Two Last-Minute Gift Ideas for your favorite cook!
Hint: if you like Dim Sum and crazy-good recipes for vegetable dishes…
Two significant cookbooks did not get on my Gift List 2017. For reasons having to do with time—there are so many wonderful cookbooks to choose—Joshua McFadden’s Six Seasons A New Way with Vegetables, and Joanne Chang’s Myers+Chang at Home are briefly noted below, but deserve our passion for them if you’re a fan of cooking vegetables or Chinese. McFadden’s book comes with a rich tapestry of cooking traditions, from modern to Middle Eastern in flavor, while Chang’s is definitely rooted in Asian cuisine, but has crossed an invisible line when it comes to what to expect from a Chinese chef and restaurateur. Undoubtedly the best is saved for last—the last few hours of Christmas shopping, the last few hours of this year, the last few hours of any bit of 2017 that you want to celebrate with a new cookbook! Take notes!
Although Myers + Chang at Home is unmistakably an omnivore’s choice, the cookbook is replete with vegetable dishes and, as any Chinese cookbook is famous for, offers a number of recipes for sauces. Sauce—a creative bonus for any cook—is a special advantage for vegetarians who like to amp up the flavor of their favorite vegetables and grains. Authors Chang and Karen Akunowicz have animated Chinese food by selecting the ingredients and cooking methods of Taiwanese home cooks and bringing that to you. As Chang intimates, “fresh produce, exotic herbs and redolent spices” characterize the tone of the cuisine at Boston-based Myers + Chang, now 10 years old in their location on Washington Street in the city’s downtown. The authors bring this same liveliness to daily fare now available here in Myers + Chang at Home for the home cook.
Mostly because each recipe in their cookbook is so descriptive of the culinary encounter, so familiar with all of a culture, you get a great melding of experiences and yet the recipes appear to be specifically Chinese, and not a fusion cuisine. Even so, a Chimichurri sauce, one that originates from the South American countries of Argentina and Uruguay, is reinvented by Chang as a mixture of very dark vinegar with herbs, spices, and salt and pepper. It’s on the menu as Thai Basil Chimichurri—a marinade for a kale and fennel salad with Fuyu persimmons, prior to being dressed with a Lemon-Ginger Dressing. Thai Basil Chimichurri is one of those infusions in vinegar that would be hard to resist poured over kale and fennel or your favorite vegetable combination—perhaps collards and artichokes?
The cookbook is arranged like many cookbooks as there are chapters for each of a meal’s courses, such as dim sum, salad, sides, sauces and condiments, rice and grains, etc. The last chapter is on dessert, in which you can find parfait, mousse, ice cream, meringue and cookies. Oh, and there’s Red Bean Soup, too, in case you thought you had been transported to a French bakery! Myers + Chang at Home is incredibly appealing, and simply a lot of fun to leaf through, as you get hungrier by the minute!
In Six Seasons lies the chance for you to experiment with baking, roasting, stir frying, soup-making, marinades, and salad-making by the time of year: Six Seasons is a tome full of vegetable dishes. The photography, by Laura Dart, is luxuriant—to show off those seasonal stars of the vegetable kingdom, and completely artisanal in character. Author McFadden encourages you to cook what’s fresh at the market whether in Winter, Spring, Early-, Mid- and Late Summer, or Fall. It’s the kind of cooking that will delight your senses at each season of the year, with special notes for each season. Like “Don’t buy tomatoes in winter!” McFadden is passionate about his art, owns Ava Gene’s, a restaurant in Portland, Oregon. His co-author, Martha Holmberg wrote Modern Sauces, reviewed earlier on this blog, here.
See Joshua McFadden’s website, here.
See Myers + Chang website, here.
