morsels & sauces

In a last hurrah to summer and, perhaps, even to the fall, I present to you this lovely tomato tarte tatin. And I wistfully bid farewell to tomatoes, or at least good ones, until next July. In the meantime, let's just drink Pimms Cups with cucumbers (probably from the hothouse) with good friends, cook from fun cookbooks, and settle in for the winter. This little inspiration comes from my latest acquisition, The Cottage Kitchen cookbook from Marte Marie Forsberg . Forsberg is one hell of a photographer (seriously, if you didn't click on her link in the previous sentence, do so now.  I'll wait.)--her images are lush and abundant and inviting and casual and snug--something like a Dutch Renaissance painting. Oh, I want to visit her cottage in England. I want her to make me dinner. I want her to photograph said dinner. Sigh . Her cookbook is equally lush. And it gives the air of casualness, but I am not going to lie to you. It is extravagant. I want to eat Foie...

This cookbook is not for the faint of heart.  In Maricel Presilla 's new cookbook,  Peppers of the Americas , one must be a serious connoisseur of peppers, either as a gardener or a cook. One does not dabble with this cookbook. Instead, one must commit. Do you want the history of this capsicum? Do you ache for a breakdown of pepper anatomy and heat? Do you long for pretty little naturalist drawings of calyx, flower, and seed, and then hope for well-shot, full-color photographs of hundreds of peppers? Do you need the Latin name, the approximate lengths, and a thoughtful catalogue of the growing season of each of those hundreds of peppers? Again, I ask of you, are you a serious connoisseur of peppers?  If you answered yes to even just one of those questions, then this just might be your new cookbook.  In fact, I think this is the perfect book for my friend at   Bat Barn Farm . He's a food geek, and this book is for geeks. Period. Presilla is the fi...

Can I confess: I don't particularly care for salad. I find lettuces, for the most part, boring. I get tired of carrots and radishes and cucumbers. I just don't think I would do well on a raw diet. So I was delighted when I received this latest cookbook from Food 52 because I am always looking for ways to up my salad game. And so I begin my foray into Mighty Salads with a fantastic grilled bread salad chock-full of grilled veggies and spectacular dressing made from the mayonnaise marinade. Yes, you heard me right. Mayonnaise m arinade. Okay, maybe this salad is not the healthy-eating alternative I was longing for, as we kick off summer. But I still consumed about 729% more vegetables in this salad alone than I did the entire month of May.  It's summer, and lordy, people, I have got to get this diet back to salads and soups and smoothies and healthy eating. Because lately it's been cheetos and chocolate. And this is just the cookbook to do it. Befor...

Ah, bitterness. The anger that forgot where it came from, or  so says  Alain de Botton . However, you will embrace this bitterness, know only marginally where it comes from, and dismiss anger. For you, my friends, are about to embark on a journey into the bitter and bittersweet world of amari with me. Amari (the plural of amaro , the Italian word for bitter ) are all the rage right now. And there are rules that go along with amari, most notably to be called such, these lovely little liqueurs must originate in Italy (or so  some sticklers say) .  You can be all snobby about them if you would like (and there are plenty who are decidedly snobby about their amari), but I prefer a more adventurist view.  Brad Thomas Parsons, who wrote my most recent libation guidebook Amaro and may just be the US's leading expert on amari, is of the same inclusive mindset. He invites Gammel Dansk from Denmark and Unicum from Hungary an...

Oh my.  What a gorgeous drink from an equally gorgeous cookbook.  When this culinary treasure landed on my doorstep, I was hesitant to drag it into the kitchen for fear that I might slop some tomato sauce or coconut oil or just plain old water on it and ruin it. This may be a book for the living room table, not the kitchen table. Shane Mitchell, food writer extraordinaire and Saveur  contributing editor,  fills the pages with beautifully written essays that rival the photography of James Fisher. Each of the ten chapters focuses on global culinary narratives, from the food cooked on the  leitir  (the autumnal sheep roundup) in Iceland to the meals cooked by refugees and migrants in the Calais Jungle . Committed to documenting the traditions of (as she writes in her introduction) "people who are firmly rooted in their culture and landscape, in some of the most isolated or marginal communities, where keeping the foo...