The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook: Recipes and Wisdom from an Obsessive Home Cook by Deb Perelman | 2012 | Knopf Doubleday | Hardcover $ 35
Deb Perelman loves to cook. It’s as simple as that. She isn’t a chef or a restaurant owner—she’s never even waitressed. Cooking in her tiny Manhattan kitchen was, at least at first, for special occasions — and, too often, an unnecessarily daunting venture. Deb found herself overwhelmed by the number of recipes available to her. So, she founded her award-winning blog, smittenkitchen.com, on the premise that cooking should be a pleasure, and that the results of your labor can — and should be — delicious… every time.
Deb is a firm believer that there are no bad cooks, just bad recipes. And now, with the same warmth, candor, and can-do spirit her blog is known for, Deb presents her first cookbook — more than 100 new recipes, plus a few favorites from her site, all gorgeously illustrated with hundreds of Deb’s beautiful color photographs.
This is actually a repost and update of a review for this book that I originally posted here a little over a decade ago, not long after it was first released. I acquired a copy at an author tour event hosted by a local bookshop and tried a few recipes sort of willy-nilly… then put it on my cookbook shelf to languish for a while, except for the sporadic occasions when it was necessary to remake the really good stuff that’d made it into my regular rotation of recipes.
When deciding on which cookbooks to tackle for my cook-thru projects last year, I settled on revisiting The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook. After all, I’d thoroughly enjoyed it the first time around, and have even remade a few of these multiple times already. I figured it was high time to do another experimental run through the book.
Deb Perelman has been blogging at her website, the eponymous Smitten Kitchen, for going on two decades now. (In blog years, that’s an eternity.) Her expertise is evident in this book. She has also published two subsequent cookbooks, which will be going on my wishlist in the near future.
First, and most obviously, the book is beautiful. Deb Perelman did all of the photos herself in her tiny little kitchen. And every single recipe has at least one photo — the more complicated ones have more when needed to demonstrate a particular process. Plus, the cover looks great with or without the dust jacket. Oh, yeah, and it opens flat on your kitchen counter. Details like this make me so happy.
I do want to make it clear that this is not a cookbook for beginners. The instructions are all clear and the author has included plenty of little asides and tips, but if you can barely boil an egg this book is not for you! And it isn’t for folks who only like beef-and-potato type meals, either. The author was once a vegetarian, and that comes across in her creative use of fresh produce (and relative dearth of heavy meats).
Of the recipes I tried initially, years ago, I still regularly make the broccoli slaw and the cheese on rye with sweet and sour onions. For my cook-thru project last year, I tried an additional 15 new-to-me recipes from this book. I’ll now be adding a few more recipes to my regular rotation. My absolute favorites were the apricot breakfast crisp and the harissa and honey farro salad, but my coworkers were also big fans of the whole lemon bars and the gooey cinnamon squares… and they might fire me if those goodies never reappear in the break room again.
If you think cooking is a fun hobby, if you like trying new ingredients and combinations, if you want to try something different but not unrealistically complicated, and if you appreciate recipes that have been tested and perfected by a foodie who knows what she’s doing — this is the cookbook for you.
If you would like to see a few photos from my adventure through this book and several others, check out my Cookbook Cook-Thru Project Page:
If you want to follow along in my continued culinary experiments, please feel free to visit my foodie Instagram:
Links:
- The Smitten Kitchen
- “Smitten Kitchen takes the fuss out of cooking” interview at NPR
- “Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen’s Favorite Cookbooks” interview at Serious Eats
- “The Best Smitten Kitchen Recipes, According to Eater Editors” article at Eater
Publication information: Perelman, Deb. The Smitten Kitchen cookbook: Recipes and wisdom from an obsessive home cook. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. Print.
Source: Personal library.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.