Cookaholics Bulletin Board

Many thanks for that Fuzzy; I've ordered it from the library. Eggs are a huge part of our low-carb eating so variety is delicious

So, the "must avoid" cookbook of the week.

You'd think a cookbook called "Back to Butter" (Molly Chester et al) would be an authentic, stick-to-your-ribs, midwestern-and-French cookbook. It has the subtitle "Nourishing recipes inspired by our ancestors". My sweetie took it out of the library envisioning recipes for shortbread, rommegrut, and buerre blanc.

Instead, what the cookbook is is "real butter, fake everything else". The recipes are full of stevia, carob chips, non-gluten flour, honey granules, and other neurotic food-hater ingredients. Well, except for the inexplicable inclusion of organ meats in recipes where you don't expect to find them, like desserts. And lots of bacon.

In fact, I'd call this a recipe book for a new diet: the Jack Sprat's Wife Diet, consisting of only saturated fats. Maybe it'll start a trend.

More likely, it'll end up in the humor section ...

Wow.

One of the gaps you run into is the definition of "fake/evil", and some of the obsessions around it. I know a couple of people who use butter instead 'fake' food (aka margarine). They don't seem to know that in most savoury dishes, a vegetable oil could be used too. These people are often the same ones who consider sugar to be horribly evil, but stevia and honey, etc. to be wonderful. So they say to me "oh I used butter too!" and we be thinking we have something in common, and then they start in on sugar or something and I am totally like "huh?".

Whatever turns your crank, I guess! I got my oddities...

So I had to take out "Aarti Paarti" from the library just because, well, name.

Unfortunately, I took it out at a time I didn't have much of a chance to cook from it, so I don't feel like I got a good scope for the cookbook. Aarti (yes, that's her name) created her show and the cookbook to re-envision Indian-American food. Instead of being the hand-me-down of Anglo-Bangladeshi food too many Americans are familiar with, she fuses Cal Cuisine with modern South Indian for some interesting dishes, like Gulab Jamoon with Chamomile Syrup.

I only had time to make her twist on Oopma. This is a dish I don't often prepare because it calls for very coarse ground semolina, something I can only find at Indian markets. Aarti solves this by replacing the semolina with quinoa, giving the dish a bit better nutritional profile in the process. However ... I found it bland. I understand that oopma is a breakfast dish, but I doubled the spice quantities she called for and it was still tame.

So I'm not sure if I recommend this or not. Borrow it from the library yourself and try it out.

I bought Aarti's book, read all of it, and thoroughly enjoyed it - which surprised me in a cook book. Her perseverance and joie de vivre are admirable and make enjoyable reading and cooking

I was just given The Secret Recipes, by the guy who came up with the Cronut (tm).
Half of it is musings on his career and specific ideas, half of it it pastry porn and there are some recipes. A few look intriguing, a few I wouldnt make except for money and often the batch size is too small. Am I really going to mess around with building a laminated dough and rolling it out thin enough to read through on cinnamon sugar, which makes it a right bitch to work with, only to get just eight pastries? Not hardly!
I think I will have to try the chocolate caviar, as a down-market bit of molecular gastronomy. And I get really tired of the interior lives of chefs. I know too many of them already.

Becky love the idea of chocolate caviar. I can see it on so many savory applications as well as desserts. I am planning on making Sriracha caviar with my boys when they are here for Christmas. Maybe we'll try chocolate as well.

I received "Family Meal" (nominally) by Ferran Adria for Christmas. The Amazon reviews are all about apparently misprinted recipe ingredient amounts, but we didn't have any problem tonight.

It is a list of 31 Family Meals as served by his chefs for his chefs before service starts. Each is an app, entree and dessert. I normally don't like "meal" cookbooks but I did like the detailed timeline he provided for each meal. Every recipe gets a two page spread with step by step photos, which is overkill for me, but might interest a less experienced cook.

Tonight we did the full run through of Meal 19: Spaghetti with tomato and basil, fried fish with fried garlic and caramel foam. Everything was excellent, We ate the spaghetti and fish together and they balanced nicely. The fried garlic was amazing. The caramel foam was okay but I didn't let it get dark enough. A sprinkle of Maldon salt made a huge difference. All in all, we are looking forward to trying more dishes.

--Lisa

Lisa,

Wow! Thanks for adding the cooking-from pics. Here's my contribution for the week, but no cooking pics:

Healthy South Indian Cooking, despite the name, isn't some kind of health-food cookbook. Instead, it's an extensive, easy-to-read-and-follow, fairly comprehensive South Indian home foods cookbook. As befits the cuisine, 80% of the cookbook is vegetarian. There are 20 recipes for sambars (dal soups) alone. The recipes emphasize flavor but don't require recipes to be super-spicy to be good, although you will need access to a wide array of spices and Indian legumes and grains. The only thing which would be needed to make this book perfect is some more pictures. I plan to buy it and toss some of the inferior South Indian cookbooks I have.

You've sold me, Fuzzy! Southern is definitely my favorite Indian style of cooking, and, though I'm not vegetarian, most of the Indian dishes that I make are vegetable dishes, and I make countless sambars and other legume dishes every winter (recently I have been using the ends of my oldest batches of legumes, and making a list to sfock up on at the Indian grocer). I'll be interested in the recipes for masalas (spice mixes); I just made a few new batches for the winter.

I think I know what I'll have for dinner tonight...

Update: I have a question for you, Fuzzy: Do you still have the book there? If so, could you check the publishing date for me please? Upon researching it, I found that it was published in 2001, and the "second expanded edition" was published in 2008, another in 2012, and another is being released in Feb. 2015, though the latter may just be "new" because it is paperback. I'm sure you will be trying to get the same book, too.