s/d: cookbooks!

we are a fuchsia dunlop household. her books are wonderful

woks of life is, in fact, great

yeah I don't know how many books she has but she has two very good books on Sichuan and Hunan cuisine

xp

fuchsia rules, I've seen tons of really wonderful books from her and others on individual cuisines, but not a whole lot that are like "ok here are all the diff regions and the types of food they prepare and how they've influenced or been influenced by these other regions etc etc etc"

ya she’s basically exclusively szech

Another vote for Fuschia Dunlop.

As well as the Hunan and two Sichuan books she has a couple of others.

‘Every grain of rice’ which is a more general every day Chinese cookery book.

‘The land of fish and rice’ which is cuisine from the Jiangnan (Lower Yangtze) Région

All highly recommended and highly accessible but Every grain of rice is the one I use the most as it is really focussed on everyday cookery.

I've cooked about half the Sichuan book and idk max 3 recipes from "The land of fish and rice". Not sure I have an explanation.

She's great in any case, her memoir is a good read too.

I’m probably about the same ratio. I think I just love the spicy bombast of Sichuan food.

where is the love for OLIA HERCULES? I've been working my way through Kaukasis and Summer Kitchens, and I have a pot of bubbling green tomatoes at the ferment, but ultimately I'lll just say she has a love of food that everyone should engage with.

i've had kaukasis on my cookbooks list probably since it came out but never bought it. what does she do with green tomatoes? i am supposedly getting a batch in my farm share tomorrow and have never worked with them.

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt put out a kids book with recipes if anyone wants to cook with their progeny

nice of kenji to remind anyone who missed it the first 5000 times that he is a dad

lol do u need a minute cad

haha he had a kid and then instantly altered all of his bios to read like this: J. Kenji López-Alt is a stay-at-home dad who moonlights as the Chief Culinary Consultant of Serious Eats.....

I lost track of him after the Food Lab book came out and he cut back on writing to open a restaurant, didn't even realize he had his own cooking channel until last month. His videos rack up a crazy number of views for a guy wearing a GoPro and chatting.

his videos are good! he's still one of the best out there at teaching people how to actually cook but could otherwise stand to relax a bit.

His videos are good fun, I trust his recipes and I enjoy peeping at his kitchen and fridge

kenji's zucchini basil soup (on youtube) is KILLER

His pressure cooker chile con carne is a winter staple.

Nice. ive always wanted a pressure cooker

pressure cookers are great

Instapot mania seems to have died down but I still use mine once or twice a week. The stovetop pressure cooker I had wasn't worth the effort for the extra pressure.

don't have place for a pressure cooker, and am not sure I need to cook my food that much faster, but I liked reading about that J. Kenji Lopez-Alt Chili Con Carne recipe

it calls for a dutch oven, which I do have

yeah had to grudgingly admit the instant pot is way better than a stovetop pc

https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2015/01/quick-and-easy-pressure-cooker-chicken-lentil-bacon-stew-recipe.html

another incredibly good cold weather recipe but I swap out the bone-in/skin-on thighs for boneless and a little bit of gelatin powder. Pressure cooked chicken skin is gross and more trouble than it's worth to fish out.

made that one a few times, it's quite good

I have tried more recipes from Ottolenghi's "Jerusalem" than most other cookbooks over the last few years I think. After many years I'm still impressed by Patricia Wells' "Bistro Cooking" especially, but also "The Best Recipe" book, the Silver Palate books, and Madhur Jaffrey's books

i've had kaukasis on my cookbooks list probably since it came out but never bought it. what does she do with green tomatoes? i am supposedly getting a batch in my farm share tomorrow and have never worked with them.

― call all destroyer, Saturday, 24 October 2020 01:58 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Recipe in Kaukasis is a mostly-straight fermentation recipe - cover in brine with various flavourings, leave bubble away for a week or two until they taste fizzy. There's another great/simple fried green tomatoes recipe in Summer Kitchens - the secret is to cover them in a huge amount of cheese after frying.

yeah had to grudgingly admit the instant pot is way better than a stovetop pc

― call all destroyer, Sunday, 25 October 2020 1:04 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

it has a sauté function, can't say i'm a big fan of it because it tends to get too hot and hard to control but it's ok for browning meat or onions before pressure cooking

Re: Instant Pot, it's better than a standard pressure cooker, imo, but not better than a slow cooker. Or at least not a 1:1 replacement. If you want to use it as a slow cooker, you have to kind of adjust the time/temperature to compensate. Fwiw, my Dutch oven is pretty much my most go-to big pot.

I heard something good about a cookbook called "Feast," apparently a broad survey of Islamic cuisine around the world, but I saw one review that said the book was OK but ultimately not for "most American kitchens." I figured, OK, it's going to be some rube bristling at hummus or sumac or something, but no, it was a recipe for ... roast camel hump. And I thought, yeah, that is pretty exotic. Can I even buy a camel hump? A quick look suggested no, at least not easily. But I soon enough came across the cookbook author's blog expressing big enthusiasm for camel hump, and, curious, read up to see where she got it. And she concedes that the easiest way to get a camel hump is ... from someone cooking an entire camel. Not a big one, mind, just a small one, but an entire camel all the same, which I'm pretty confident isn't any easier a get. And I thought, you know, this cookbook is probably not for me.

i've never used it as a slow cooker and also haven't used my slow cooker (iirc) since i got it. there's probably nothing i would slow cook instead of pressure cooking for 1 hr - 90 min.

i've never encountered a recipe for camel hump! i think i have a book with sheep's brains, but no hump. even if i could get that i'm not sure i would cook it because what if i don't like it? there is a grocery store here that i think is owned by yemenis and has a butcher shop attached to it, could probably get a place like that to order a camel hump. probably deliciously fatty.

really? tell me more... my stovetop one has broken and i’m looking at replacing. was thinking that browning things would be the biggest issue with instant pot?

― just sayin, Sunday, October 25, 2020 8:48 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

for me the stovetop pressure cooker involved just enough monitoring that it outweighed the convenience factor. having to wait around for it to come up to pressure so i could reduce the heat (my stovetop is aggressive) and then making sure that it stayed at a happy pressure meant i was just staying in the kitchen as much as i would for any other operation, where ideally if i wanted to do a pot of beans it would be a set and forget operation. so the instant pot takes care of all of that.

the saute function isn't amazing but does the job for onions and stuff. if i needed to brown something really carefully i guess i would do it in a saute pan, deglaze and transfer to the instant pot, but that hasn't come up.

A lot of instant pot recipes we've found and like aren't just toss everything into the pot and let it go types. They typically involve growing meat or veggies first on sautés before locking everything else in there. Honestly, we love to use the IP most for hardboiled eggs!

Anyway, for the record: https://www.anissas.com/camel-hump-finally/

I bought Jerusalem right before moving and never quite “bonded” with it for lack of a better term, I really should go through it again for ideas