5 comments about Hollyhocks and Radishes: Mrs Chard's Almanac Cookbook.

1. This is simply the best cookbook I have ever used. I love comfort-food and this is full of delicious recipes that will become family favorites. I've purchased too many cookbooks only to find the recipes difficult to duplicate, complex, or simply poor-tasting. Virtually everything I've tried is a home run. The stories are engaging and heartwarming too.



2. This book is so cool. You know how you buy a cookbook and after you've picked out the 10 "normal" recipes your left with nothing more then a dust collector. Not so with this one. I have enjoyed reading and eating my way through this book. It is a treasure. The food is good and easy to make. It's the kind of stuff you wish your grandmother had shared with you.



3. I love the letters at the beginning of each chapter which were written to the cookbook author from Mrs. Chard. They offer insight into the beautiful world of Upper Michigan.
   
   However, the real star of this book are the recipes. An excellent cookbook to be used when the garden is full of fruits and veggies.



4. I have had this book for a few years now and it is easily my favorite. I have not even began to try all of the recipes that are included yet the ones I have tried have been fantastic. Very basic, easy and delicious. The best part of the book though is that it is not just about food but the creation of herbs, flowers, life and love with the beautiful letters and the stories that tell of how the recipes came about. I plan on putting it on it's own wall plaque as a decorative addition in the kitchen to our new home in the woods so I can pull it down everytime I am in the kitchen and needing some insperation. A wonderful book!



5. Several years ago Mom gave me a signed copy of this lovely cookbook developed by a woman in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I've been making a number of things out of it in the last few months and coming back to it more and more as just good, tasty food. The best recipes are excellent, but even the worst things I've made have been mediocre or better. It's not health food, as there's a lot of butter involved, but I don't feel like I'm swimming in cream sauces or anything, either. Significantly for me, there are a number of tasty veggie recipes - I always have a hard time making vegetables interesting enough for me to want to eat, but the few things I've made out of this so far have all been very good. This week I'm eating a casserole of sweet potatoes and apples with a brown sugar/honey/butter/rum sauce. At Christmas I made a tasty casserole of butternut squash, tomatoes, and a little cheese. Chicken glazed with honey and soy was simple and very tasty. There are lots of awesome-looking fish recipes that I'll just have to find substitute fish for, being far from the Great Lakes' bounty. This will be a good staple cookbook for me for years to come, and the stories interspersed with the recipes are fun, too.

No comments about California Heritage.

No comments about The Kansas City Barbeque Society Cookbook, 25th Anniversary Edition.

2 comments about A DASH of Aloha - Healthy Hawaiian Cuisine and Lifestyle.

1. A showcase compendium of recipes from the islands of Hawaii, "A Dash Of Aloha: Healthy Hawai'i Cuisine And Lifestyle" is a collaborative project of the University of Hawai'i's Kapi'olani Community College and based on the DASH (Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension) program. Beautifully illustrated with full-color photography, "A Dash Of Aloha" has a spiral binding enabling it to be laid open on a kitchen counter, and features healthy eating tips from the American Heart Association, food nutrition and seasonality charts, as well as exercise and lifestyle advice. The seventy 'kitchen cook' recipes are 'kitchen cook friendly' as they are delicious and nutritious. Ranging from Ginger-Bran Cake; Spanish Rice with Napa Cabbage Rolls; and Loco Moco Fried Rice; to Tofu Burgers with Mango Chutney; Curried Sweet Potato Chowder; and Forbidden Black Rice Salad, every recipe comprising this outstanding collection comes with serving size information, a brief commentary and a Nutrition Facts chart about the dish. Especially recommended for personal and community ethnic cookbook collections, "A Dash Of Aloha" is particularly appropriate as a culinary reference for anyone having to deal with weight loss, cardiopulmonary, or general health and fitness improvement issues.



2. My wife is a cookbook collector and has looked through this book, but has not actually made any of the recipes as she feels that the ingredients called for are not things we normally stock in our pantry.

5 comments about The Fog City Diner Cookbook.

1. That's about it. Lots of recipes the average person just would not use.



2. for many years i was wondering what that german deli down the block from me, was putting in its' tuna salad that gave it a unique wonderful taste. i could never figure it out and was addicted to the tuna salad so was spending a good chunk of my food allowance on it.
   tuna is a food that if you can get it to taste great you have a very cheap meal that is good value. tuna as a whole i don't care for except for this german deli tuna.
   well i relate this story because the secret ingrediant that i could never figure out is in this book.
   for this alone the book was worth the money spent on it.



3. I like to browse different types of cookbooks, and to find recipes that I may not find anywhere else. This cookbook did not disappoint. Even though I have not visited the Fog City Diner, I have been to many diners in my day. I was surprised at the large variety of recipes available, and the eclectic ingredients included in the book.
   
   Some of my favorite recipes include: Split Pea and Apple-Smoked Bacon Soup, Mushroom Toast, Cheesesteak Sandwich, Cobb Sandwich, Chicken Curry Pot Pie, Apple Dumplings, Vanilla Caramel Custard, Hot Toddy, and Seasoned Nuts.
   
   Enjoy!



4. I have been lucky enough to visit the Fog City Diner many times over the last 15 years or so. I think Cindy is gone on to other things but I was there when she inspired the place. My first exposure was on that credit card commercial that featured the FCD and showed the Red Curry Mussle Stew because the dish was soooo good. I was going mad trying to figure out how to cook this at home. Then came the cookbook. Problem solved.
   
   The book is overall very enjoyable and it has some great little stories. The dishes are unusual and easy to make.
   
   Recommended!



5. This book would get the full five stars from me based on its inclusion of one of the single most fabulous recipes I've ever made - the Grilled Eggplant Sandwich with Fontina and Watercress. My, oh my, I salivate at the mere thought of it. It's a fantastic thing to eat, even if you decide to forgo making the buns from scratch! Just don't skip making the Tomato Chutney which is sheer magic combined with the smokiness of the eggplant, the creamy, tang of the Fontina and the clean whiff of the watercress.
   
   Cindy Pawlcyn is a most remarkable chef. I know people (yes, plural) who literally swoon at the mention of the Pork Chop served at Mustards, her wonderful restaurant in Napa Valley. (That Pork Chop must certainly be one of the most legendary foods on the West Coast.) In any case, she is a master of combining and juxtaposing sometimes surprising ingredients to coax the most intense and exciting flavors out of food.
   
   With this book, Pawlcyn elevates diner food to a gourmet art form and then some. I've not been disappointed with any of the recipes from this book. They are just plain fun. Although I don't usually like cookbooks that include skipping all over the pages to find the recipes within recipes, I have to make an exception with this book. The sub-recipes have been well-worth the trouble.
   
   Needless to say, I also recommend the Mustards Cookbook - almost as highly as I recommend dining at the restaurant.

5 comments about The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii's Culinary Heritage (Kolowalu Books).

1. Maui Sherbert

   2 (7oz) cans strawberry soda AND 1 can sweetened condensed milk AND 1 (7oz) can 7-up

   Mix together and freeze for 3 hours. Whisk. Freeze again.




2. It seems this book was born out of Laudan's attempt to categorize and make sense out of the foods in Hawaii. I was raised in Hawaii and grew up surrounded by the foods that Laudan presents in her book. Many of the local cookbooks put together and sold by Hawaii's churches, schools, and communities give you recipes from local home kitchens; nothing too fancy and usually no description of the dish, because it is assumed you know what the ingredients are and how they are used.

   More than a cookbook, Laudan has written well-researched histories of how various local foods have developed throughout the islands before each main and sub sections (The Plate Lunch, The Matter of Mochi, Sorting Out Sushi to name a few). And, she includes a brief explaination of the dish before each recipe.

   I bought this book hoping to shed some light on "crack seed" and how to make it. Unfortunately, it appears that she was able to get only the more well known recipes due to the fact that the main ingredient (oriental flowering apricot) is not widely available.

   This book is a good resource, if not for the recipes, then for the history of Hawaii's local food for both non-Hawaii and island cooks. One caveat: a recipe found in a cookbook is no more than a base on which to add/subtract/change ingredients as you see fit. There is no such thing as "The Recipe" for teriyaki sauce - recipes vary from home to home and island to island.




3. Professor Laudan, who is primarilly a philosopher of the history of science, has produced an outstanding book on the origins and background to Polynesian food. It is not supposed to be a recipe book, and Heaven knows what the reviewer who talks about "sherbert" was on about. That was not a review.
   
   It is well-written, engrossing and in beautiful English, a real rarity nowadays. Richly deserved to win the Julia Childs Award for America.
   
   I gather that Professor Laudan's long-awaited magnum opus, the World History of Food, will be ready soon. Should be excellent and ground-breaking.



4. Rachel Laudan has written a hymn to the plate lunch, a rhapsody on the theme of two scoop rice.
   
   The presses are running hot with glossy books about Pacific Rim cuisine. Laudan says she has nothing against it, but she is interested in local food. The recipes that conclude each of the essays in this book include such fare as Okinawan pig's foot soup. You will not find anything with lilikoi-Maui onion-ginger salsa on top. (Lilikoi is the local term for passion fruit.)
   
   For someone who had been in the islands only eight years (as a teacher of history of science at the University of Hawaii), she really knows her local grinds (but grinds, surprisingly, is not used anywhere in this book).
   
   For Laudan, food is not just a way of keeping the body fueled. The way people east, their tendency to avoid strange foods, their willingness to make great efforts to maintain culinary traditions in new settings tell a big story.
   
   In Hawaii, they tell a story of a creation of a successful multiethnic, multicultural society. She doesn't go as far as the historian Gavan Daws, who says, correctly, that Hawaii is the most successful multiethnic society on Earth, but she does note that in the islands, half of marriages are across ethnic or cultural boundaries.
   
   Crossing food boundaries is just as significant, in her view. Local food is a meaningful development, the offspring of "a culinary Babel."
   
   "There are few places in the world," writes Laudan, "where the creation of a cuisine is so transparently visible."
   
   Well, yes, if you look, and this is where "The Food of Paradise" excels. I have at least a couple hundred Hawaiian cookbooks (only a fraction of the published total), but all of them together don't provide as much food for thought as Laudan's one volume.
   
   While admirably thorough, she does stop short of of the extremes of local food -- neither milk guts nor finger Jell-O is mentioned.
   
   One thing she has done is to compare different editions of local cookbooks. The changes in the recipes are revealing.
   
   Take poke. (Pronounced po-kay, from a Hawaiian word, usually taken to be the word for slice, although this is controversial.) It is so common that surely it has been around forever, but Laudan says not. It seems to have been created around 1970, a typical (for Hawaii) melding of themes from several sources -- the main ones Hawaiian and Japanese, with minor notes from America and other parts of Asia. The result is pure local Hawaiian. (Poke is simply cubed raw fish, preferably ahi tuna, with minimal flavoring of onion or scallion or seaweed and possibly salt or shoyu; but since this book was published it has become a contest to devise the most unexpected combinations. There have also long been versions of cooked seafood, notably baby octopus.)
   
   Local food, as an identifiable cuisine, "began to appear in the 1920s and 1930s," writes Laudan. She has done her homework, interviewing food preparers and vendors at what she calls Open Markets.
   
   This is very much a Honolulu book. Despite being the most cosmopolitan place in the islands (if not in the entire Pacific), Honolulu also has preserved many more local food traditions than Maui has.
   
   At the Aloha Farmer's Market, Laudan found fresh pig's blood, fresh chitterlings, dried fish poke and lomi oio. (You could occasionally find any or all of these on Maui, but not at the same time at the same place. If you ever encounter lomi oio, bonefish flesh scraped off with a spoon (an ancestor of poke), you are definitely out of the tourist zone.)
   
   There are a few oddities here that reveal that Laudan is malihini, though a very simpatico one. She says shave ice is sometimes called ice shave on the Neighbor Islands. She talks about the days of "sleeper jets" (they weren't jets). She starts pineapple plantations much too early.
   
   But Laudan does bring a verve, an extensive background as a world traveler and the skills of a professional reseacher to her book, which is easily the solidest work on local food there is.



5. THE FOOD OF PARADISE ~ Exploring Hawaii's Culinary Heritage
   Rachel Laudan
   University of Hawaii Press ~ 1996
   296 pages, softcover
   
   I must say that I was delightfully surprised when I received this book in the mail- I had expected just another Hawaiian cookbook, and that would have been great too. Instead, I found not only recipes that were not available, ad nauseum, in every other Hawaiian cookbook, as I do seem to have an over-abundance of these, due to my obsession with Hawaii, but I was happy to get a few history lessons, as well.
   
   As many already know, besides the first Polynesian settlers to Hawaii, from the South Seas, Hawaii was settled by many diverse cultures. Certainly, the Asian influence is very heavy here: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Southeast Asians. There is a big Portuguese and Azores influence too. Europeans came to conquer and subjugate, but most of their food culture was not so compatible with the climate. New World foods did do very well, and many of the common foods we associate with Hawaii actually were imported from the Americas, such as pineapple.
   
   It seems that most Hawaiian residents are a mixed up combination of heritages and cultures, and they are very proud of that assimilation, and their food choices reflect that. The beloved comfort foods may have originated across the globe, but Hawaiians have reinvented them uniquely in their own way.
   
   A few favorites that are now heritage dishes are Jook, a porridge soup, Musubi (see my SPAM review!), Saimin noodles (available even at McDonalds), Shave Ice, Malasada donuts, and Crack Seed, which even has its own store in Ala Moana mall.
   
   This book has many great features beside the recipes: seafood made easy, a glossary, all about the water, rice savvy, and many black and white photos. I can show you a sample recipe here:
   
   In Hawaii, after Thanksgiving, everyone makes JOOK
   
   Ham & Turkey Jook (a rice soup)
   yield: 1 gallon, or 8 big servings
   
   3 cups rice, well washed and rinsed
   3 ham hocks of a big ham bone
   1 turkey carcass, broken into pieces
   1 cup raw, unsalted, skinned peanuts
   Garnish: lettuce; salted, preserved cabbage, Chinese parsley or cilantro, and finely sliced green onion
   
   Combine rice, ham hocks, turkey carcass, and peanuts in a large pot, add about a gallon of water, bring to a boil, and cover. Simmer for a couple of hours until the rice has disintegrated and the meat is falling off the bones. Carefully remove the bones and any bits of meat clinging to them from the soup. Chop the meat into small pieces and return to the pot. Add salt to taste. Ladle into large soup bowls and sprinkle some of the garnish on each bowl. Delicious. Many Hawaiians eat this for breakfast.
   
   A wonderful book, this will give you deeper insight into the food culture of Hawaii, but also appreciation for the way the foods transcended the racial problems each new ethnic group of immigrants encountered, and brought them all together to Paradise.
   
   Fun times here, makes you hungry!

1 comments about Private Collection 2: Recipes from the Junior League of Palo Alto.

1. I own hundreds of cookbooks, and I like to cook. The recipes in this volume and in the first volume, called A Private Collection, are delicious and reliable. The instructions are easy to follow and the results impressive in appearance and flavor. If you need a few recipes to cook when you really want to impress someone, use these cook books. You won't fail.

5 comments about The Kansas City Barbeque Society Cookbook: Barbeque...It's Not Just for Breakfast Anymore.

1. If you buy this book, you wont learn how to BBQ. It doesnt cover enough (or any) on selecting meat, selecting the BBQ smoker, proper cooking technique, etc. But what you do get, that makes this a worthwhile purchase, is a huge amount of great recipies. Where else can you be be looking for BBQ sidedishes like potato salad and coleslaw, and find multiple recipies of each?



2. This is a FANTASTIC BOOK. It has a great deal of useable recipes in it. Unlike alot of cookbooks that just have a few. I highly recomend this cookbook. Would give it 10 stars if i could.Happy Barbecueing. It's time to fire up the Weber Smokey Mountain Smoker.



3. While this book may come from a barbecue society it mostly deals with grilling instead of smoking. In addition, quite a few of the recipes lacked critical details. The "Champion's" recipes were laughable. I was hoping for more than: Blue Ribbon Brisket: Ingredient list: 7-10 pound brisket trimmed, barbecue rub. Instructions: Season meat with rub, cook at 225 degrees until done. The side and dessert recipes were interesting, but that's not what I buy a barbecue book for



4. KCBS has put together a great book here. Mostly for the beginning smoker however. It has wonderful recipes from the top bbq cookers around the circuit. These are proven award winning recipes and will help any wanna be bbq chef turn out a great product. If you follow the tips and tricks in this book it will help you avoid a lot of mistakes and headaches.



5. Dear Sirs:
   
   I recommend this book as a must for beginning and experienced barbequers. I thoroughly enjoyed this publication and consider it a valuable item in my cookbook collection. Everyone should order at least (5) copies for their personal and family gifts!
   
   Thanks again...Let's get to greasin!
   
   Danny Charles Adams
   Gahanna, Ohio

5 comments about Wildwood: Cooking from the Source in the Pacific Northwest.

1. Let me be clear - I have never laid eyes on this book. I bought it based on the description for a friend who lives in CA but is from the Northwest and is an avid cook. She absolutely loved it and continues to rave about it. Based on that, I give it a 5.



2. One of the best cookbooks in my collection.

   What's really interesting to me is that almost every recipe in the book goes very well with a nice Oregon Pinot Noir.




3. I received this book very quickly and in perfect condition. I will definitely do business with them again!



4. Fantastic cookbook. Beautiful photos and recipes that are stunning.
   Local foods and people. A must for anyone who enjoys food and life!



5. a good book full of good recipes - most are beyond my budget, but a few are very good.

3 comments about M. F. K. Fisher among the Pots and Pans: Celebrating Her Kitchens (California Studies in Food and Culture).

1. As a person who has spent half a lifetime reading anything and everything on or about MFK Fisher, I eagerly awaited the arrival of this book. Although I found it enjoyable,for the most part it was mostly a lot of information lifted from MFK's own writings about her kitchens, and the many places that she lived. The newer material was good, describing a bit more in depth what Mary Frances was going through during times of upheaval and illness, and there were some wonderful photos of the places that she had lived. The illustrations were lovely. All in all, it was a nice read- and makes one want to go to the bookshelf and pull down one of MFK's own, and read them again- they never go out of style!



2. Joan Reardon's M. F. K. Fisher Among the Pots and Pans is a brief biography of America's greatest food writer. Reardon wrote a longer bio in 2004; here, she's decided to keep her touch light by documenting the different kitchens rented, remodeled or simply passed through by Fisher in her progress through three marriages, the birth of daughters legitimate and illegitimate, and the writing of many, many books and articles.
   
   Most of Fisher's kitchens consisted of little more than a hot plate and a pantry. Fisher insisted on eating and cooking in the same space, and her best meals were apparently also her simplest. Her 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf, written during the first years of World War II, addressed "the preparation of food in times of scarcity and bomb shelters."
   
   Watercolors by Avram Dumitrescu recreate the kitchens. Designer Sandy Drooker has given the book a small footprint suitable for your airplane carry-on. A suite of updated recipes divide each chapter, providing some hands-on sustenance for Fisher fans. I read the book in an evening (as if it were "a cheese souffle and a light salad"), but is well worth holding onto for its compelling portrait of "a writing cook and a cooking writer," "bold at the desk as well as at the stove."
   
   [....]



3. A friend in the culinary field lent me this book and it is charming! I knew a little about Fisher -- primarily thro' books about Julia Child -- and don't have any of her cookbooks. But I had read two of her novels: NOT NOW BUT NOW and THE BOSS DOG, both which I thoroughly enjoyed. AMONG THE POTS AND PANS told me so much more about this very interesting, ahead-of-her-time woman, and it shares a few recipes, too. Very well written and beautifully illustrated. And yes, I've already ordered one of her cookbooks. Enjoy!