cookbooks


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Dorie Greenspan’s Olive Oil Ice Cream

Every two months I host a cookbook club meeting. A cookbook is chosen (usually at the prior meeting) and friends and family all choose a dish to make from it. Then we all get together to talk about the dish we chose, eat the hell out of all the food, and drink an ungodly amount of beer. While flipping through our next cookbook, Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table, trying to pick my dish from the hundreds of incredible recipes, this recipe for olive oil ice cream caught my eye. A basic custard base, but some of the heavy cream is swapped out for olive oil. One of Dorie’s suggestions is topping it off with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkle of Maldon salt flakes. The end result is a sweet and incredibly nuanced ice cream. My five year-old son declared it the best ice cream yet (he has rich five year-old tastes).

Olive Oil Ice Cream

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in Desserts / Endless Ice Cream / Recipe 5 comments
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Cornerstone Cooking: Crunchy Black Bean Tacos

We love us a good blog-to-book success story (hellooooooo, agents — what ver happened to Friday Fuck-Ups, the novel?) So I was excited to get my copy of Cornerstone Cooking, the new cookbook from Nick Evans, sometimes ES contributor and the man behind Macheesmo.

Of course, leave it to a blogger to come up with the first cookbook I’ve seen in eons that is actually useful. The concept behind Cornerstone is one we can get behind: “learn to love your leftovers.” In each of his eight chapters, Nick offers up one “Cornerstone recipe” — the simple things that you should just know how to make perfectly (roast chicken, spicy black beans, grilled flank steak, baked potatoes, marinara sauce, lentils, homemade bread and vanilla ice cream). Then for each one, he gives you about a dozen more directions for how to use that cornerstone dish up over the course of a week. For example, how to turn those spicy black beans into black bean burgers, black bean soup, huevos rancheros, black bean salad, and our favorite — fried tacos!

Check out Cornerstone Cooking on Amazon, or keep reading for the recipe.

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in Celebs / Recipe / Veggie 81 comments
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Lodge Cast Iron Goes to the Printing Press

I can attest to the durability and sturdiness of cast iron. It was with a huge cast iron pan that I injured my shoulder last year, while tossing fingerling potatoes, sizzling hot from the 500-degree oven, during a particularly busy Lenten fish fry dinner service.  Still, from enameled cast iron to that nice, seasoned, Lodge pan, anything cast iron gets my vote.

And Lodge is the cast iron standard. If you don’t have a Lodge cast iron in your pan collection, go buy a Lodge.

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in Photos / Pig 0 comments
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Plate It or Hate It

Recent food world discoveries the ES crew is loving and hating

Plate It: Flashlight Grill Tongs

Problem: 60-degree February days means grilling season has started six months early, but it still gets dark outside at 5pm. Solution: Put a light on it! Available from homewetbar.com.

Hate It: Cup-a-Cake

Problem: You need to carry a single cupcake around with you all day, but just hate how the frosting gets all over everything in your purse. Wait, no…Really? Did this need to be invented?

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in Bacon / Breakfast / Pig / Restaurants / Trends 3 comments
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Feeding the Dragon: Yunnan Potato Balls with Spicy Dipping Sauce

Editor’s Note: A Chinese teacher/translator and writer living in Washington, D.C., Jody Melto of Curlicue Chronicles joins us for a tasty trek through China…

At first glance, I didn’t want to like Feeding the Dragon, the recently published travelogue/cookbook on China. First of all, there are the names of the co-authors, sister and brother duo Mary Kate and Nate Tate. But that’s not their fault.

However, young Mary Kate Tate asking in the introduction, “How can we record each person’s story, taste every dish? Have we bitten off more than we can chew?” is quite their fault. It reeks of a Julie & Julia attempt. I bet The Two Tates have talked about just playing themselves when the cookbook is optioned. Now I’m just being snarky. I did that with Julie & Julia, come to think about it.

At least my snark has backstory. I spent the first part of my 20s living in a small Chinese town as a student on scholarship, working as a teacher, model and even as an actress in some really bad television shows and one martial arts film to earn enough money to travel over 250 hard-seat hours by train throughout China. No credit card. No cell phone. No parents footing the bill. Pretty hardcore travel. Who can blame me for being snarky when it comes to a couple young hipsters who claim to have roughed it through China on a quest to “taste every dish?”

Just when I’m feeling quite smug, Mary Kate & Nate Tate (I just love saying that) do something that impresses the hell out of me — they admit to eating dog. They weren’t ballsy enough to include a recipe calling for dog meat. But I give credit when it’s due. And that took balls. I’ve killed the mood at more than one dinner party after raving about doggie dumplings. (Dog people can be so freakin’ sensitive.)

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in Food Travel / Recipe 2 comments
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Review and Recipe: The Dead Celebrity Cookbook

When I first discovered The Dead Celebrity Cookbook it was a near hit at the back of Entertainment Weekly’s The Bullseye feature. Frank Decaro, best know for being the movie critic on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, drew inspiration for the book from a college party in the 80’s. All of Decaro’s friends dressed as a dead celebrity, but the party had a fatal flaw — it lacked food. So, over the years Decaro collected a mass of cookbooks, magazines and other sources of recipes from celebrities who are now dead. If you can get past the morbidity of the book it really is a great collection of recipes, with no particular rhyme or reason other than they’re each supposedly a favorite of a deceased famous person. Who’d have thought Johnny Casrson cooked? Whitefish, no less.

If you can convince yourself that these people actually cooked, let alone had a favorite recipe worth keeping note of, then it’s worth having as an addition to your collection of cookbooks. Plus, most  the recipes are pretty basic. Dean Martin’s burgers and bourbon consists of three ingredients — beef, salt and bourbon — at least he seasoned (what, you’re expecting molecular gastronomy?) My favorite chapter is chapter 25, Thank You for Feeding a Friend, which includes Bea Arthur’s veggie breakfast and Rue McClanahan’s non-dairy cheesecake, among other Golden Girls goodies. And to get your started, here’s one fabulous recipe from the DCD.

How does one catch a salmon, why with a wire clothes hanger of course…

 

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in Celebs / Fish / Recipe 1 comments
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