Need recipe ideas and cooking advice? - cooking resource

Need recipe ideas and cooking advice?

Posted on Sun, Nov. 20, 2005

From the bookshelf

Whether you¡¯re looking for a particular stuffing, a special side dish or a spectacular dessert, here are five new cookbooks you can rely on as the holidays roll around.

Thanksgiving Entertaining by Williams-Sonoma (Free Press, $24.95) should be the book to grab off the shelf. It¡¯s page after page of ideas and recipes, from what cooking equipment to have on hand to how to re-create a traditional New England Thanksgiving to a day-after lunch.

Dough: Simple Contemporary Bread by Richard Bertinet (Kyle Books, $29.95). Warm the kitchen and hearts with gifts of homemade bread. Bertinet takes the scare out of making homemade bread with a lot of step-by-step photographs.

Betty Crocker is the first lady on cooking advice, and this year she has an updated version of her 50-year-old classic. Betty Crocker Cookbook: Everything You Need to Know to Cook Today (Wiley Publishing, $29.95) has the same ring-binder cover but updated recipes, from Cuban pork sandwiches to stir-fry tempeh with yogurt peanut sauce. And yes, she¡¯ll teach you how to carve that turkey and bake that pumpkin pie.

The folks at America¡¯s Test Kitchen make all the mistakes so you don¡¯t have to. They¡¯ve assembled more than 1,200 recipes, accompanied by 1,500 photographs in The America¡¯s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook (America¡¯s Test Kitchen, $34.95). Formatted like Betty Crocker¡¯s cookbooks, this one is thick with old-fashioned recipes, from pumpkin-nut bread to creamy corn pudding.

Nancy Baggett¡¯s newest cookbook, The All-American Dessert Book (Houghton Mifflin, $35), is the dessert cookbook to have on hand. She includes four recipes for pumpkin desserts, 10 for cranberries and 11 recipes that are specific to kids. This one¡¯s bound to become a year-round favorite.

Here are some cooking advice from these books

Jamaican Rice and Peas (Not Easy Takes Awhile Vegan)

There are hundreds and thousands of variations on rice and peas -- many of them happen to be vegan. Here's one:

• 1 1/2 c. dried red kidney beans, soaked overnight
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• salt
• 1/2 c. unsweetened coconut milk
• 2 scallions, chopped
• 2 sprigs fresh thyme
• 1 whole Scotch Bonnet Chili (I usually use several cayennes)
• black pepper
• 2 c long-grain white rice

Boil the beans, garlic and salt until the beans are tender. Save three cups of the liquid, discarding the garlic. Return the beans and the three cups liquid to the pot (if there's not enough of the cooking liquid use water), along with the coconut milk, scallions, thyme, chili, and black pepper and salt to taste. When it comes to a boil, add in the rice. Let it boil for 20 minutes, then remove it from the heat and let it sit for 15 minutes. Stir it with a fork. Do Not Eat the chili pepper.
I've made this with canned beans, skipping the first step and just dumping them in with 3 cups water and some garlic powder, and everything else.

Beans and rice are extremely versatile. When I was in Ocean City, N.J., with my extended family, I planned on cooking advice rice and peas. The local store, however, was lacking. They didn't have red kidney beans, for one. So, I bought pinto beans instead, soaked them overnight, and then boiled them for about an hour (I turned on the stove, played two sets of tennis, and then came back and turned them off.) Then, I realized that, instead of unsweetened coconut milk, I had bought coconut cream, for use in pina coladas. There was only an hour left until dinner, so I improvised: I sauted some rice with garlic and scallions, as in rice pilaf, and then added water and tomato sauce instead of coconut milk. I also threw in some scallions, some spinach (which gave it a nice color contrast,) lots of thyme and basil, and ground cayenne. The family loved it.

Super-Easy Roasted Potatoes (Super-Easy Not Quick Vegan)

• potatoes
• oil
• onion soup mix powder
• Mix one packet of onion soup mix with some oil. Cook the same as Roasted Cajun Potatoes.

The next time you boil some potatoes for a meal, boil lots of them. Leftover cooked potatoes can be made into a thousand different breakfasts, lunches, and side-dishes for dinner.

In the following recipes, I purposely leave off the exact number of potatoes, as well as the exact quantities of spices. This is because everything depends on how many left-over potatoes you have and how many you are serving, as well as your personal taste. These are intended only to be rough guidelines, to give you ideas.

All of these recipes are or can be vegan, are easy, and don't take much time (20 minutes at the most.)

For more info about cooking advice, visit Kansas City.

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