another cookbook referral

We received this cookbook - Jacques Pepin's Kitchen: Encore With Claudine - for Christmas from Beth, who apparently found it at a used booksale or something like that. It's set up by menu - a main dish, a couple of sides, and a dessert. We had never heard of this chef but Adam was getting tired of menu planning for the grocery shopping so he decided to work his way through the book.

Success!

There have been a couple of things that we didn't really like - the cold cucumber and mint soup being the one that immediately comes to mind. But other than that, it's been great! We've been introduced to some interesting food combinations - tonight's dinner was zucchini mashed into a mashed potato gratin dish topped with poached cod and a basil sauce. The side was steamed leeks with bread crumbs over them, with garlic and Swiss cheese in the breading. It was really good!

And there's something else - until this week, neither of us had ever had leeks. Or turnips or parsnips. And now we have. Our kids won't go near most of this stuff but we're not pushing them hard on what they eat - they eat tons of fruit, vegetables, and sandwiches and very few treats so they're fine. They don't need to develop an adult palate overnight - some of these dishes have a pretty complex taste.

We're not even halfway through the book yet but like I said, everything (with just a couple of exceptions) has been surprisingly good - even combinations that sound a little weird. So I thought I'd pass on the book referral.

a must-read

I've decided that I'm going to take a little jaunt into the realm of "food lit" - books and memoirs about cooking. I was not impressed at all with the book "Julie and Julia," which I read last summer. There was quite a bit about cooking, but mostly, the writer is just really crass and profane ... even when talking about the cooking, actually. I'm hoping that's an anomaly and I've built up a list of other food lit I want to read.

Our local library (amazingly enough) had "Confections of a Closet Master Baker" by Gesine Bullock-Prado, and I read it this past week in about 3 days. (With 3 small children around, that's moving fast for me.) LOVED it. From the first sentence, I was hooked. "I saw the devil at the age of 3 and he gave me chocolate. It changed my life forever." Awesome.

Long story short - she's Sandra Bullock's sister and worked with her in Hollywood. Got sick of LA and when their mom died of cancer, decided to do what she really loved - bake. So she moved to Vermont and opened a bakery. How cool is that? To just up and leave, and try something new. Anyway, so this book is her memoir about doing that, and it includes a number of fantastic-sounding recipes (minus her obsession with coffee - bleh - but we can get around that.)  Some of them are traditional desserts from Germany that sound oh so tasty! And I really like that she talks about desserts as things to be shared, and something to be special rather than inhaled in mass quantities as we gluttonous Americans tend to do.

I posted about the book on Facebook and talked about it with Adam and a couple of friends. Adam picked it up tonight and started reading it. He wasn't even halfway done when he said that he is not going to scan a couple of the recipes for me to keep - he wants to buy it. Done.

Ms. Bullock-Prado also has a blog, which I've added to the "food lovers unite" links in the sidebar. I'm all over trying to make my own English muffins - recipe on the blog, not in the book. I love them just out of the toaster, a little bit of a butter, and very thin slice of cheese that you just let sit until the heat of the muffin softens it. Then eat. Yum. And homemade English muffins? That has all the makings of a breakfast nirvana.