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Cookbook Annotation
Nov. 26th, 2021 11:44 pmFor the Love of Pie joins the list of cookbooks I have annotated. (You can tell which ones I actually use, to a certain degree, by which ones are annotated.) "Nantucket cranberry pie" is quite tasty but I think if I had remembered to put in the extra half-cup of sugar directly on the cranberries it would have been far too sweet. It's sort of like a buckle in a pie shell, with a sugar-encrusted top, and I really like the texture of the sugared top. The pie itself reminds me a lot of cranberry torte, but it needs more cranberries next time. So I have noted modifications to the recipe in the cookbook and next time it will be better. And the cookbook joins the ranks of "tested and proved actually useful," since I generally don't bother to annotate the ones I'm not keeping.
We had less leftover food than I was expecting, honestly, although it was still quite a lot of food for what turned out to be five people. But the high price for the turkey was well worth it because meat share turkeys actually taste good, so people ate more turkey than usual. I still have some in the freezer, and on Saturday benign_cremator is going to make turkey stock with me. And I need to come up with alternative uses for cranberry sauce, because I have a container of benign_cremator's good cranberry sauce which I am absolutely spreading on something. (I mean, yes, leftover turkey, but I don't actually have as much of that as I was expecting.)
People also actually ate dessert this time, which I suspect is down to it being more dinner-party than usual since there weren't enough people there for the usual exponential potluck problem, so dessert was just my two pies and someone else's homemade vegan ice cream to go on top of them and not a large crowd of desserts fighting for attention. People did seem enthusiastic about the pies and a large dent was made in both of them.
Today, I have continued the Great Cookbook Weed a bit and removed Better Baking from the collection, as on looking through it "better" is being used to mean "wholesome" and therefore using it would require keeping around spelt, white whole wheat flour, whole wheat pastry flour (which I had no idea was even a thing!), and rye as basic pantry staples, to say nothing of the number of recipes that call for things I can't have as a structural element. Unlike A Cowboy in the Kitchen, none of the recipes are interesting enough to make it worth keeping around and putting in the work to modify them; I have plenty of recipes that don't require modification for all the things in Better Baking. This is the first of the new-and-pretty cookbooks to be removed.
On the other hand, I've added one that I don't expect will see much use, but using it isn't really the point when you get something like the official Hannibal show cookbook written by the show's food stylist. The point is the pictures and the behind-the-scenes stories-- Hannibal is a bit too much of a gourmet for anything to be workable. It joins Cooking for Mr. Latte and The Antarctic Book of Cooking and Cleaning in the category of "cookbooks I am deliberately keeping because they're interesting in some way, not because they're practical."
We had less leftover food than I was expecting, honestly, although it was still quite a lot of food for what turned out to be five people. But the high price for the turkey was well worth it because meat share turkeys actually taste good, so people ate more turkey than usual. I still have some in the freezer, and on Saturday benign_cremator is going to make turkey stock with me. And I need to come up with alternative uses for cranberry sauce, because I have a container of benign_cremator's good cranberry sauce which I am absolutely spreading on something. (I mean, yes, leftover turkey, but I don't actually have as much of that as I was expecting.)
People also actually ate dessert this time, which I suspect is down to it being more dinner-party than usual since there weren't enough people there for the usual exponential potluck problem, so dessert was just my two pies and someone else's homemade vegan ice cream to go on top of them and not a large crowd of desserts fighting for attention. People did seem enthusiastic about the pies and a large dent was made in both of them.
Today, I have continued the Great Cookbook Weed a bit and removed Better Baking from the collection, as on looking through it "better" is being used to mean "wholesome" and therefore using it would require keeping around spelt, white whole wheat flour, whole wheat pastry flour (which I had no idea was even a thing!), and rye as basic pantry staples, to say nothing of the number of recipes that call for things I can't have as a structural element. Unlike A Cowboy in the Kitchen, none of the recipes are interesting enough to make it worth keeping around and putting in the work to modify them; I have plenty of recipes that don't require modification for all the things in Better Baking. This is the first of the new-and-pretty cookbooks to be removed.
On the other hand, I've added one that I don't expect will see much use, but using it isn't really the point when you get something like the official Hannibal show cookbook written by the show's food stylist. The point is the pictures and the behind-the-scenes stories-- Hannibal is a bit too much of a gourmet for anything to be workable. It joins Cooking for Mr. Latte and The Antarctic Book of Cooking and Cleaning in the category of "cookbooks I am deliberately keeping because they're interesting in some way, not because they're practical."
