50books_poc | Entries tagged with cookbook

I just read Notes From A Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi with Joshua David Stein, thanks to this recommendation.

I enjoy chef memoirs -- The Apprentice by Jacques Pepin is a favorite and I've read it multiple times -- and this one definitely hit the spot. I appreciated getting the behind-the-scenes glimpses at different restaurants, including ones where I've eaten, and I appreciated the specifics of how different self-presentations, and sometimes lying, were instrumental to Onwuachi's steps on his career ladder.

Onwuachi is significantly younger than I am, and I found it edifying to get glimpses of how cell phones, social media, and related technologies have played different kinds of roles in his education than in mine.

Also, I rarely cook, and this book spurred me to get back in front of the stove!

atdelphi.livejournal.com

5. A Feast for All Seasons: Traditional Native People's Cuisine by Andrew George, Jr. and Robert Gairns (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010)

This is a reissue of the 1997 Feast!, brought back to the public eye after Andrew George, Jr.—a Wet'suwet'en Nation chef—received some well-deserved recognition at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics as head chef at the Four Host First Nations pavillion.

A Feast for All Seasons features modern Native cuisine, aimed at the home cook and hunter. While a few recipes require a smoker or meat grinder, the bulk can be attempted by anyone with a source of fish and game. Background information on the chef and Native North American food cultures is provided, and the book is set up in four sections: From the Waters (seafood), From the Earth (vegetables and grains), From the Land (game), and From the Air (fowl). Seasonal menus are also offered.

So far I've tried the Smoked Salmon on Bannock Fingers (although, like anyone who grew up with bannock, I used my own recipe, because everyone else's recipe is wrong), the Wild Rice and Mushrooms, and the Baked Sweet Potato with Roasted Hazelnuts, and they've all been delicious.

The book is full of interesting information, written in an engaging voice, and the recipes are a great combination of traditional and innovative without being too out there for home cuisine. As someone living on the west coast of Canada, it was nice to find a cookbook that consisted entirely of ingredients I could easily find; most cookbooks on the market here are by U.S. writers, and there are often international differences as to what ingredients can be found cheaply and easily and in what season.

My one complaint is that the book really could have used more photographs. I don't know how this compares with the original edition, but in the age of digital photography, it seems like a few extra snapshots could have been included.

vegablack62.livejournal.com

I grabbed Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian because I was interested in having a more plant based diet and I found it was a great find because I love it. Jaffrey's writing style is engaging and polished, the recipes are clear and easy to follow and the background she gives the recipes are fascinating. She is an Indian and has many recipes from the Sub-continent, but she also has vegetarian recipes and adapted to be Vegetarian, recipes from around the world. My favorites have been from Cyprus, Morocco, Turkey, and Trinadad. Places from where I have not sampled food before. She explains why the food in Cyprus is distinct from Greece or Turkey and what is unique about Moroccan cooking. (Recipes from Latin America, Korea, France and Italy are easily found. The book is truly a world cook book.)

The first set of recipes are for Dried beans, dried peas and lentils. She begins the chapter with a descirption of her own experience with the food, one I enjoyed reading: "As a child, I remembere sitting with my mother and all the other women of our large Indian household, perpetuating my little place in a family ritual. The oldest woman of the house -- generally my grandmohter -- would place a few handfuls of lentils, split peas, or beans into the big metal plates we each held. Quite automatically, we drew the legumes to the edge nearest our bodies. Then, in an ancient ritual, enacted as if in a half-remembered dance, we began pushing the lentils toward the far side one by one, plucking up and discarding all sticks and stones as we idd so. Sometimes we sang, sometimes we gossiped, sometimes we werre lost in our own silences. As we were doing this in India, Chinese, Syrians, Mexicans and Peruvians were doing the same in their own courtyards, gardens, and kitchens."

A James Beard award winner, listing 650 different recipes, I plan on using this book a lot.

ETA: I can't beleive that I left out that I thought the recipes were delicious.

floriatosca.livejournal.com

I had some familiarity with Vertamae Grosvenor's work before, ("Vibration Cooking"), but I actually found this book when my mother was doing an African foods research project. It has lots of interesting looking recipes from around the African diaspora, as well as information about the history and cultural significance of the various dishes. I didn't cook anything out of it, but the recipes sounded tasty and practical, and there was a lot of emphasis on fruits and vegetables, which I appreciated. I also liked the information in Geechee/Gullah culture, which is Grosvenor's own background, and something that I knew very little about before reading this book.

vom-marlowe.livejournal.com

Amazon info here.

I have been putting this review off. I love Chinese food and I wanted to read a cookbook by someone of Chinese heritage, especially for homestyle Chinese cooking. I love homestyle Chinese cooking. I have several recipes or two from friends and there is a neighborhood restaurant that does a few homestyle dishes.

I had heard that this book was good, but doable, and not banquet style fancy food. It is written by Kylie Kwong, an Australian with Chinese heritage.

Unfortunately, I just didn't enjoy the recipes in this book. It is huge (actually much too large and heavy to be a comfortable cookbook and is awkward to use) and full of very glossy finished recipes. That can be motivational, but I mostly wound up frustrated, because while the food looked good, I found the results to be rather boring and bland. There aren't very many recipes, actually, and one particular method of cooking (a sort of sweet ginger sauce) was shown in pork, beef, chicken, tofu, and so on. It would have been nice if instead of wasting all those pages on a repeat of the same recipe, if she'd shown something different and simply said: substitute pork, beef, etc. I felt that for such a large book (it's huge and weighs a ton) it should have had more recipes. Many of the meat types just have a couple methods of cooking them.

It's not a bad book. The recipes are just...bland. Boring. Things I could get off the internet at About.com Chinese Cooking. Er. I feel terrible saying that. But it's true, at least for me, that there wasn't anything in this book that I felt was especially noteworthy or tasty. The writing wasn't especially good, either, and I feel very bad for saying that.

It got good reviews at Amazon, so some people do like it. It didn't work for me. What it did make me realize, though, is that most of the books that were recommended to me about Chinese food were written by non-Chinese folks. I ended up scouring Amazon some more and have acquired Breath of the Wok and a few others. It was more effort than I expected to find Chinese cookbooks written by people of Chinese descent.

floriatosca.livejournal.com

1. The Arab Table by May S. Bsisu
I'm a big fan of cookbooks, because the chattier ones tend to give a lot of cultural context along with the recipes. This book definitely counts as one of the chattier ones. There's an introductory anecdote to go with each recipe, as well as sections on subjects like the culinary traditions of different parts of the Arab world and holiday customs (including a guide to Ramadan etiquette for non-Muslims). The recipes seemed pretty accessible to me, although not all of the ingredients are stuff you can find at your nearest supermarket or even your nearest internationally-leaning health food store (Bsisu does give mail-order sources in the back of the book), and the book includes some vegetarian recipes, which I appreciated.

2. Brown Girl In the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
This was an interesting read, and very different from my previous experiences with urban fantasy (which leaned much more towards elves than orishas.) I really liked the world building in this. Post-apocalyptic Toronto felt like a real, plausible community and not just a place for the plot to happen. The story's supernatural aspects are grounded in Caribbean spirituality, which was an interesting change from the more European or Christian influenced cosmologies of a lot of the fantasy novels I've read. This book also got me interested in "Ti-Jean and His Brothers," which Hopkinson references in her author's notes.

Current Mood: geeky

lady-jem.livejournal.com

Isabel Allende's part-memoir, part-cookbook, part-lots-of-other-things Aphrodite is a delightful rambling study of aphrodisiac food and drink throughout history and around the world. It is charming, witty, thought-provoking, and just a really fun read. It made me feel like I was sitting in the kitchen with Allende listening to her tell stories while she cooked up a batch of her favorite never-fail-make-up-with-an-angry-lover soup...the recipes are scattered throughout the book, with a collection of them at the end, and she slips between anecdote and history easily.

Allende's work has always intimidated me; but this is a wonderful introduction to her voice!

(next, for something completely different: An Ordinary Man by Paul Rusesabagina--the "Hotel Rwanda" guy who saved more than 1200 Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide.)

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Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

Entries tagged with cookbook

"Notes From A Young Black Chef" by Kwame Onwuachi with Joshua David Stein

A Feast for All Seasons: Traditional Native People's Cuisine

World Vegetarian by Madhur Jaffrey, 9/50

#3, "Vertamae Cooks," by Vertamae Grosvenor

#02 Simple Chinese Cooking by Kwong

"The Arab Table," "Brown Girl In the Ring"

2. Aphrodite, by Isabel Allende