Chicago Foodies

"Real Moms Love to Eat" Cookbook – Meet Beth Aldrich

It's not even the end of the first week of 2012, and most of us have fallen off the resolution bandwagon. Running, eating our vegetables, and cleaning the sock drawer were all quite exciting for the first day or two, but our resolve wears thin after that. Enter Beth Aldrich, cookbook author, Chicago native, and food-loving mother. Her new cookbook, "Real Moms Loves to Eat: How to Conduct a Love Affair with Food, Lose Weight and Feel Fabulous," promises to make over not just what you eat, but your relationship to food.

She offers plenty of tips, recipes, and ideas along the way, including a full 21-day plan for meal suggestions. Rather than depriving yourself, Aldrich builds in ways to eat all the foods you love (in moderation, of course), meaning you'll feel much happier and energetic than if you were slogging through a beet juice cleanse. Aldrich will be signing copies of the book on Saturday from 2 to 4 PM at FoodEase in Water Tower Place. As a certified health counselor, not only will she sign your book, but she'll give you a little jump start to your stalled resolutions.

Heston Blumenthal – "Heston's Fantastical Feasts" & The "Perfect Christmas"

I was sitting at Borders and while killing time came across Heston Blumenthal's Fantastical Feasts. The part that stuck out was how he got leeches to engorge themselves on goose blood so then he could fry them up as mini blood-puddings for his Gothic Feast... seriously. He's AWESOME. One of the questions I like to ask chefs is if they ever cook anything that isn't supposed to taste good. I get awkward stares and incredulous responses of "Never" or "I'd be out of business". I asked Blumenthal the same thing when I had the unexpected opportunity to talk to him for about 40 minutes and we got to the space I intended the question to take us- Ritual.

500 Recipes From One Saute Pan: Sauté 101

A friend who ate microwave meals, eggs and sandwiches for many years taught herself to cook. When I asked if she took lessons or watched cooking shows to learn technique, she simply said… “cooking is easy, you just have to read”. If you agree that reading is the first step to cooking at home, then I have the perfect cookbook. Sauté 101 claims to be a guide to “one technique in one pan with 101 Variations”. I like to think of it as the”idiots guide to cooking like a gourmet”.

Ruth Ross, cook, teacher and Sauté 101 author told me about her book at a charity event. A week after our conversation, a copy of Sauté 101 arrived as a gift from Ruth.

I love the book for two reasons- I’m inspired to be creative and the book makes cooking feel effortless:

Please Pass (on) the Tuna

By now, most people have read or heard about Fast Food Nation, an indictment of the modern factory farm, where cheap meat is produced at an all-too-high, hidden environmental cost. The recent emergence of swine flu has once again put the spotlight on factory farming and how the industry encourages the proliferation of disease. With that in mind, I began investigating the complementary industries of fishing and aquaculture. Taras Grescoe's Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood provides an eye-opening, informative guide to the state of the world's seafood supply, and is a must-read for anyone who eats seafood, if only for reasons of self-protection.

The oceans have long been credited with inexhaustible supplies of seafood, but a combination of industrial-age fishing techniques and a burgeoning human population has wiped out many fish stocks to levels of commercial extinction. Bottom-trawling, or dragging a net across the seafloor, essentially destroys and levels hundreds of square miles of seabed each day. Dynamite and cyanide are commonly used to stun reef fish (grouper, Napoleon wrasse); it is estimated that a square meter of coral reef is killed for every reef fish caught. Meanwhile, people have been consuming more and more seafood, from the newly affluent Chinese to the explosion of all-you-can-eat shrimp and crab specials at American chains like Red Lobster.

Kitchen Sessions: Trotter's Braised Short Ribs pt.1

This was an interesting recipe to follow, from Kitchen Sessions by Charlie Trotter. I don't think it was too obscure and not very hard either. At least not like Keller's short ribs from the French Laundry cookbook which is next on the list, as soon as I get a line on some good marrow bones (I have a good line but it sounds like a good excuse, no?).

The browning of leek, garlic, jalapeño, granny smith, and yellow onion created a wonderful aroma. Dumping  in a bottle of Zin, thyme, sage and coriander seeds certainly added something. Plunking the ribs into the marinade, I did a very hard thing, I tossed it into the fridge for the night.

Tagine Home Cooking

Over the holidays, a friend of mine who loves to cook turned me on to a very affordable tagine from Sur La Table. As a fan of cooking and experimenting with new foods, I thought a tagine would be a perfect addition to my kitchen-arsenal and I figured for the price (~$20), it would be a great idea for my Christmas list. Sure enough my husband bought one for me but unwrapping the gift was just the start of my adventures in tagine cooking.

White House Chef: 11 Years, 2 Presidents, 1 Kitchen

I must confess that I'm a political junkie and was surprised that I never really thought about the head chefs at the White House. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush's White House chef, Walter Scheib, has put out a cookbook full of interesting anecdotes, from the fact that W. like his hot dogs boiled, not grilled to details about Chelsea's high-school rooftop parties. There is no mention of Willie Nelson being there.

The Oldways Table: Essays and Recipes

I notice sometimes that I come across simple and nutritious recipes and my response is - well that's a no-brainer – I'll make that for dinner. The Oldways cookbook is a whole book of recipes that we all take for granted. In the rush to use our gadgetry and the most complicated fusion of flavors and ingredients we forget that simple really is better. Instead of masking flavors leave them alone. Let the ingredients have enough room to combine their flavors on their own. These are terms that contradict traditional French cooking but align with how the Japanese eat.

Cookbook: Moghul Microwave

It sounds too good to be true. Those fabulous sauces whipped up in the old microwave without all of the traditional – fat and time consuming, (and kitchen infusing) methods? Can't be.

Julie Sahni has figured on the adjustable power of the microwave and a variety of glass cookware to cover off on different cooking techniques but it seems that I was operating at 100% in covered glass pots almost entirely. I bailed on a microwavable browning pan since I don't have one and don't know if they even make them anymore. The cookbook is from 1990. She also published Classic Indian Cooking in 1980 and Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking in 1985.

Some interesting additions in the back include mung broth and how to make ghee... basically clarify the butter and then keep it going for about 5 minutes, until all the water fizzles out and the butter darkens. Without getting too carried away I wanted to see how easy these dishes are. I gave it a shot with a mulligatawny, chicken makhani and a gobi vindaloo.  The combined prep time of 20 minutes sounded too good to be true and I have the advantage of getting some of the tough to find ingredients at the local Devon groceries so finding asafetida is easy for me. I have to give this a shot.