minute the weather gets over 35. I couldn’t start a Japanese cookbook in good conscience with anything but the milk bread recipe, especially when it is actually present in the book. Milk Bread has hit its stride in the United States in the last few years, especially on the West Coast where the Japanese immigrant population is much more dense. I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never had it made by a professional. My stint on the East Coast was short, and we never made it to any kind of joint in the big cities where they might serve it. This will be my first taste of milk bread, and my first attempt at making a bread so reliant on dairy. The strangest thing about it is starting out with a milk/water/bread flour roux that has to be heated to a boil and whisked until it becomes thick. This isn’t something I have done with any western bread recipe that I’ve tried over the last four years. Dairy comes into play for me in western breads mostly for flatbreads and that’s about it. I don’t pull out my whole milk for anything that’s going into a loaf pan-- until today. This roux has to cool to room temperature before you can move on to the rest of the recipe, so there is a shocking amount of downtime early on before you even have to start proofing your dough. This was cleaning time for me. I’m the WORST at keeping up with my dishes, so while I waited for the roux to cool, I tackled the growing stack of pans I created making Katsu from Bon Appetit (more on that later). A few clean pans later, and I began combining the rest of the ingredients in the bowl for my stand mixer. I couldn’t find buckwheat flour, but the recipe in this cookbook is flexible enough to allow any ‘heritage’ grain such as rye, so my rye flour was finally used. The dough pulls together super easy, and you just let it go in the standmixer for about ten minutes until its a nice, smooth consistency. The dough goes through two different proofing sessions, first in a bowl and then in the loaf pan. Prior to putting it in the loaf pan, you split your dough, ROLL IT, and then fold the two sections separately into logs. Those logs are laid in opposite sides of your loaf pan, and then proofed again. I forgot to brush the top with milk before baking it, so I brushed it halfway through. This might be enough of a problem that I’ll make myself do the recipe again to see if it mattered. Spoiler alert: It definitely mattered. I made this bread again several times over the course of March and found that the majority of my problem was because i did not allow my stand mixer to knead the dough for a long enough amount of time to allow for elasticity within the dough so that the yeast could do its work. Every attempt afterwards came out much better. This recipe has become one of my favorite project bakes for the weekend since I don't have to have my oven up at ungodly temperatures to come out with a good loaf of bread. I would honestly recommend this book if only for the Milk Bread Recipe. I love it so much. We use it for sandwiches and egg in a basket, and I imagine it would turn into some great breadcrumbs when it goes stale. I can only hope to have milk bread made by a professional one day. Don't forget to show us some support on our facebook page. The button is on the right. We're looking to grow, and it's the best way to get updates. We are ONE person away from 100. Maybe we'll do something crazy if you hit like? Originally Posted in the Archive March 31, 2020 This article was written before the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread aggressively within the United States. Please keep that in mind while reading. Japanese Home Cooking relies upon a number of essential preparations that often need to be done ahead of your actual cook time, not the least of these is the quintessential Japanese stock, dashi. Sonoko Sakai discusses having these ready before you begin cooking, and I could not agree more with this statement after having had them available for my use during the regular weekday. As of writing this particular article, I’ve done nothing from this book but make milk bread and get these pantry ingredients ready. What I have already taken from the book, however, has made an abundant difference in my cooking.
The beauty of these pantry ingredients is that they are usually quick to assemble for future use. The first of these that I took on was the sauce known as shoyu tare, a reduction of soy sauce, cane sugar, and mirin. It takes very little babysitting, and it keeps for longer than the dashi. After reducing the ingredients together, I stored it in a mason jar for whenever I would manage to get to actual recipes from the cookbook. I had the flu in the second week of March which has hamstringed my cooking progress in this book significantly, but the shoyu is able to outlast any illness that sidelines the cook. I had it available for a weekend meal that I quickly prepared for my husband, adding it to a fried rice that apparently blew his mind. The seasoning it brings, while slightly sweet from the cane sugar, is much different than if you added a normal soy sauce. That alone is a point in favor of keeping the shoyu tare around even after I am finished with the book. Dashi, on the other hand, has sat in my fridge up until now with very little cooking having been done with it. It was, however, an interesting experience to bring it together. I don’t have any experience cooking with kombu kelp or kastuobushi, AKA bonito flakes. I had no concept of what dashi should taste like or the kind of flavor profiles that its base ingredients could create. I didn’t know that bonito flakes danced in hot water when you added them. All of this, I learned on dashi night. Sunday evening, I was finally fever free and felt like I would be safe cooking anything that would also be consumed by my husband that date or later. The bonito is time sensitive, and while I know the new bags I got wouldn’t go bad within the month, I didn’t want to make the mistake of letting them age in my cupboard like I had the bag that I purchased during the Momofuku debacle. I had high hopes for dashi. Sonoko Sakai includes a recipe for what she calls secondary dashi, a lighter and weaker dashi that’s made from the spent ingredients that you use to make your first stock. I created this one immediately after so I didn’t waste anything. This is something about cooking that I love. If an ingredient can be used more than once in order to reduce waste, I will advocate for that until the end of time. Knowing I could get three mason jars worth of stock out of the ingredients made me very happy. Dashi is a base ingredient in soups and noodle bowls of all kinds, some of which I intend to get to before the end of the month. It may very well require that I make a second batch if I continue to let my current batch sit in the fridge unattended. Given the current climate (the literal climate, as well as the political and health climates), food waste of any kind feels something like a special crime. Being in northern Wisconsin, I don’t anticipate that my husband and I will face any real quarantine, but my anxiety tells me not to waste anything-- just in case. This just in case mentality (AKA anxiety) has me turning to many recipes like these from within Japanese Home Cooking to make sure I have everything I could ever want or need-- whether it's to cook on a normal weeknight or to make a nice soup for my husband or myself if we do get sick. It’s a strange time to be living in, much less cooking in. Having this to fall back on when there is so much uncertainty is a small gift from the author to me. This is one of the things I love most about cookbooks. These very basic things that the author takes the time to teach a western audience about are perhaps some of the most valuable aspects of the book. I’ve heard of dashi all my life, but I never really understood how to make it. Some Japanese cooking programs online treat it like an instant stock, which I’m sure exists, but this is the way we can make it here. It’s a unique connection to a culture that has infiltrated our American cuisine in the form of sushi and now noodle shops. Originally Posted April 5,2020 in the Archive It wasn’t all that long ago that I picked up Dining in by Alison Roman and regarded it as one of my favorite cookbooks of all time. During the great cookbook release of October 2019, she dropped another cookbook on me in my most trying time: Nothing Fancy. I couldn’t get it. I waited patiently until I started a new job, and here we are, visiting Alison Roman for another cookbook of the month: Nothing Fancy. April won’t be anything fancy, that’s for sure. ‘Unfussy food for having people over’, says the first page. I don’t have people over very often. I most certainly won’t be having people over when my entire state is under a Stay-at-Home order during COVID-19, but that doesn’t mean this cookbook isn’t for me. I learned that pretty quickly when I picked up Dining in with a degree of skepticism before it completely blew my mind. I thought that a big time New York Times cooking writer would be a pretentious asshole, but her writing is among my favorite about food. So I know right off the bat that my expectations are going to be high for Nothing Fancy. I crack it open and smell that new book smell. I look at the pages, and I know that if you told me it was Dining In, I’d believe you. She’s landed on a brand, and it works. It’s a magical combination of professional and friendly. Pure white page, minimalist font. Beautiful photography. I haven’t been paying much attention to the press for this one, so I don’t know if there are any recipes that I should focus on. I’m just going to do what I’ve done for every other cookbook that I’ve cooked out of for you. I’m going to wing it. I feel much more comfortable about that coming into a cookbook from an author that I already know and trust. Whatever i pick, I can rest assured that it will likely go over well in my house. The only problem is of course our current environment surrounding grocery shopping and food. My only complaint of Dining In was the call for things like preserved lemons, labneh, and other somewhat specialist ingredients that are difficult to get in a traditional American Grocery store. Blessedly, Alison has started to offer alternatives that people can use that would normally be in the grocery store. It’s pretty food meant to serve a crowd, so I expect that i’ll come out of each recipe with a good amount of leftovers to stretch over a few days with just my husband and I in the house. This would be true with or without COVID-19 stopping any kind of social visits. We very rarely have company, but if we did, I’d trust Alison Roman with feeding them. I haven’t even cooked out of this book yet. I will try to post at least one article a week about my cooking experience with Nothing Fancy similar to what was done toward the end of March for Japanese Home Cooking. I had so many articles for that, and yet my pandemic anxiety kept me from just logging on and putting the articles online. |