Sunday, January 26, 2025

Chef Michael Bennett's cookbook makes top reader poll

These Summer Cookbooks Will Make the Good Life Even Better ~because they are healthy recipe books. 

June 09, 


Summer cookbooks are fanciful creatures — high on whimsy and shamelessly devoted to making a good life better. For some that means lingering in the farmers markets or gardening with the kids. For others it's indulging in some usually forbidden pleasures —the icy sweet, the charred and fishy. And for some, it means crossing oceans to sample less familiar fare — without ever leaving the porch. There's something for everyone, but all go just fine with bare toes and a sun hat.

Description: Marinades

Marinades

The Quick-Fix Way to Turn Everyday Food into Exceptional Fare, With 400 Recipes

by Lucy Vaserfirer

Paperback, 320 pages

Ah, the glow of the charcoal! the ring of the tongs! The romance of grilling may center around a Weber kettle, but some of its most powerful secrets lie in a zip-top bag. Marinades offers page after page of simple, devastatingly effective baths — and just in case you're not so sure what to do with your Madeira-Thyme Marinade once you've got it — afterward points you in the direction of some nice veal rib chops or other appropriate cuts. Lucy Vaserfirer knows that for all the fire and flair at the end, the success of a grilling adventure often starts hours before, with the silent, humble art of wet baths and dry rubs. Chops and medallions, steaks and kebabs — there's hardly a cut of protein that doesn't benefit from a good long soak in an emphatically-seasoned liquid. Five minutes of forethought while you're cleaning up from lunch is all it takes. After that, deliciousness is in the bag. Meanwhile, you can go for a bit of a soak yourself.

All Natural SURF Cuisine

A Study in Seafood Cookery

by Michael Bennett 

• 

Paperback, 186 pages




You will love how the Chef’s narratives are paired up with the recipes. It was like reading a recipe guide and journal from this chef on his journey through cooking seafood. You will also like the idea that the book is broken up into segments like; spices, salads, sauces and entrees. So, besides having 100 or more recipes squeezed into 188 pages, you actually get a multiple of at least 3 times that much if you interchange the sub-recipes into the entree section. This book is of course featuring healthy cooking of Seafood. Since it is a tropical seafood natural cooking cookbook you expect that but, it is also a GLUTEN FREE cookbook. The chef explains that the recipes are mostly grilled so the need for adding wheat flour is not needed. Chef Michael Bennett goes out of his way to create sauces that are as healthy as they are exotic - to pair with the grilled seafood. Once you investigate the recipes you'll see that this book might be your favorite cookbook for your weekend family dinners.




Description: The Beekman 1802 Heirloom Vegetable Cookbook

The Beekman 1802 Heirloom Vegetable Cookbook

100 Delicious Heritage Recipes from the Farm and Garden

by Brent Ridge, Josh Kilmer-Purcell and Sandy Gluck

Hardcover, 275 pages

The "lifestyle company" Beekman 1802 celebrates the better bits of farm life (fresh eggs and rustic antiques, not manure spreaders and drought). This third Beekman cookbook outing is suffused with nostalgic, agrarian spirit, from its seed-packet endpapers to its fluted-china still lifes. Even if you can't be bothered to jot down "Fall Recipes From Your Family" into the quaintly lined journal pages provided, the recipes here go a step beyond your average vegetable ode and are worth exploring: green beans with frizzled scallions and ginger, butternut squash crostini with raisins and brown butter. It's not vegetarian and heirloom vegetables are not actually required — for Beekman 1802 is all about the joys of the harvest, minus the backache from weeding and the gritty fingernails. To be used in a spirit of indolence.

Description: Vegetarian for a New Generation

Vegetarian for a New Generation

Seasonal Vegetable Dishes for Vegetarians, Vegans, and the Rest of Us

by Liana Krissoff

Paperback, 272 pages

This third offering in Krissoff's "New Generation" series may look just like any other vegetable book, but don't be fooled! Once you get past the bland title and tiny print, there are some surprising, wickedly effective flavor combinations just waiting to be discovered. Brussels sprouts waltz through a tamarind-ginger dressing; a tamari-butter glaze clings to potato wedges. Even the kale chip, which everyone agrees has overstayed its welcome, gets an alluring makeover in coconut. Not every recipe shines with newness — there are fine old friends like miso eggplant and butternut squash soup — but Kassoff never lets comfort devolve into boredom.

Description: The Better Bean Cookbook

The Better Bean Cookbook

More than 160 Modern Recipes for Beans, Chickpeas, and Lentils to Tempt Meat-eaters and Vegetarians Alike

by Jenny Chandler

Hardcover, 272 pages

Protein-filled, healthy beans — everybody wants to love them, but why do they make it so difficult? Even perfectly cooked beans can exhaust your appetite long before you get to the bottom of the bowl, for the blandness of a bean calls for aggressive seasoning to blast open its beige palette. Here at last is a bean book that's more tempting than earnest, brimming with cosmopolitan flavors and vivid photography. Forget about your hippie-era three-bean dip and boiled lentils — in these pages, dosas and tagines, falafels and burritos rub shoulders. Some are generously herbed, some are richly spiced, but all deliver novelistic detail on the plate compared to the leguminous one-liners of years past. The right-minded should be warned that this is no vegan — or even vegetarian — compendium. Decadent beanery is afoot in these pages; proceed accordingly.

Description: Simple Thai Food

Simple Thai Food

Classic Recipes from the Thai Home Kitchen

by Leela Punyaratabandhu

Hardcover, 227 pages

I have generally found "Quick," "Easy," and "Simple" to be disingenuous labels when it comes to Thai cookbooks. They might be actually easy, but then they're likely more Chinese than Thai. Or they're not actually easy at all — just easy compared to the hours you'd spend pounding spice pastes in the old country, with no electricity or running water. But Punyaratabandhu seems to pull it off, coming up with recipes that are weeknight-doable yet electric with ingredients you can just about find if you try hard (dried shrimp, kaffir lime leaf, palm sugar). Shortcuts or not, they're desperately delicious. And as to those curry pastes? Store-bought is fine, according to the author. But diehard readers will still find complete recipes for each in the back of the book. In other words, you can have it both ways.


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