That's What Jenni Said

When it comes to cuisine, Marcella Hazan is my definitive guide for all things Italian, so it takes a pretty remarkable cookbook to earn a permanent space in my collection alongside her work. Domenica Machetti has written one of those cookbooks and it's titled The Glorious Pasta of Italy .  Comprised of 274 pages of well-researched and well-written recipes for making a variety of pasta, sauces, soups, and entrees, it has served as a valuable resource for exploring new flavors in my kitchen. I enjoyed Marchetti's fresh tomato sauce so much that I used it one summer recently as my basic recipe for transforming 125 pounds of farm fresh Roma tomatoes into canned pasta sauce for use all year long. The flavors remained bright and tangy even after canning. Another recipe I particularly enjoy is the orecchiette with creamy broccoli sauce. The ragu is rich and satisfying and because the broccoli is pureed it won over even the pickiest never-met-a-vegetable-I-liked eater in the family ...

  I received a copy of Sue Conley & Peggy Smith’s new cookbook, Cowgirl Creamery cooks, several months ago after great anticipation of it’s publication. There’s a Cowgirl Creamery right here in the Washington, DC metro area, making it easy to source the recipes. Our review team has made a handful of recipes from this beautiful book so far: Parmesan crusted chicken, classic mac and cheese, and pancakes. The chicken dish turned out the best; the recipe was easy to follow and included a helpful and detailed description on how to wet/dry coat the chicken breasts and make clarified butter. A novice cook could follow this recipe with ease. We would have liked to see a picture included but otherwise it was very good and we will make this again. The mac and cheese turned out well also. The directions were easy to follow and we loved the beautiful picture. Note that this recipe uses a béchamel sauce as the basis for the cheese sauce and this can be a tricky sauce to perfect, so it m...

I am always on the prowl for the latest and the greatest cookbook. Everyone has their preferences and I lean toward cookbooks that feature fresh ingredients, gourmet preparations and presentations, and an international flair. I picked up Plenty: Vibrant Vegetable Recipes from London’s Ottolenghi by Yotam Ottolenghi with these criteria in mind about a year ago when it was making the rounds as the hot new vegetarian cookbook. The author is originally from Israel and so of course middle eastern culture, ingredients, and technique heavily influence his repertoire. He owns a restaurant in London and for several years he wrote a column for The Guardian press on vegetarian cuisine. Pretty good for a chef who isn’t actually a vegetarian. He became well known for his creativity with fresh vegetables and the recipes laid out in Plenty are those that have appeared over the years in his Guardian column. The cookbook itself is beautiful. The cover art (a shot of a row of roasted eggplants dr...

  Every home cook has a few favorite cookbooks. You know the ones. The cookbooks are filled with easy to follow recipes that look amazing and taste even better. Full color photos accompany several of the recipes and much like a good restaurant, you can’t go wrong no matter which item you choose from the offerings. Southern Pies: A Gracious Plenty of Pie Recipes, From Lemon Chess to Chocolate Pecan by Nancie McDermott is just that kind of cookbook. I got interested in recreating authentic southern pecan pie after I enjoyed the house recipe while dining at the Eclectic Café in Memphis, TN (you really must go there if you’re passing through Memphis). I picked up Southern Pies in the hopes that at least one of the pecan pie recipes contained within could approximate the fantastic pie served at Eclectic Café. I wanted to save my formal review of the cookbook until I’d attempted the pecan pie recipe but the results of the two recipes I have already tried have been so great that I did...

  We have a tenant staying with us in our home this year. He knows I love to cook and so he procured a copy of Domenica Marchetti’s The Glorious Pasta of Italy for me as a Christmas present at the close of last year. I have very high standards when it comes to Italian cookbooks, having long ago fallen head over heels for the legendary work of Marcella Hazan and her Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking which sets the standard for Italian cookery. So while I accepted Marchetti’s book gracefully, I  remained skeptical. Thumbing through the book it’s obvious that it’s well planned. The chapters are thoughtfully arranged, with the first devoted to the basics of pasta enjoyment – the necessary equipment, a encyclopedic listing of pasta types, common pasta dough recipes, and the most essential of sauces such as fresh tomato. Subsequent chapters address pasta soups, pasta with sauce, stuffed pastas, baked pastas, quick pasta entrees, classic pasta recipes, over the top pasta “sho...

  My experience with Polish cuisine has been less than satisfactory, but until I visited Poland I assumed this could be blamed on lackluster American copies of Polish originals. I’d tried pierogies from the frozen section of the supermarket and kielbasa from Hillshire Farms and neither suited me. When I tried a fresh kielbasa prepared by a Polish housewife at an upstate New York church supper in the late 1990s, my theory was reinforced. This,THIS kielbasa wasn’t smoky or salty, it was sweet and rich and delicious hot off the grill. I dreamed of going to Poland one day to taste more of this meaty perfection and to sample the rest of what I was sure would be fantastic cuisine. I finally visited Poland in late 2011- Krakow and Warsaw both. I eagerly stood in line at the Christmas Markets is downtown Krakow to taste authentic kielbasa. Guess what, it tastes exactly like Hillshire Farms! Sidenote: I contacted that Polish housewife when I returned to the states and she confirmed that f...