Tag: cookbooks

What’s Cooking? – Summertime Style

Are you looking for ways to use your home-grown vegetables or CSA-share? Want to up your grilling game? Cook for a crowd? Add a few new recipes to the rotation? Or have a beautiful new book to show off in your kitchen or on your coffee table?

Here are some new and notable cookbooks:

Green Fire by Francis Mallmann

Green Fire is an extraordinary vegetarian cookbook, as Mallmann brings his techniques, creativity, instinct for bold flavors, and decades of experience to the idea of cooking vegetables and fruits over live fire. Blistered tomatoes reinvigorate a classic Caprese salad. Eggplants are buried whole in the coals—a technique called rescoldo—then dance that fine line between burned and incinerated until they yield an ineffable creaminess made irresistible with a slather of parsley, chile, and aioli. Brussels sprout leaves are scorched and served with walnuts; whole cabbages are sliced thick, grilled like steaks, and rubbed with spice for a mustard-fennel crust. Corn, fennel, artichokes, beets, squash, even beans—this is the vegetable kingdom, on fire.

Yawd by Adrian Forte

Yawd = comfort food that sticks to your ribs! Dive into this bold, flavor-filled cookbook packed with fresh Afro-Caribbean recipes to bring some island vibes to your home.

In his first cookbook, Top Chef Canada star Adrian Forte shares more than 100 inspiring and delicious recipes to get you fired up in the kitchen. Try new riffs on Caribbean classics like Coconut Fried Chicken, Spiced Steamed Fish, Rasta Pasta, and Pepper Shrimp Paella. Incorporate more African ancestral ingredients into your repertoire with Ackee & Saltfish Fritters or Okra Pilaf; and try the dishes Adrian has now made his signature like Oxtail Gnocchi or Jerk-Marinated Chicken Coq au Vin. As well as great recipes—including a chapter on soups and porridges and oodles of plant-based options—Yawd explores the key ingredients of Afro-Caribbean cuisine and gives multi-use recipes for essentials such as Jerk Dry Rub and Marinade or Pickled Scotch Bonnets.

Brave New Meal by Bad Manners

Brave New Meal shows you the way: 
 
• 100+ life-changing vegan recipes including Orange Peel Cauliflower, Beeteroni Pizza, Nashville Hot Shroom Sammie, Jackfruit Pupusas, and Plum-Side-Down Cake 
• Killer photos so you’ll know for sure you didn’t f*ck it up 
• Tips on how to stretch your budget, limit food waste, and incorporate every edible piece of the plant into your meals (or finally find a use for that wilted kale in your fridge)
• Shortcuts and substitutions for when the grocery store is sold out or you need help getting dinner on the goddamn table already 
• A produce glossary that breaks down everything you probably never knew (but most def should) about all the fresh stuff in your market

Antoni: Let’s Do Dinner by Antoni Porowski (Signed copies, while they last)

Let’s Do Dinner is an invitation into Antoni’s easy kitchen. Dinner with Antoni means satisfying meals full of clean protein and loads of vegetables, with splurges of carbs and decadence. Simple, yes, but always special. Antoni keeps shopping lists short and steps and pans to a minimum. 

Pulled chicken nachos, pasta carbonara with scallions and peas, or pan-seared steak with harissa butter and crispy potatoes—it’s all good for post-work evenings or casual entertaining. Antoni shows how to crank the flavor, make exciting suppers from pantry staples, create new takes on classics by swapping in one surprising ingredient, and build a rousingly flavored vegan grain bowl. Plus, he lets you in on the secret weapons in every kitchen that get great food on the table fast.

Bagels, Schmears, and a Nice Piece of Fish by Cathy Barrow

Bagel lovers rejoice! This delightful cookbook makes it easy to bake fresh bagels in your own kitchen with just five base ingredients and simple techniques. With advice on mixing the dough, shaping the bagels, proofing, boiling, baking, slicing, and storing, you will be a master bagel-maker in no time.

Recipes include two dozen variations on the New York bagel, with classic and innovative flavors ranging from Sesame to Blueberry to Hatch Chile Jack. You’ll also find recipes for homemade sweet and savory spreads, schmears, pickles, and other deli mainstays like Home-Cured Lox and Chicken Salad.

Eitan Eats the World by Eitan Bernath

In Eitan’s debut cookbook, he channels his high-energy passion for all things delicious into eighty-five inventive and approachable recipes, paired with mouthwatering photography. They range from new twists on comfort food and classics (PB&J Pancakes, Double Grilled Cheese with Blueberry-Thyme Jam, Bourbon Brown Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies) to his versions of dishes from around the world (Green Shakshuka, Chicken Kathi Roll, Beef Souvlaki) that he has meticulously studied with friends, neighbors, and other chefs.
 
Overflowing with positivity, creativity, and the “You can definitely do this!” attitude that catapulted Eitan into the media spotlight, Eitan Eats the World will charm and inspire readers to get in the kitchen and start having fun.

What we read when we read about food

One of the things that makes A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers delicious is the descriptive writing, worthy of its food critic protagonist.

“Craddock’s Corpse Reviver #2 is an exquisite drink that sits on the lintel of anarchy: what makes it also breaks it. The splash of absinthe propels the Corpse Reviver #2 into the territory of the faintly hallucinogenic–the absinthe also dates and places the drink.”

A Certain Hunger

In fact, the protagonist, Dorothy Daniels, would favorably place herself in the company of the outstanding practitioners of her craft.

“I am a great food critic, one of the greatest, and, I should add, a great food writer; Gael Greene, Ruth Reichl, Sam Sifton, R.W. Apple, and the rest can collectively kiss my delectable ass.”

– Dorothy Daniels, A Certain Hunger

A Certain Hunger (Unnamed Press) is the staff pick of the month for January 2022. Read store manager Emily’s full review.

Coincidentally, New York Times food editor Sam Sifton is speaking and headlining a fundraising gala for the Friends of the Key West Library on Jan. 31. Learn more about that event and the full 2022 speaker series at the FOL website. If you aren’t able to attend an event, watch for replays on the FOL YouTube channel.

For foodie mysteries of a cozier type, don’t miss the Key West Food Critic Mystery series by Lucy Burdette. The most recent one is A Scone of Contention, which takes you off the island, all the way to Scotland, but most of this series is set in Key West and gives you a fun tour of our island paradise, along with a murder or two. Read the Q&A we did with Lucy a couple of years back, and watch our social media feed for occasional sightings of Lottie, the author’s canine companion.

The next Key West Food Critic Mystery, A Dish to Die For, comes out in August, but you can preorder it now. We can preorder almost any book once it has a confirmed publication date. Check out this handy list of a few of the books we are looking forward to this year.

If all of this talk about food has made you hungry, we always have a wide range of cookbooks in store. Come in and browse for something new for your dinner table.