A slew of new eCookbooks have landed at our online library!
Ready to whip up a heap of comfort food, or try your hand as a dough puncher (industry lingo for bread baker)? Haven’t been out to the grocery store lately? We’ve got you covered. The library has eCookbooks for all of those scenarios and more. So. Let’s get cooking!
A few categories of cookbooks lend themselves perfectly to the practice of hibernating, settling inside for an extended period of time. One such type is pantry cooking: cookbooks chock full of recipes that use what you have on hand, and many are easy, perfect for cooks at entry level and up.
For instance, Michael Love has many yummy recipes in The Salvage Chef Cookbook: More Than 125 Recipes, Tips, and Secrets to Transform What You Have in Your Kitchen into Delicious Dishes for the Ones You Love. Besides the recipes, Love explains how to lengthen the shelf life of items and answers a variety of questions about how cooking meals can be easier and more successful based on the underpinnings of a kitchen.
Hack Your Cupboard: Make Great Food with What You’ve Got by Alyssa Wiegand goes over what food storage areas typically have (and what they ought to have) and then delves into age-specific guidance to help you move on to more ambitious meals. Under the heading Toast, Wiegand offers three kinds of Avocado toast as well as adventurous versions of meal and snack staples, including Pepperoni Grilled Cheese and Curry Lime popcorn. Under Raman Hacks cooks can select from, among others, Raman with Ham, Egg and Spinach as well as Coconut Curry Raman. I also like the sound of her Rotisserie Chicken Hacks and the list of many marvelous Microwave Hacks recipes, including Mushroom and Egg Cheese Bowl. And finally, show off your new cooking skills in what she calls, A Family Celebration Dinner, a collection of recipes to choose from for dinner and dessert.
Add ‘easy’ to ‘make with comfort food’ and you have yourself a popular recipe. Danielle Centoni turns an old standby favorite, fried rice, on its head with delectable results. with Fried Rice: 50 Ways to Stir Up the World’s Favorite Grain. For easy and healthy, try Fix-It and Forget-It Healthy 5-Ingredient Cookbook by Hope Comerford. For easy and fast, check out The Two-Pan, One-Pot Cookbook: A Guide to Cooking Great Meals Quickly, in Any Kitchen, and On Any Budget by Hope Korenstein. It can help you to swiftly deliver a meal and remove hunger pains at the same time.
Besides the aforementioned titles, aspiring cooks can pick up valuable information that deconstructs how all the food parts fit together in the critically acclaimed Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat.
Comfort and freshly baked bread go hand in hand (don’t forget the butter!). If you’re looking for all of the above as well as the ultimate weekend baking project (any two days will do) that ends with you popping a warm piece of bread in your mouth, see if these cookbooks don’t do the trick.
In David Norman’s debut cookbook, Bread on the Table: Recipes for Making and Enjoying Europe’s Most Beloved Breads, he spells out bread baking traditions, learned first-hand traveling throughout Europe and North America. Home bakers will revel in the clear instructions and terrific photography, as well as the menu suggestions, which he has designed to showcase the bread you make. A fixture in Austin, head baker Norman and Easy Tiger Bakery and Beer Garden have recently committed to baking 10,000 loaves in 60 days to distribute to organizations that are experiencing increased demands from those in need, a direct result of the Coronavirus. Norman’s book was named one of the best cookbooks of the year by The New York Times Book Review in 2019.
Then there’s David Leader’s Living Bread: Tradition and Innovation in Artisan Bread Making, released last October. Living Bread is an introduction to everything bread and includes recipes inspired from bakers around the world. A pioneer in American artisan bread baking, Leader started baking bread out of a wood-fired oven in the southern Catskills. From the start, he produced traditional, European-style bread shaped by hand. Perfect for the enthusiastic home baker.
Bon appétit!