Category: cook the cookbooks

This series of blog posts is born out of a desire to cook the cookbooks, i.e., use the books sitting on our kitchen shelves. It’s the post series that first launched this blog, in December 2017. (The backstory: Shanna Mallon had a beautifully illustrated cookbook that she wouldn’t give away because she liked its design–but had never cooked from it. Why not, she started asking. So the first five posts on this site chronicled her doing something about this, cooking from the cookbook. Starting with an introduction post, she made a recipe from each section of the book. The experience provided a more thorough overview of a vintage cookbook, and it celebrated an author’s work in the early to mid 1900s.)  This idea inspired an ongoing series of Cook the Cookbooks, which will feature recipes from published works of different kinds. You can view all posts in this category here.

If you have a suggestion of a cookbook to feature here, contact Shanna today.

Janet Reich Elsbach’s ‘Extra Helping’ Is As Thoughtful As It Teaches Readers to Be

Published this past November, the cookbook “Extra Helping: Recipes for Caring, Connecting & Building Community One Dish at a Time” is an artfully illustrated paperback with a simple goal: to give you real tools for responding to the “endless opportunities to hone the craft of feeding those too taxed to feed themselves,” along with “the art of gratefully receiving this attention” in those situations when the person who is too taxed is under your roof–or you. Food, Elsbach says, is one of the most foundational and meaningful ways to help one another. In this book, she shows how.

Janet Reich Elsbach's 'Extra Helping' Is As Thoughtful As It Teaches Readers to Be / Go Eat Your Bread with Joy
Written for anyone who needs a helping hand in community, ‘Extra Helping’ offers 70+ recipes for expanding families, the rearranged, the ill or recovering, the grieving and more.

According to Janet Reich Elsbach, Massachusetts-based author of the recently published cookbook, “Extra Helping: Recipes for Caring, Connecting & Building Community One Dish at a Time,” caring for people with food is essentially the same as caring for people in any other way. Whether someone’s just brought home a new baby or is grieving the sudden loss of a spouse, to be able to offer the kind of help that is truly help, what’s required is less cooking skills, more listening skills.

In other words, what you need to know is how to be curious.

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Marcella Hazan’s Handmade Pasta Recipe

The 1992 cookbook Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is still an Amazon bestseller today. In it, Marcella Hazan has a lot to say about making pasta–some of it surprising. Whether you’re a pasta veteran or never considered the idea of making it yourself, here’s a look at the legendary Italian cook’s handmade pasta recipe and what it might be able to teach you!

what marcella hazan teaches us about making pasta at home
Fresh noodles made per Marcella’s formula, with only two ingredients: (semolina) flour and eggs

There’s nothing like a handmade pasta recipe to reignite your love of cooking. All it takes is a chunk of time in the kitchen and the simplest of ingredients to create the foundation for four-star dining at home! Read More

How to Bake Long-Fermented Sourdough Bread

Long-fermented sourdough bread is sort of the gold standard of natural leavening. Particularly if you’re interested in the health benefits from sourdough, you will care that a long fermentation means more time to break down phytic acid as well as the bran of the grain for digestibility. Min Kim of the beautiful Instagram account Min’s Kitchen created her recipe with this in mind. Available online, it requires no kneading, is largely hands off and yet offers all the benefits of a long-fermented sourdough bread.

naturally leavened long fermented sourdough bread

Traditional foods teacher Min Kim first became interested in true sourdough bread when trying to help her daughter deal with repeated sinus infections. After having her daughter remove all grains and try the GAPS diet for gut healing, her family began to slowly reintroduce only properly prepared grains. Understanding that the traditional method of making long-fermented sourdough bread meant making bread easier to digest, she started baking it herself.Read More

6 Cookbooks for Mother’s Day (or, Cookbooks I Keep Using)

Since it’s almost May, here are six cookbooks for Mother’s Day gifts (or any occasion), worth buying for someone you love. These are the six cookbooks I legitimately keep coming back to, time and time again, organized by the moms who’d like them.

Guide guide: cookbooks for Mother's Day

When you read a story, you experience someone else’s view; likewise, when you read a cookbook, you get outside your own kitchen habits. Cookbooks expand the way we approach food. They give us new recipes and make preparing another meal more fun. They’re often pretty and inspiring and outside of the worlds in which we live. So, with that in mind, cookbooks make great gifts. For Mother’s Day, a birthday or just because, here are my six favorites and why I keep using them.Read More

11 Kids’ Books about Food to Inspire You to the Kitchen

This roundup of 11 kids’ books about food is part of a series of articles on cooking with kids. Reading kids’ books about food with a child you love is a great way to inspire cooking projects and provide a roadmap for spending time in the kitchen together. With that in mind, here are 11 books worth exploring. If you have your own story or experience to share on the topic of cooking with kids, contact me here.

kids' books about food

As recently explored in the post, “5 Reasons to Bake Pretzels with Walter the Baker,” there are so many reasons to cook with kids, from growing life skills to educating about healthy choices. But pair this activity with books about food relating to your cooking projects, and it’s doubly valuable.

That’s because, according to Casey Byrne, Reading Recovery teacher at Glenview Elementary School in Nashville, when it comes to literacy, the more exposure you give a child to books, the better. Read More