Wander, Eat and Tell

cookbook club: To Asia, With Love

Welcome to the second book of our summer cookbook club! Our theme this season is Summer Vegetables – perfect for a time when local farmers’ markets are thriving, and maybe even your home garden. After easing into our vegetable-focused cooking adventure with Nigel Slater’s Greenfeast: Spring, Summer, we begin our journey of exploration of other continents. Asia and Africa await!

Our next book is To Asia, With Love: Everyday Asian recipes and stories from the heart by Hetty McKinnon. This is Hetty’s fourth book. Beginning with Neighborhood, then to Community, and Family – with each we join her on a journey continuously closer to her heart.

cookbook club: Greenfeast: Spring, Summer

Welcome to the first book of the summer season of our cookbook club! Our first book is the most recent edition from the UK’s Nigel Slater, Greenfeast: Spring, Summer. Our theme this season is Summer Vegetables – perfect for a time when local farmers’ markets are thriving, and maybe even your home garden.

I’m feeling inspired. And with an international lineup of vegetable-focused books to work our way through, I’m betting you will be too!

Our first book, Greenfeast: Spring, Summer, was originally published in Great Britain in 2019. The North American “translation” was just released last month. I’m working from the UK version, everyone else has the new US edition. Does that make a difference? Read on to find out…

savor the season – summer cookbook club starts soon!

from the farmers’ market or your own garden to your table… with a little help from these amazing books

The spring cookbook club, Classic to Modern, was such a huge hit that we’re going to make a regular thing of it! The summer cookbook club begins on May 26, 2021 (register here!). I’ll be leading an enthusiastic group of passionate home cooks and culinary adventurers through four awesome books. Are you going to one of them?

https://www.92y.org/class/summer-cookbook-group – Join the Club!

Every 2 weeks for 8 weeks we meet on Zoom for a 90-minute discussion about our experiences reading, cooking, and eating from a new cookbook. Conversations are always lively and engaging. And, we get to host some pretty spectacular guests from the world of food and words. Last time we were joined by an America’s Test Kitchen cook, a cookbook author who runs a cooking school in Paris, and the one and only Sam Sifton of The New York Times Cooking. I’ve got a few new surprises in store for this round… you’ll have to join to find out!

cookbook club: The New York Times Cooking No-Recipe Recipes

Cookbooks and kitchens are the heart of many great adventures. Last week our spring cookbook club, Classic to Modern, ended our journey with a return to the present. Over the course of 4 books in 8 weeks, we time traveled from the days of Edna Lewis to Sam Sifton’s contemporary approach to creating delicious meals. In between, we traveled via our pantries and spice cabinets to Paris in the 2020s and to India by way of Brooklynin the 1980s.

cookbook club: Classic Indian Cooking by Julie Sahni

In book three of our four-part spring cookbook club we went on a journey through time and place through the “great and subtle cuisine… from all the regions of India.” This, from the first cookbook to introduce them, in all their refined complexity, to the American home cook.

all books available at Kitchen Arts & Letters

“Indian cooking is more of an art than a science. It is highly personalized, reflecting individual tastes. It allows the cook to exercise the full range of her or his creative ingenuity.”
Julie Sahni

cookbook club: Plat du Jour by Susan Herrmann Loomis

I’d say the spring cookbook club is off to a great start!

In our second meeting, we talked French comfort food and life in France with award-winning author Susan Herrmann Loomis as we cooked to her latest book, Plat Du Jour: French Dinners Made Easy.

book cover: Plat du Jour — https://kitchenartsandletters.com/product/plat-du-jour/

Plat du jour means daily special. These are the dishes handwritten on chalkboards outside every bistro and café in France. They tout the chef’s excitement for a new ingredient, a seasonal return of a classic, or its creative reinterpretation.

cookbook club: The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis

Welcome to the first book of our spring cookbook club! Our first book of the series is: The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis.

But, before digging in, I want to thank Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore and The 92^nd Street Y in NYC. Their beloved live program, Talks & Tastes, had to go virtual and they made it happen in the best possible way. If you missed this season’s club registration, sign up for any or all of our newsletters to learn when the next round begins.

What is this cookbook club? You can catch up with my previous post HERE.

join the (cookbook) club

I’m about to do something I’ve wanted to do for YEARS!

Confession: I’m a food and drink book addict. OK. Maybe you’re not surprised at all by that.

My home is literally wall-to-wall cookbooks, food history books, and a library’s worth of wine and spirits books. They make me happy. And when I’m happy, I want to share it. So, a food and drink book club has been on my wishlist for decades. But life kept getting in the way…

Until recently. The opportunity to share this obsession finally arrived. And, of course, now I want to share it with you!