Our Thursday Night Smackdown playbooks:
Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill Cookbook: Explosive Flavors from the Southwestern Kitchen
For those who love Mesa, or who always wish they could try Bobby Flay’s Iron Chef entries (many of which are inspired by dishes at Mesa and closely echo those flavors), a great book with nice photography that will allow you to re-create his dishes at home pretty accurately. Instructions are clear and most recipes are not overly complicated, although you may have to stock up (or create) your dried chile collection. The dessert section is small, but that’s probably not why you’re buying this book.
The Improvisational Cook
Pictureless and dense, but full of delicious, simple recipes with straightforward explanations that teach a method along with a recipe. As the title suggest, the book will help you go from recipe-bound non-cook to a cook with a more confident hand with ingredients. By learning a method (for example, poaching fish in olive oil), you can take it and run with it, creating your own variations. Some of her pantry staples (hazelnut oil) might not be your pantry staples (ramen noodles and a jar of Prego), but they may become yours after you read and start using this inspirational book.
The New Book of Middle Eastern Food
A Joy of Cooking
Charlie Palmer’s Practical Guide to the New American Kitchen
This book has one immediately evident characteristic to recommend it: it is waterproof, and you can wipe it down when you spill soy sauce all over one of the pages. It also has a lot of fantastic sounding recipes, each with a picture, and is subdivided according to occasion and style of cooking: date night, formal home cooking, comfort classics, food for a party, etc, each with a wine pairing (a nice plus). Ingredients lists and directions are not always as clear as they could be – in the instructions for our Smackdown, the book told us to lay duck breasts in a pan and take care not to let the pan get too hot, but it never instructed us to put the pan on the heat in the first place. Still, the pictures make for some great food porn, and most of the recipes are not-over-complicated by interesting twists on classic dishes that I would gladly eat any night of the week.
Crescent City Cooking: Unforgettable Recipes from Susan Spicer’s New Orleans
A great mix of New Orleans classics – shrimp boil, dirty rice, gumbo – and modern twists on classic dishes (New Orleans-inspired and not). Most of the ingredients she uses are easy for the home cook to find without making a day-long tour of specialty stores (except fresh crawfish), and the recipes are straightforward and simple. Great combinations and strong flavors create exciting dishes without 2-page recipe lists or 6-hour kitchen marathons. The appetizer section in particular is worth the price of admission, and has the side benefit of being a bit more N.O. focused than the other sections.
All About Braising: The Art of Uncomplicated Cooking
Molly Stevens’ wonderful book is the definitive guide to all things braised. Lest you think that braising needs to take 6 hours or is only for pot roast or brisket, she will guide you through delicious, simple recipes for veggies and fish along with the more traditional poultry and meats – anyone getting tired of pan-seared salmon over field greens needs to try her braised fish fillets with creamy leeks; 10 minutes to your favorite new way to eat salmon. She also provides a strong grounding on how to build a good braise so you can head off on and invent your own. All this is done in her unfussy writing style. A++: will do business with this again!
The Gift of Southern Cooking
Written by Atlanta-based chef Scott Peacock along with stateswoman of Southern cooking Miss Edna Lewis, this homey book combines traditional favorites (fried chicken, hush puppies, biscuits) with Peacock’s more modern flavor profiles. The down-home techniques aren’t modified at all so the amounts of butter and lard can be shocking (and sometimes unnecessary) to the modern cook, even one who loves the Barefoot Contessa. Recipes are fairly simple and easy to follow, and informal asides and explanations make you feel like you’re learning from the great-aunt you never knew you had. Even if you never cook a dish from this book – which you might well not – it’s an enchanting read.d
Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen
Rick Bayless’s books are like a crash course in Mexican culinary history and practice. His knowledge and love of Mexican food are prodigious, and he loves to share both. This book in particular is my favorite of his; it features his 16 essential sauces, salsas and seasoning paste, which are then featured in recipes throughout the books. Each recipe also offers variations, allowing you to get a lot of bang for your buck for each dish learned. He clearly explains methods, tools and ingredients that might be unfamiliar. Reading this book, it’s hard not to get as excited about Mexican food as he is.
