What does a supertaster want for Christmas? Cookbooks and food-related writing, please! I was pleased to get both this year, in the form of The Quick Recipe, and The San Francisco Food Lover's Guide.
Last year I got both a subscription to Cook's Illustrated magazine and their book, The New Best Recipe, for Christmas, and got so hooked on their recipes and deliciously geeky scientific method approach to finding the perfect recipe that when I saw they came out with a quick recipe collection I knew I had to have it. I've already browsed through half of it, and it looks tasty. First of all, it looks like you really could make these recipes in the amount of time they specify. Most cookbooks seem to underestimate the amount of time it takes a regular person in a non-test kitchen without a staff on hand to do prep work to make anything. I almost always take 30-50% longer to make anything in a cookbook. But maybe not these.
Second, it looks like food I would actually make. Maybe not Roast Pork Tenderloins with Figs and Balsamic Sauce on a weeknight after work, but even that wouldn't be so hard for a mid-week dinner if I did a little prep the day before. But for every recipe on that scale, there are four or five more like Penne with White Beans, Pancetta, and Arugula, which takes 20 min. I think I'll dive in and try something next week and see how it really goes.
Patricia Unterman's San Francisco Food Lover's Guide I spied on a friend's shelf and was immediately charmed by its loving descriptions of restaurants, markets, cafés, and bakeries all over the Bay Area. I found The Oakville Grocery and Vella Cheese Co. by scanning its Wine Country chapter and thereby fortified a trip to Sonoma and Napa last spring. Now that I'm a native, I decided I needed my own copy and am now happily exploring the foodie side of the city via my armchair. Starting with my own neighborhood (Potrero Hill) and checking Unterman's opinions of the local places against my own, I am moving out to adjacent neighborhoods next (The Mission), and am looking forward to spending the next months reading and eating my way around the city.
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