Cooking 101: How to Buy on a Budget

Wednesday January 11, 2017: 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Downtown Library: Secret Lab

Cookies Galore!

Monday December 12, 2016: 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Malletts Creek Branch: Program Room
Grade 6 - Adult

Delicious Caramel 101

Wednesday November 30, 2016: 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Downtown Library: Secret Lab
Grade 6 - Adult

Perfect Pies & Tarts

Wednesday November 9, 2016: 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Downtown Library: Secret Lab
Grade 6 - Adult

Eating in Bowls: Veggie Style

Mon, 09/12/2016 - 12:57pm by manz

Bowls! Eating a big pile of delicious food from a bowl is simply amazing. You basically toss in a grain, a veg, a protein, and a sauce and you’re all set. With this combo there are limitless options of scrumptious wonders to be scooped up. There are a few new vegetarian and vegan cookbooks that focus on bowls!

Bowl: Vegetarian Recipes for Ramen, Pho, Bibimbap, Dumplings, and Other One-dish Meals is one such book, and offers up some tasty dishes. For even more bowls upon bowls upon bowls, Vegan Bowl Attack!: More Than 100 One-dish Meals Packed With Plant-based Power is sure to get you going. Many non-bowl specific cookbooks also feature sections on bowls now!

New Cookbooks

Wed, 08/31/2016 - 6:15pm by ballybeg

Have you noticed how beautiful many cookbooks are these days? Like the way they look, and even feel in your hands, and all the sumptuous pictures, foretell the lovely tastes and smells that await you on exploring the recipes within. From beginning to end, these three cookbooks, and their contents, spell something sensuous and delectable. They are available right now on the Downtown new bookshelf.

Sea Salt Sweet: The Art of Using Salts for the Ultimate Dessert Experience by Heather Baird
Salt is the new ingredient formerly known as “bad for you”. (Eggs, butter, and bacon have also made this transformation.) But not just any salt will do for admittance to this preferred status. There are many gourmet and artisan salts on the market (like black and red salt from Hawaii, pink salt from the Himalayas, and “flower of the ocean” from Brittany), with exceptional taste, trace minerals, and no additives. These are the salts added to everything in this cookbook, even ice cream, but in very controlled and conscious amounts. You have to read the preliminary chapters, “Salt Savvy”, “Salt Textures”, and “Gourmet and Artisan Sea Salts”, to understand the whys and wherefores of salt enhancing the flavor and the sweetness of all the other ingredients in the recipes. And then try making: salt baked pears with rosemary; coconut lime mojito shooters with fleur de sel; smoke and stout chocolate torte; or, espresso mousse souffles.

Big Flavors From a Small Kitchen by Chris Honor & Laura Washburn Hutton
From the café, Chriskitch, in north London, comes this really inventive, artful, tantalizing cookbook with glorious pictures and something for everyone: salads, brunch, soups, mains, bakery, extras. This strikes me as a very modern collection of recipes, but not weird, as modern can sometimes be, and utilizing all the most fresh and artisan ingredients, and the most remarkable combinations, to wit – a cake with Guinness, dates and chocolate; a salad with salmon, pineapple, fennel, red onion and dill; and a main with duck leg, plum, pomegranate and star anise. A nice feature is the how to of combining dishes for a meze. Lots of fun!

From India: Over 100 recipes to Celebrate Food, Family and Tradition by Kumar & Suba Mahadevan
This book is a feast for the eye and the contents promise to be a feast for the palate. The rich, jewel-toned pictures which permeate this book are nothing short of perfection. Also notable are lots of personal reminiscences about food experiences in India with the authors’ parents and grandparents. The recipes are divided by the subject headings, salt, bitter, sour, spice, sweet and condiments and sides, which turns out to be a very clever way to organize the book. I have very limited experience with Indian food, but I hope that is a short-lived condition. I am inspired to try: lamb meatballs in coconut curry, vegetables in yogurt, beef with apricots, crispy okra and baked sweet yogurt cream.

Fabulous Fiction Firsts #610

Sat, 08/13/2016 - 4:36pm by muffy

One of Bon Appetit's 8 New Food Novels to Read This Year - The City Baker's Guide to Country Living is a debut novel by Boston pastry chef Louise Miller.

Running away is what thirtysomething Livvy (Olivia) Rawlings does best. After her Baked Alaska sets fire to Boston's exclusive Emerson Club, she packs up and heads north to Guthrie, Vermont where her childhood (and only) friend Hannah lives. Luck would have it, the Sugar Maple Inn needs a pastry chef, a job that comes with a charming little cottage - the Sugarhouse.

Margaret Hurley, the cantankerous and demanding inn owner puts Livvy through her paces but is soon won over by Livvy's creations, along with the guests and the town-folks. Before long, Livvy finds herself immersed in small town life and intense scrutiny when she gets involved with Martin McCracken, a prodigal son who has returned to tend his ailing father.

After a Rockwell-worthy Thanksgiving, a funeral, and a surprise visitor shake things up, Livvy must decide whether to do what she does best and flee--or stay and finally discover what it means to belong.

This August Indie Next and LibraryReads pick, will appeal fo fans of Kitchens of the Great Midwest by Ryan Stradal; South of Superior by Ellen Airgood; novels by Erica Bauermesiter and the Little Beach Street Bakery series by Jenny Colgan.

The comfort of food shared with friends

Tue, 07/19/2016 - 12:42pm by Lucy S

Dinner With Edward: a Story of an Unexpected Friendship

“There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.” M.F.K Fisher

Isabel Vincent is a writer and a journalist for the New York Post who is approaching a divorce and single parenthood when an old friend asks her a favor. This friend’s 93 year-old father is newly widowed, lonely, and living in the same neighborhood as Isabel. He is an excellent and exacting cook and could use an occasional dinner companion. This is the genesis of Isabel Vincent's delightful book, Dinner With Edward. What comes out of these dinners is a profound connection between two people who are both in need of buoying.

Edward is a perfectionist in the kitchen, and a self-taught cook. He cultivated his craft to relieve his wife of her 52 years of providing meals. He learned to cook out of love and so his cooking is imbued with it. This book speaks strongly to the importance of a human connection, and one that can be facilitated by shared food and meals. Isabel and Edward’s relationship also exemplifies a loving, platonic attachment, something that is rarely found in the stories we read today.

This slim volume will fill you with descriptions of simple, yet precise meals, and tales of an unusual and unexpected bond that comes to the rescue of these two very different people. The meals are used as a framework to unfold the story of this deep friendship, reminding us that food can sustain us, and save us in many ways. As Isabel tells us, “That night, I sat down to write my own letter to Edward. I told him that I had never been incapacitated like this, and how I was suddenly feeling middle-aged and alone. I told him that he had saved my life and that he would be with me forever. The response was swift. Edward called me right after he read my letter. ‘You saved your own life,’ he said. ‘You think about this in time and you will come to see the truth of what I’m saying. You were giving as well as receiving.’ And then his voice caught, and he said he needed to go. ‘You touched an old man’s heart.’”

This book will touch your heart, and teach you the trick to mastering a perfect roast chicken.

Dinner With Edward will appeal to fans of The Intern, Julie and Julia, The End of Your Life Book Club and anything by Laurie Colwin.

Conquer Your Cravings

Tuesday December 13, 2016: 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

Secrets of Effective Weight Loss

Tuesday November 15, 2016: 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Malletts Creek Branch: Program Room