s/d: cookbooks!

Thanks so much WmC! I think I can pull that one off even though the kitchen setup I inherited was:

Two gas burners, which are actually totally badass and crank out the BTUs like no-one's business

One pot. No lid.

One wooden spoon

One not so sharp knife

Electric kettle

Vegetable peeler

Salt

Two small dishtowels

Chopsticks/forks/spoons/knives for eating

A few bowls, plates, mugs, glasses

To this I have added: a pot with lid and steamer insert; a cheap but somewhat sharper knife; a mixing bowl and three smaller prep bowls that can double as serving bowls; a strainer; and a filter for the sink drain.

Husband's first reaction to seeing original kitchen setup: "it's like camping!"

Gonna ask apartment owner to purchase a rice cooker for the place. There's no oven, microwave, toaster/toaster oven, crock pot, or any other kitchen appliances, but a rice maker would be a game-changer.

Grabbed Fuchsia Dunlop's Every Grain Of Rice from the local library after having used a bunch of the recipes via the Grauniad &c.

I just bought that the other day!

i cooked from it last night

Well now I'm really going to need a rice cooker!

I received 'Every Grain of Rice' for Christmas this year and it really delivers on being the every day Chinese cookbook. I can easily knock together a couple of dishes in the time it takes the rice cooker to deliver. I've got her Hunan and Szechuan cookbooks and they are great but the recipes do take a bit more prep work, although I love being able to do 辣子鸡，chicken with chillies at home.

Favourites so far are 豆豉鸡丁, black bean chicken, and 家常肉末芹菜， celery with minced beef. Last night did 香肠炒荷兰豆， mange tout with wind dried sausage but I think I out in too much meat and not enough ginger as the flavours didn't balance right.

While our kitchen is not quite as galley style as quincie's it doesn't have a great deal of space but does have a usable wok burner on the hob. It really made a difference vs my old place where the burners dint quite have the oomf.

Only criticism and this goes for all her books is that the pinyin has no tone marks so it takes some work with Pleco to work out how to pronounce things. ( I'm learning mandarin so this matters to me)

Burners having oomph is sooooo important; I am going to overhaul the hell out of our gas range at home someday.

My landlady is dropping off her rice cooker tonight for us to use while we are here! I hope it is not some crazy neuro fuzzy model with tons of buttons, because I cannot read Mandarin. If needed maybe I can post a pic on ILX for help ;)

Getting the hang of the timer setting on our old one in the states was well worth it for morning Porridge and Congee. Our one in Australia is just on and off.

everyone needs to have 660 curries, i have made like 100 of them now

― kim tim jim investor (harbl), Sunday, April 8, 2012 6:56 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ohmahgod there is a cookbook called '660 curries'. That sounds fantastic b/c curry's my favorite food. But uh does the book ask you to grind all the curry pastes from scratch? Because that would be asking kind of a lot.

Anyway, I got these as a Christmas present to myself, and they're all by Isa Moskowitz and Terry Romero, both of whom are genius. They haven't let me down, tho I'm just starting to get into these books. Surprised they haven't been mentioned already:

* Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World
* Vegan Cookies Take Over Your Cookie Jar
* Vegan Pie in the Sky
* Veganomicon

Hey guys, I want some like ESSENTIAL CRUCIAL COOKBOOKS! Ideally ones that just totally fucking nail a specific type of cuisine. Here's what I'm thinking:

Lidia Bastianich's "Lidia's Italian American Kitchen" (but she has like 20 cookbooks -- are there other better ones?)
Marcella Hazan's "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking"
maybe something French, but not something so outdated as "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"

Also, maybe some essential food mags I could subscribe to? Bon Appetit rules, Food + Wine sucks, I am considering Saveur though but I have never read it and know nothing about it

I want to read about fooooood!!

all about roasting/all about braising
maybe one of rick bayless's books, i've had good luck with mexican everyday
grace young's books on stir-frying

or maybe "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" IS worth getting? idk!

i'm liking fuschia dunlop's "land of plenty" for sichuan cooking, but i've only made like two things from it so far (ma po tofu and gong bao chicken)

or maybe "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" IS worth getting? idk!

― belami young (Stevie D(eux)), Wednesday, October 22, 2014 9:26 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's very interesting to read, not actually super fun to cook from imo

Madhur Jaffrey is the go-to Indian cookbook author, but her books have been retitled and combined so it's hard to figure out which is the go-to. I have old library copies of A Taste of India and Indian Cooking.
Yotam Ottolenghi's books are great - Israeli/Mediterranean/Levant food - but I haven't cooked much from them yet. Jerusalem, Plenty and the new one Plenty More (latter two are vegetarian)

Saveur is a little more fancy-pants in the written/travel section than Bon Appetit but it's still a good read IMO.
You should watch The Mind of a Chef on Netflix and PBS.

Every time I read Food + Wine it's just like wanky bourgie resort horeseshit and not about FOOOOD, like I just want COOL FOOD SHIT

show me some 25 year old crust punk pastry chef in Omaha covered in tattoos who talks about how much he fucking loves FOOOOOOD idgaf abt the fucking Maldives

MTAOFC is fun as a game: Open to random page and pick one recipe with your eyes closed kind of thing. Attempt on a winter Sunday afternoon when you can just order takeout if it all goes wrong. Be prepared to eat a weird dinner with like one 3-hour-preparation dish and a side of toast.

Otherwise, nah.

show me some 25 year old crust punk pastry chef in Omaha covered in tattoos who talks about how much he fucking loves FOOOOOOD

not answering this question but yesterday I got Sean Brock's southern cookbook Heritage. I really enjoyed his take on food from The Mind of a Chef - one part delicious, one part cultural anthropology. The book is gorgeous but I haven't had a chance to look at the recipes yet.

stevie you could also consider getting cook's illustrated, its approach can be a little joyless but they do have cool recipes and you do learn stuff.

kenji lopez-alt's stuff on seriouseats is similar but a lot more fun imo.

If you have an iPad, the Modernist Cuisine At Home app is sweet. I assume the book is good too but they're always sealed at B&N.

Saw this as S/M Cookbooks, then disappointed by the actuality. However, gotten good recipes and shopping tips, esp. re vegetables, from Eating On The Wild Side, blanking on author's name (it's not really Wild stuff, but making the most, nutrition & tastiness-wise, of yer local grocery and non-Escoffier skills)

I'm guilty of using the internet as my cookbook of first resort for the last few years, but these have places of honor on my shelf:

Mark Miller: Coyote Cafe
John Egerton: Southern Food
Sheila Lukins: All Around the World Cookbook
Rosso & Lukins: The New Basics
the Vietnamese and Thai volumes in the Wei-Chuan series, which I picked up eons ago and haven't seen since (haven't looked hard though)
Dragonwagon/Brown: The Dairy Hollow House Cookbook
Breakfast at Brennan's

I like John Currence's book from a year or 2 ago - Pickles, Pigs & Whiskey - but after making a few of the pickle recipes, I haven't messed with it much.

I have a tablet but it is not an iPad (which is annoying bcz How to Cook Everything app is IPAD ONLY, fuck that); i will check otu Modernist Cuisine at Home though!

these are my standard reference cookbooks that i consider authoritative and consult almost every time i cook the cuisines they cover, they are all text- and recipe-heavy with little photography (sometimes the marker of whether i think a cookbook is any good -- the more photos, the less i tend to use it):

mexican: "art of mexican cooking", diana kennedy. this is authoritative, exhaustive and such a beautiful, well-designed book. she is so thorough and detailed and at the same time very accessible. she is very particular and doesn't tolerate bullshit and i love it. you could also probably get "the cuisines of mexico." she is similar to julia child in that her husband worked abroad and she mastered the cooking.

indian: "classic indian vegetarian and grain cooking", julie sahni. more fun and interesting than madhur jaffrey imo, even though jaffrey is great too, it's just that jaffrey has so many books and many of them are "cooking of the orient" and "world vegetarian" and with sahni i know that i am getting all india.

vegetarian: "vegetarian cooking for everyone", deborah madison. another beautiful, unpretentious book with tons of background on handling all kinds of vegetables. i'm not a huge fan of the vegan pop-chefs like the "veganomican" or "vegan cupcakes take over the world" authors. madison is a more classic vegetarian who learned her cooking at chez panisse and the san francisco zen center, then started greens (an early local-sourced, seasonally-based restaurant).

fermented foods: "art of fermentation", sandor ellix katz. this is a fucking phenomenal and exhaustive book covering fermented foods and beverages from hundreds of different cuisines. katz runs workshops all over and does intensive training sessions at this queer community in rural tennessee where he lives. it's super fun to read, too.

good god it's $80 for an app! EIGHTY

will second 'vegetarian cooking for everyone' - was super helpful to me when i was really inexperienced in the kitchen and i still use it probably weekly

'how to cook everything' is similarly useful although i would balk at paying $80 for the ipad version

i bought my bf a copy of maida heatter's 'book of great desserts' because it was on a list of best cookbooks and he swears by it - ive never cooked anything from it but have eaten enough to agree its p good

feel like i am not interested in ipad versions of any cookbook. part of the fun is to gradually end up with a super-worn-in and weathered book that shows evidence of use and love and has stains and swelled pages and bookmarks and hand-written annotation. we've had some books for years and years that i will probably hand down to my kids.

I dig Saveur, never really read any other similar magazines. A lot more travel or place focused than strictly recipes but I find it pretty useful. Seems like most of the ads are actually about food or kitchen stuff too, other cooking magazines feel like they're all luxury SUVs, shiny Vegas hotels, $15,000 ranges, etc.

Other books I've really loved or cooked a lot from:

Plenty (mentioned above)
Thai Food - David Thompson
Classic Indian Cooking - Julie Sahni
Cradle of Flavor - James Oselund (former Saveur editor, this book is all Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia)
Hot, Salty, Sour, Sweet - Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid (Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand)
The Border Cookbook - Cheryl Alters Jamison (my first cookbook after Joy of Cooking, when I lived in Arizona and the one that really got me interested in cooking)

ooh i need to get the border cookbook, rad

I am a niche market:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Q0o0T5NFL.jpg

Hot, Salty, Sour, Sweet

I have this one -- need to take another look at it.

this thread rules

whenever we're going through a vegan phase this cookbook is pretty essential:

http://www.vrg.org/bookstore/images/vrg/vegansoulkitchen.jpg

Vegan Soul Kitchen is a great title. In this vein I'd also recommend the Donna Klein books The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen and Vegan Italiano, as practical regional veg cookbooks.

A lot of the stuff on this shelf is better suited to a coffee table (yes, I've a copy of Great Chefs Cook Vegan), and I don't have the hours for then entrees in the Moskowitz/Romero books.

And no, I don't have the Sriracha cookbook. Its sat there on my wishlist for a couple years.

yea i'm not a fan of moskowitz and romero. i find their whole style really grating and (that "hip", informal, jokester writing with no funny jokes) and tbh i don't find their recipes that good.

great chefs cook vegan has beautiful photographs but fuck it is a SHITTY fucking cookbook. nothing in there that i want to eat. makes me think of every fancy restaurant that doesn't have anything vegan or vegetarian on the menu and the chef whips you up something pretty but that provides basically no sustenance and never has any legumes or other foods vegetarians rely on for fat and protein. that comes off shitty i know b/c any chef whipping you up something on the fly that is not on the menu based on a special request is SUPER FUCKING GENEROUS, but that doesn't mean i want a cookbook of that shit.

'how to cook everything' is similarly useful although i would balk at paying $80 for the ipad version

$80 is the Modernist Cuisine App - not too bad since the book is over a hundred. Lots of neat little touches in how it works - videos, recipe scaling, etc..

i will rep hard for MAOFC

you will never have a better boeuf bourguignon than jc's version

if you are super against the datedness though i get it

bourdain's les halles cookbook is a good option instead. lots of all-day French classics that are daunting but fun to master

i have both, dig them equally

feel like i am not interested in ipad versions of any cookbook. part of the fun is to gradually end up with a super-worn-in and weathered book that shows evidence of use and love and has stains and swelled pages and bookmarks and hand-written annotation. we've had some books for years and years that i will probably hand down to my kids.

― marcos, Wednesday, October 22, 2014 3:56 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^

this is right on,
i am not together enough to have done this for myself, but, it would be nice, too, to buy a nice cloth-bound book to be copying recipes into, & to eventually have the soup-spattered master list, frayed & unbound, pages steam-buckled, cycles of ballpoint pens come & gone, a casual record of time passing

fyi there are several <$1 copies of the border cookbook on amazon, it looks rad and i just ordered one.

Did I mention it already? Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America, by Maricel Presilla, is a freaking tour de force, and I've yet to be disappointed by its recipes. The grilled skirt steak with chimichurri is just one particularly sublime yet simple example along many.

ooh i need to get the border cookbook, rad

I haven't opened this one in probably ten years but it really was the first "specialty" cookbook I owned and I had pretty good luck with a lot of the recipes. I used to make the carne seca a lot and should do that again.

It's also one of those books where certain pages are all stained and and beat up so I can open to recipes I've made a lot right away.

border cookbook is really really good, i got it as a christmas present in 2014 and it's become one of my favorite cookbooks

like "southwestern" or "border cuisine" has become such a watered-down concept so it is really nice to be reminded (since i don't live in the southwest) that this is an incredibly rich & varied cooking tradition

yeah we love that book around our place

Topopo Chicken Salad is a classic

this one, pray tell?

http://www.amazon.com/The-Border-Cookbook-Authentic-Southwest/dp/1558321039/ref=zg_bs_4315_24