Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone - Deborah Madison

My other favorite cookbook (besides How to Cook Everything). We cook mostly, though not exclusively, vegetarian, and I love this book. Encyclopedic, and Deborah Madison has a knack for breaking down a class of recipes into its constitutent parts. She explains the different steps involved in all stir-fries, for instance, so you can riff on the theme.

Ten years ago I bough Madison's book, The Greens Cookbook, on the advice of a friend who said it was the one vegetarian cookbook he could cook from for meat eaters and they would not feel disappointed. But I found The Greens Cookbook too fiddly - because it is based on a restaurant, the recipes all have 20 ingredients and 9 steps. Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone is much more friendly to the home cook. You can do fiddly stuff if you want, but you don't have to.

This book is a real boon if you belong to a CSA and have to figure out, like I do this week, what will I do with a whole mess of corn, tomatoes, tomatillos and edamame?

Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
Deborah Madison
1997
Available from Amazon

Kitchenaid 7-Cup Food Processor KFP10

A friend asked what food processor I bought and was I happy with it. So here's my answer.

I bought the Kitchenaid KFP710 at Target.

On the plus side:

• It's a Consumer Reports Best Buy.
• It costs $90 - which I appreciated because I wasn't ready to commit to a $200 appliance I wasn't sure I would use.
• It's easy to clean. (I had a Cuisinart briefly 10 years ago, and it seemed hard to clean the feed tube on that brand.)
• It works great.
• You can wash everything in the dishwasher (except the base - duh).

On the minus side:

• It's a 7-cup bowl, and sometimes I wish I had a bigger one. Of course, it's not like I have counter space for a bigger one. And I'm definitely glad I'm not trying to store extra food processor bowls, which some of the more expensive models come with.
• They don't make extra blades for it (which they do for the 9- or 12-cup models). It comes with a metal chopping blade and a disk that does grating and 2mm slicing. Now I'm used to it and those blades work well for me, but initially I wished I had a disk that did 4mm and 6mm slicing. 2mm slicing is pretty thin for something like carrots.
• It doesn't have a little insert bowl for chopping small amounts of things - but honestly, I can't think why I would want that.
• Parmesan cheese is too hard for the grating blade - it just ends up pulverizing it, rather than shredding it. And if I recall, it sometimes sounded like it was laboring to deal with the Parmesan cheese. I just went back to grating Parmesan by hand. I never tried grating mozzarella in it, but I suspect it might have a hard time with that as well, because of the smooshing aspect.
  
• The blades are freaking sharp. Kind of terrifying. I cut my finger on the grating blade early on and it gave me great respect for the blades. Because I have kids, I actually store the blades in a plastic box on top of the cabinets (along with my Microplane grater which I use for Parmesan cheese). I would definitely not store them in a drawer that you have to fish around in. Of course, sharp blades means it works better - you just have to be careful.

I especially like the food processor for

• slicing greens (kale, chard, cabbage). If I do it by hand I end up with big chunks. With the food processor, the texture of my dishes is much improved, plus it's fast.
• grating zucchini or carrots
• making salsa
• mixing together cold butter and flour for the beginnings of pie crust, hot cross buns, other breads
• chopping onions, though if I just have 1 onion to chop I typically do it by hand.
  

Kitchenaid 7-Cup Food Processor KFP10
Available from Target

How to Cook Everything - Mark Bittman

Like the Joy of Cooking - only hip. I love the Joy of Cooking (I have the 1975 edition), but I find I use it almost exclusively for baking. The main dishes are too heavy or bland or roasted for my taste. How to Cook Everything has a much more modern feel - it has stir fries, and curries, and pad thai, and Italian food. Encyclopedic (as one would hope), with great illustrations to explain techniques, hundreds of useful lists, variations of many basic recipes, and an accessible tone. Mark Bittman speaks so highly of food processors in this book that I bought one, and I've been using it like mad. I love his section on bread and pie crusts - I'd never made either one before in my life - and now I feel pretty competent. My new favorite cookbook - I've been using it for several months.

If you look on Amazon, you'll see several books on this theme: How To Cook Everything: The Basics or How to Cook Everything: Vegetarian. My understanding is that these are just subsets of the main book, so just get the main book.

You should also check out the New York Times for Mark Bittman's excellent column, The Minimalist, and his blog, Bitten.

How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food
Mark Bittman
1998
Available from Amazon - a new edition comes out in October

Interlibrary loan

Can I just say a word in favor of interlibrary loan? I love it. What an astonishing thing that I can get a copy of any book, published any time, in print or not, for free at my local library. I try not to buy books until I've read them (or else how will I know they're worth keeping around?), and interlibrary loan means I can read anything I want. My local library offers interlibrary loan; yours probably does too. The books I request mostly come from the local university and community college libraries, but I've had books shipped to me in North Carolina from Arizona. What a great service. Support your local libraries!

Curious Cook - NY Times - Harold McGee

Harold McGee is the author of the encyclopedic book about the science in the kitchen, On Food and Cooking. He writes a regular column for the New York Times called The Curious Cook. Two of my recent favorites are one about heat and one about cold. I learned a fantastic trick in the column on cold - you can make ice cream by putting the ice cream mixture in a ziploc bag and putting the bag in a bowl with ice and salt. Shake the bag a couple of times over the course of thirty minutes, and presto! Icecream with no icecream maker. Apparently 4H groups have been using this trick forever, but it is new to me, and I am so excited.

Unfortunately the Times doesn't provide an RSS feed for The Curious Cook - so you'll just have to keep your eye out for it. It seems to appear the first Wednesday of the month in the Dining & Wine section.

The Curious Cook
Harold McGee
The New York Times Dining & Wine section - 1st Wednesday of the month

Beautiful Boy - David Sheff

An amazing book by a father about his son's addiction to methamphetamine. I picked it up out of professional interest as a substance abuse counselor, and I will be recommending it to clients in the future. I thought David Sheff did a fantastic job of explaining both addiction and what it's like to love someone with an addiction. Plus he's a great writer. Next I'm going to read his son Nic's book Tweak.

Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
David Sheff
2008
Available from Amazon