Daily Loaf

Alton Brown is an odd poster boy for the modern Food Network. His Good Eats cooking show, which debuted on the network in 1999, is quirky. Incredibly informative. Culinarily wonky, even. Not the kind of thing you’d expect from the sanitized, simplified, housewife-friendly cooking channel that counts Paula Deen, Rachael Ray and Giada DiLaurentis’ cleavage as its primary stars.

But, somehow, Brown has been able to carve out a home on the Food Network as the resident Mr. Wizard of food, perfect as the knowledgeable color-man on Iron Chef America, or whenever the honchos need to trot out someone with both credibility and charisma. Good Eats continues to garner solid ratings and the recently released Good Eats: The Early Years ($37.50), a collection of recipes spanning the first six seasons of the show, will likely be a holiday cookbook success.

Back in 2002, after three solid seasons of incredible recipes based on serious culinary and scientific principles, Read the rest of this entry »

Way back a hundred million years ago, when my husband and I were first married, we received a copy of The Silver Palate Cookbook as a wedding gift.  It sat proudly in our orange crate bookcase alongside The Joy of Cooking and The Betty Crocker Cookbook, also wedding gifts. That bookcase made quite a statement paired with our dining room set of a card table and four metal folding chairs.  (Did I mention that we were poor as dirt back then?)  Anyway, whenever I needed some culinary inspiration, I’d reach for Sheila and Julee’s wildly popular and creative Silver Palate to get me started. Read the rest of this entry »

Linguine with a pink shrimp sauce
From Giuliano Hazan’s Thirty Minute Pasta.
(Read our interview with Giuliano Hazan.)

This is a very elegant sauce that is traditionally served with seafood-filled ravioli. A portion of the shrimp are chopped very fine, giving the sauce a consistency similar to meat sauce. Parsley at the end adds lightness and fragrance.

Serves 4

Ingredients:

¾ pound large shrimp
2 medium cloves garlic
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons tomato paste
½ cup dry white wine
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 pound linguine
6–7 sprigs flat-leaf Italian parsley
1 cup heavy cream

Read the rest of this entry »

I finally broke down and bought the book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.

It is wonderful and I highly recommend it. No more buying packaged bread for me. And my house smells like a bakery. However, it is a bit dangerous because bread makes my butt big and the fact that I slather it with butter doesn’t really help. I suppose I could have a worse habit, like crystal meth or something. Crystal meth, butter, crystal meth, butter — yep, I’ll take my butter!

I have made two types of bread so far, the 100 percent Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread and the Oat Flour Bread. Both were extremely delicious and healthy. However, I did notice the bread really didn’t rise well. I followed the very well-written directions, but the dough didn’t act right. So today I went to their website. There is a section listed “Errors”

One of the errors in the book is that all the recipes as written call for 1 1/2 packets of yeast, when it should be TWO packets of yeast! Huge boo-boo on their part.

If you have the book I suggest you check out the error section of their website.

But even with the problems, I still love the book and will continue to make my own bread.

Enjoy,
The Hungry Housewife

Slate food writer Lauren Shockey grabbed a few cookbooks pegged to famous restaurants — Eat Me, Carmine’s Family-Style Cookbook, and Chanterelle — and tried to recreate the dishes at home. We’ve all done something like that, certainly, but she also had the opportunity to compare her attempts with the real deal by visiting the restaurants. The result? Surprisingly sucessful. Read the rest of this entry »

Renowned cookbook author and Mexican cuisine authority Diana Kennedy will be at Seminole Heights’ favorite Mexican food diner — El Taconazo (affectionately known at the Taco Bus) — Friday, February 13. She’ll be signing books at 5:30 and teach a cooking class at 6:30.

I’m a huge fan of Kennedy’s. The first cookbook I ever owned was her The Art of Mexican Cooking, which is due for anew printing this March.

While she’s visiting Tampa she’ll also do a book signing at Inkwood Saturday the 14th and offer a cooking class at the Rolling Pin Kitchen in Brandon on Thursday the 12th. Her schedule is posted below.

Rene Valenzuela, owner and chef of the Taco Bus writes: Read the rest of this entry »

The text on the Tastebook site calls its own product “stunning and unique.” For once, I’ll have to agree with the PR flunkies. With just a little effort, you can create a recipe book of your own family favorites that’s miles ahead of the old-fashioned box of handwritten note cards.

The process is simple: just upload you recipes (with a picture if you have one), tag them into sections, title your masterpiece and pay the $19.95 (plus shipping). The resulting cookbook has the classic Betty Crocker look, with a hard cover, labeled tabs delineating sections and full-color, ringbound pages.

You can also share recipes with the Tastebook community, pull recipes from its database for your cookbook, or order Tastebooks created by other people — some of them recognized chefs like the editors of Epicurious, Cooking Light or Food & Wine.

In these days of throw-away, consumable crap, a personalized cookbook like this is the kind of thing that people will hold onto for generations. If your recipes are any good, that is.