Because our neighbors with whom we share our veggie booty each week are on vacation, we get the entire portion this week (that cantaloupe would have been mine, all mine! Sob!). So I have a few zucchini and some pickling cukes. Anyone have any good zucchini recipes, other than zucchini bread and zucchini casserole? Because we are sick of both, and it’d be a shame to waste two perfectly good zucchini. I found a couple recipes for refrigerator pickles on the web, but if anyone has any foolproof suggestions, do tell. I always feel so darn domestic when I do things like make pickles or jam. A few summers ago I made a ton of peach jam and strawberry jam, inspired mostly by Laurie Colwin. It was so good that I wound up giving jars of it away as Christmas gifts. I’ve also done apple butter, which was tasty but not the hit that the peach jam was. All three were scarily simple; the most complicated part was boiling the jars to make sure they were sealed, and I solved much of that trauma by using my spaghetti pot – one of those stainless steel pots with the built-in strainers. I have since acquired a big canning kettle at a yard sale but have yet to use it. At the old house we had a lovely and high-yielding sour cherry tree. What we didn’t immediately bake into pies and almond tarts, I preserved in big jars of vodka. That was pretty yummy too, and really simple. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the cellar is full of preserves and canned/pickled veggies and fruit from generations back. That idea did creep me out – I mean, do you really want to even touch three-decades old preserves? If you can’t/won’t eat it eventually, the point of stockpiling it is nil. But it makes me feel so Martha-Stewart-y, which is a lovely feeling. Like I do have my domestic shit together, when it is patently clear to anyone who knows me that, really, I so do not.
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As far as Laurie Colwin goes – a few days ago I stumbled across this article by Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin, about the editing (or in this case, non-editing) that goes on in the world of the cookbook. Apparently the responsibility for the success of recipes falls squarely on the chef’s shoulders, not the editor, so if your author is busy filming a reality TV show or running six restaurants, you might not want to get your hopes up too high. I am guessing everyone has cookbooks that they have given up on. I have given away both James Peterson’s Splendid Soups and Crescent Dragonwagon’s Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread cookbook because 1) the recipes are all way too much work. Who the hell wants to roast a duck to make broth on a regular basis? Any cookbook recipe with ingredient lists that include references to other pages is fairly useless to me at this point in my life. If the ingredient is “Jellied Duck Consomme (see page 112)” and I turn to page 112 and discover a recipe for said consommé that takes three hours to concoct, I am very darn likely to bag on whatever recipe was asking for the consomme. And 2) I have yet to make a recipe from either of these books that was edible, let alone come close to blowing my socks off, even after making the three-hour jellied duck consommé. (One of the very few things my husband has flat-out refused to eat was a garlic soup recipe from the Peterson book.) The pics are pretty, the recipes sound delish, but they never ever turn out right. Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking and More Home Cooking have the same trouble. Although they are such a joy to read, with Colwin’s breezy style and humor permeating the text, that I keep them and reread them. But her recipes almost never turn out well. And when she insists, as she does all too often, that something is a “snap,” it turns out it is either inedible or it is not a snap at all unless you happen to be an invalid confined to the house for ten hours at a time since I could never leave my gas oven overnight without worrying to death. But I will say this – her recipes for black bean yam cakes and rosemary walnuts make every other mistake worthwhile. I could happily eat an entire batch of yam cakes by myself and sometimes do, and I have given countless jars of the walnuts as hostess gifts.
I adore John Thorne’s books but have never attempted his recipes. He has too much Colwin in his tone to be reassuring (when he quotes from a part of The Tin Drum in which a bedridden character is making spaghetti, sauced with ketchup, in a tin can, I knew I should probably steer clear of his recipes), but gosh, they’re comforting and entertaining to read.
I recently read some of Nigel Slater’s books, and he too has that Colwin tone: “Yes, you simply saute the duck for three hours and then chop it fine and pack it into a terrine with lots of fresh tarragon and dill, and voila, you have sandwich spread that you can just slap upon the loaf of organic cracked whole wheat bread that happens to be lying around, and maybe use some of that delicious homemade garlic-celery salt mayonnaise you whipped up yesterday. Simply delish! And so simple.” In whose world, Nigel? In my house it’s more likely you’ll get tuna from a can and mayo from the Hellman’s jar (hey at least I don’t use Miracle Whip!), slapped onto some week-old wheat bread. (In my mother’s infamous words, “You’ll eat it and you’ll like it!”)
My foolproof cookbooks – I swear by my Fannie Farmer (it has my finally-successful pie crust recipe in it, and even if that were the only useful recipe I would still keep that book forever). I also use the New Basics Cookbook a lot. It has never failed me, particularly when it comes to dealing with some oddball ingredient I have not used before. I have every single issue except for three of Fine Cooking; admittedly, after almost ten years of issues, they have begun to repeat themselves, but the recipes are almost always spectacular and many of them have made their way into my usual recipe rounds. To them I must credit my gumbo, my lemon curd, my shortbread, a delectable baked ziti, an easy and delicious lasagna, and the most amazing chocolate cupcakes I have ever tasted. Oh, and the aforementioned sour cherry-almond torte which I believe Dan would sell his soul for. And I have this little book my mom gave me years ago, called A Year of Cookies which has some of the best cookie recipes I have ever tried in it. But closest to my heart and best of all is the tattered, beat-up, food- and grease-stained, annotated notebook given to me by my mom when I moved out of the house, with all her recipes in it. The best Sloppy Joes ever, total comfort meatloaf, the cheesecake that my neighbor made for my mom’s birthday every year and that was rationed like gold (now whenever my brother comes to visit, I make one and we each eat half : )), her ambrosia fruit salad that I craved wildly with each pregnancy (yes, the kind with sour cream and those mini marshmallows), my grandmother’s apple cake and her halupchis (which take *forever* and are worth every single second). Now that my mom is gone, it’s even more precious to me, and I wish that I’d realized she wouldn’t be around for ever and had the notebook enshrined instead of actually using it and messing it up.
7 comments:
I have given How to Cook Everything as a gift a number of times, and it always goes over well. Even my grandmother, who disdains cookbooks as crutches, approves of it, and that's pretty high praise.
I think I first heard of it when the Cook Slut reviwed it on Bookslut. :-)
If you go to www.americanprofile.com and search "zucchini", some of the recipes there look good. These are recipes sent in by everyday people. The judges then sample them and print the winners. They sell cookbooks also. I have been thinking of buying one to add to my oversized collection.
Dammit, blogger ate my comment!
What what I said, in essense, was this: I will always love Laurie Colwin for teaching me how to make bread without tears. I don't use her recipes so much as I use her techniques.
And also, my favorite way to eat zucchini is sliced into half-moons and fried with bacon and sweet onions. Maybe throw in some basil, salt and cracked pepper. Tastes like summer!
BUT what I said.... Not WHAT what I said.
Sheesh. I give up.
What is a halupchi?
basically cabbage leaves wrapped around rice and meat, cooked in tomato sauce. it's the ukrainian version of normal stuffed cabbage. yummy!
Last night we threw zucchini spears on the grill with a little olive oil, salt and pepper, and that was tasty. Although you can only eat so much like that. And it was so simple! Haha. Especially since someone else did all the work.
I end up using Betty Crocker more than anything else, for basic things like "how long to cook an ear of corn." As far as real meals...well, I guess I need to spend more time with cookbooks.
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