It's November once again and you guessed it! This month the lending library is adding two more cookbooks to the shelf. Whether you need something new and delicious for a get-together or just want to stay in for a day keeping the kitchen warm, these books will give you the recipes you want.
Tight budget this year? Cooking for a small crowd? Don’t have fancy kitchen gear? Then consider checking out Cooking on a Bootstrap by Jack Monroe. The recipes in this book tend to be simple and easy, but also filling and delicious. Some are even able to be made in the microwave. Make your own bread using a pint glass to measure ingredients, cook up a tasty soup for one, or bake a vegan chocolate cake (with beets!). Many of the recipes are vegetarian or vegan, and recipe sizes range from feeds one to feeds about four. From the back of the book:
“‘My mission is simple: that cooking on a budget can be sumptuous. It can be nourishing. It can be devastatingly delicious. It can be all of these things with the smallest of kitchens and the simplest of equipment and absolutely no skills whatsoever. It can be yours.’
Jack Monroe shares over 100 simple and sustaining recipes including Pint-Glass Bread, Marmite Mac’n’Cheese, Self-Love Stew, and Whirly Buns. Proving that great cooking isn’t just for those with fancy gadgets or ingredients, Cooking on a Bootstrap shows that living on a stringent budget should never be a barrier to incredible food.”
For those who like a dash of history with their dinner, Rice (a Savor the South cookbook) by Michael W. Twitty will deliver. Twitty is a culinary historian who not only begins the book with a lesson in rice, but offers a brief description for every recipe tracking flavor origins and histories. With cooking influences from West Africa to Thailand to America, the recipes in this book are varied and delicious, and show rice is so much more than a side dish. From the cover:
“Among the staple foods most welcomed on southern tables—and on tables around the world—rice is without question the most versatile. As Michael W. Twitty observes, depending on regional tastes, rice may be enjoyed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner; as main dish, side dish, and snack; in dishes savory and sweet. Filling and delicious, rice comes in numerous botanical varieties and offers a vast range of scents, tastes, and textures depending on how it is cooked. In some dishes, it is crunchingly crispy; in others, soothingly smooth; in still others, somewhere right in between. Commingled or paired with other foods, rice is indispensable to the foodways of the South.
As Twitty’s fifty-one recipes deliciously demonstrate, rice stars in Creole, Acadian, soul food, Low Country, and Gulf Coast kitchens, as well as in the kitchens of cooks from around the world who are now at home in the South. Exploring rice’s culinary history and African diasporic identity, Twitty shows how to make the southern classics as well as international dishes—everything from Savannah Rice Waffles to Ghanaian Crab Stew. As Twitty gratefully sums up, ‘Rice connects me to every other person, southern and global, who is nourished by rice’s traditions and customs.’”