Lately, here are a few I’m loving: Joy the Baker’s book, 100 Simple & Comforting Recipes I feel like I am sitting in Joy’s kitchen when I read this book and that we’re long lost gal pals. Not only are the recipes and photography great, but her story-telling is fabulous. If you like your cookbooks with a side of story (and butter and sugar), this book is for you. I met Joy and she is every bit as sweet, funny, and witty in person as she is on her blog and in the book and is just so darn endearing.
Lindsay Landis of Love and Olive Oil’s book, The Cookie Dough Lover’s Cookbook A cookbook dedicated to eating raw (egg-free and safe) cookie dough. Need I say more? Her photography is spectacular and I also gushed about this book in this post.
Momofuku Milk Bar by Christina Tosi. A more complete book review is here. The book is not for those who are looking for quickie recipes, basic recipes, things you’ve seen, done, or tried before. The recipes are adventurous, both in terms of time needed to devote to them and also in terms of pairing ingredients you likely never have. Potato chips in cookies, ingredients that you likely have not worked with such as liquid glucose, or techniques like creaming butter and sugar for at least 7 minutes when making cookies are things found in this book. I view this book as culinary inspiration despite it not necessarily being “practical” if you only have 20 minutes to spare in the kitchen.
Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks’ book, Super Natural Everyday: Well-Loved Recipes from my Natural Foods Kitchen. I rediscovered this book after putting it down for over a year. Straightforward recipes that focus on using real ingredients, natural ingredients. There are no marshmallows and no red dye #40 in anything Heidi makes. She is vegetarian and cooks with eggs and butter, and there is plenty of focus on beans, lentils, whole grains, natural, seasonal, organic, locally-sourced ingredients. She makes you want to fall in love with squash blossoms from the farmers market and fava beans all over again.
Matt Armendariz of Matt Bites’ upcoming book, Focus on Food Photography for Bloggers. Although it’s not a cookbook per se, anything by Matt is a must-read and I can’t wait. I adore his wit, humor, kindness, and the life-changing day I spent with him.
Helene Dujardin’s of Tartlette’s book Plate to Pixel. This is a book that I put down, pick up, come back to, re-read, re-read ten more times, and have been letting it “marinate” for the past year and a half. It’s singularly the best book to date I’ve ever read on food photography and food styling. I cannot recommend it highly enough and wrote more extensively about it here.
I’m extremely excited about the release of Jenny Flake of Picky-Palate’s book, The Picky Palate Cookbook. Jenny is such a sweetheart and she’s a mom, a fellow SoCal blogger, and makes the most amazing desserts. If you think I have a sweet tooth, Jenny’s desserts are full of Oreos, marshmallows, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and butter. Yes, I love them all. No doubt the photos will be wonderful as Matt Armendariz was the photographer.
Lori Lange of The Recipe Girl’s book is coming out later this year. Lori is a fellow San Diego and mom, and I am so excited for her book. She has such an extensive collection of recipes (2500+) on her blog and I can’t wait to see what she came up with for her book. Matt did her photography and I am sure it’s stunning. Jenna has a book coming out Gaby has a book coming out about avocados. My dear friend Alison Lewis of Ingredients, Inc. has another book coming out. There are so many books I am excited to get my chocolate fingerprints all over that I can hardly wait. What are your favorite cookbooks? Any cookbooks you’ve always wanted but haven’t bought or are excited to purchase? There are classics that never go out of style (think Joy of Baking) and then there are new books that come onto the scene that fill a gap that you never knew existed. I love those books. I also will forget about a cookbook put a cookbook down for a month or two, or a year, or even longer sometimes and then come back to it. The recipes, ideas, techniques are new again, all over. I have more books than I have time to cook and let’s face it, I’m cooking for a family of 3, not 13. I did a Cookbook Reviews post ages ago and have tried to keep it somewhat updated in case you like books as much as I do. Do you use cookbooks? Old-fashioned with paper and pages or digital? I do have a few digital copies of cookbooks that I can read from the Kindle app on my iMac that I downloaded. As I said in the opening of the post, real books that I can hold in my hands and thumb through the pages will never lose their appeal. Enjoy your weekend! The winner of the Adonia Greek Yogurt Giveaway is CJ at Food Stories
