2022, animals, Family, Food, holidays, Nature, Uncategorized

Tasty Eats

59 Comments

We celebrated an early Christmas with our son and his family over Thanksgiving. I was quite excited to get a new cookbook from them, The Nordic Cookbook by Magnus Nilsson. We have his Nordic Baking Book, which has hundreds of wonderful recipes. The book I just received has 700 recipes from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and Finland. Some recipes are pretty traditional ones for meatballs and stews. I am happy to report, though, that if I ever run across Pilot Whale in the store, I shall know how to cook it. It may be a while before I am brave enough to cook with seal entrails or roast a Puffin.

It is interesting to see the different versions that different Nordic countries have for the same dish. There are slight variations on seasonings and ways of cooking things like meatballs, sausages, and meatloaf, for example. I think that we will have a fun time exploring this new cookbook. There are some things I will never cook with, like, blood, for instance. There are plenty enough other recipes that will be far more tasty.

What are some of your favorite cookbooks? What are some of the oddest things you ever cooked and/or ate?

59 thoughts on “Tasty Eats”

  2. Some of my favorite cookbooks are the ones from Czaba dalla Zorza, The Modern Baker, The Modern Cook, are easy but delicious Italian recipes 😋 My grandma used to cook the blood, but I’ll definitely not do it ☺️

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  3. No cooking with blood for me. No roasted puffins or whale meat either. My mom used to make us beef tongue sandwiches. Slices of beef tongue on Wonder bread with ketchup. No wonder I don’t eat beef anymore.

    I’ve always thought of myself as a relatively adventurous eater but your post has laid to rest those delusions. I guess I have eaten some odd mushrooms and I’m still here to tell the tale. So that’s something.

    Somebody has to do this:

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  4. Rise and Get Out the Cook Ware, Baboons,

    I love old church cookbooks with the recipes of my childhood— they often include Lime Jello, Marshmellow…. I have quite a collection of these, now. I also love my grandmother’s hand written cookbook from the years of the Great Depression, including recipes and housecleaning tips cut out from magazines, and glued into place. I am glad that I do not need to cook with blood, intestines, or tongue and brains. I never have cared for such dishes.

    I do not cook much from exotic cookbooks anymore—in fact I often just improvise as I go these days. I get the most “guidance recipes” meaning the ones I start from, then riff off of, from Betty Crocker and Fanny Farmer Cook Books. My sister had a cookbook from Alaska that included “Moose Nose Jelly.” I just do not want to know more about that particular dish.

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    2. My former employer was a publisher of book series and also a studio for the creation of advertising and packaging. Many of the books were cookbooks of one sort or another and for those he employed a team of home economists to develop recipes. The inspiration for many of those recipes came from an extensive collection of church cookbooks the company maintained.

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  5. At some time in the past, I told about the cookout Robin and I attended up in Ely where the participants were cleaning out their freezers in anticipation of the hunting season. There was a large smoker and several grills going. At that barbecue, I sampled beaver tail, muskrat, pickled moose heart, and smoked lake trout and whitefish. The only item I wouldn’t reprise would be the muskrat.

    We have a lot of cookbooks and tend to keep them for only one or two of the recipes inside. Our most frequently used recipe book is a looseleaf compendium of items gleaned online, saved from magazines or newspapers, begged from friends or recipes we’ve created ourselves and written down.

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      1. Notebook (singular)? We have several that Husband has compiled. One for grilling, one for sourdough recipes, others for general baking, casseroles, pasta, desserts, etc. His task this weekend is to take all the loose recipes off the buffet and file them in their respective binders so I can get the tomten out for Christmas. .

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        5. Just one notebook for me (I glue the recipes onto loose leaf notebook paper) but I cull it every once in a while. The recipes I use the most always migrate to the front of the section!

          Not sure I could pick just one cookbook. Maybe Betty Crocker Cooky Book. It’s the only cookbook I’ve ever had to replace.

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  6. I actually have my most frequently used cookbooks on the conveniently located wine rack shelf (the rest you have to walk several more steps to get at). They are Joy of Cooking, Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, Moosewood, and The Best of Ethnic Home Cooking.

    Laurie Colwin’s humor can’t be beat – chapter titles include “Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant” and “How to Face the Holidays.” I can’t find it right now, but there’s a story about a dinner party at which was served an eel pie. That had to be an adventure!

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  7. There is a food writer for the Fargo Forum newspaper named Sarah Nasello. She writes under the Cooking with the Lost Italian name. She isn’t Italian but her husband is, and they used to have a very fine restaurant in Moorhead, MN. Her recipes are usually great.

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  8. I do have several cookbooks – from my hometown church, hometown ladies club (about 70 years old now), the clinic where Mom worked, the NICU where I worked, etc. – though I only use a handful of these recipes. The most often used recipes are on notecards in a file box.

    I’m not an adventurous eater (which I have written about in the past) but on a safari I did try impala sausage (ick), crocodile (once was enough), and warthog (delicious). I had kangaroo in Australia – another one that once was enough. I could have tried cuy (guinea pig) in Peru but seeing them roasted skinless on a skewer (head and tail intact) was enough to turn my stomach. The rest of Peruvian food was delicious.

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    2. “The kangaroo can jump incredible. He has to jump because he’s edible. I could not eat a kangaroo, but many fine Australians do. Those with cookbooks as well as boomerangs prefer him in tasty kangaroo-meringues.”

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  9. Maida Heatter’s Chocolate cookbook, Pierre Franey’s “Cuisine Rapide,” the Joy of Cooking, America’s Test Kitchen Cooking School, “New Basics” by Rosso & Lukins, and every Gourment magazine edition ever published. I think that’s what I miss most about the demise of print journalism–high-quality magazines like Gourmet.

    Chris in Owatonna

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  10. I am not wildly adventuresome either. And all I can say after some of today’s posts is that I am extremely glad I became a vegetarian when I was 16.

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  13. I get several recipes daily from Einfachbacken, which are all baking recipes in German. They are translated into English. I have never prepared any of them. I just like trying to guess what their German names mean

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  16. Still have a few cookbooks around I used to use. 3 James Beard cookbooks. Betty Crockers international cookbook. 3-5 others (with Sandra) but now I cook what takes the least effort with fresh ingredients only except for canned tomatoes and broth. So few recipes from cookbooks, well none for weeks.
    Would like to be using cookbooks of mildly exotic sorts but not for one and not when I am exhausted.
    Clyde

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  18. Faye Levy’s “International Chicken Cookbook” is among the cookbooks that I look to for inspiration when I, once again, have chicken in the fridge. It assures that we don’t have the same old, same old when chicken is on the menu.

    Other favorites include Annie Somerville’s “Fields of Greens,” Molly Katzen’s “Moosewood Cookbook, and “The Silver Palate Cookbook” by Sheila Lukins, Julee Rosso and Michael McLaughlin.

    A couple of the small, locally produced cookbooks with recipes from various people in the neighborhood are fun to peruse because I know so many of the contributors. Some of those recipes are hilarious, some are great, and some are downright awful.

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  19. We have a copy of Better Homes and Gardens cookbook ( the plaid looseleaf one) that we got as a wedding present, making it over fifty years old. That, and Joy of Cooking and to some extent the Gourmet cookbook we use more for reference than for the recipes.

    As I said, most of the books have only a couple of recipes I refer to very often. Among those books are several James McNair books, Molly Katzen’s Still Life with Menu, the original and the new Vegetarian Epicure, several Japanese cookbooks including one put together by the Women’s Society Tokyo Union Church we also received as a wedding gift. A newish cookbook I’ve been experimenting with is Repertoire by Jessica Battilana, billed as “all the recipes you’ll need”.

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  20. About the picture caption.
    Some might recall Bloom County where Opus is shown to be looking more like a puffin than a penguin.
    Look it up. I’ve been unable to post the cartoon.

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  21. I get so pissed when I write along post, and then it disappears. I was writing about the fact that one thing I would love to do would be to go into the cookbooks that I blow past all the pages on that have meat and figure out how to rewrite the recipes using the new plant-based meats now that they have become less repulsive then they have been in the past

    I read an article about how the plant-based meats are losing their luster and starting to decline in sales and they will be going into survival of the fittest mode with beyond meat and impossible burger as probable survivors MorningStar farms took a huge hit, but they should be able to come back now that there rivalry for hamburgers is no longer their focus they should stay with breakfast sausage, bacon, pronto, pups, and black bean burgers which is where they Excel the other companies that are out there have always been pretty terrible. The one that really comes to mind. Is Aldi. Aldi‘s fake meat. Reminds me of cheap hotels tea choices, where they put something out there that is just almost none consumable and I think that the days of that stuff are gone, there are people like the herb Verbiest butcher. They have figured out how to make wonderful, fake meat, substitutes at a much greater definition and detail and cost than what the beyond meat is so I hope that those secrets get out one of these days and I can figure out how to start doing some of that at home. It doesn’t appear that it requires lots of heavy duty machinery I think it’s just figuring out what the Right way of putting it together for a presentation is

    I hardly use cookbooks at all anymore. I still have the moosewood and I still have Julia child’s French cooking and I still have the big Betty Crocker and I still have others that I like that I don’t know the names of I only know them by the cover and buy the recipe that I like in there, but what I do today is look up a product category that I’m looking for online and compare five or six recipes and figure out how to tweak it I’ve never been very good at following a recipe to the tea I use their ideas and mix in my own stuff and I can visualize the taste that’s going to be coming out of the herbs that are offered and figure out how to tweak it, so it has a little bit more of this or that that I have in mind
    I need to learn how to do bread I was thinking in my spare time I should go apply for an apprenticeship at shift over on 46th and Bloomington where they make what I understand is excellent gluten-free breads the ones out of the gourmet five minutes a day gluten-free bread recipe book I have been very disappointed with and everything else is really awful so I would love to figure out how to do bread

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  23. I should cut down on cookbooks, because I usually only use one or two recipes from any one cookbook. I have two copies of the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, my old copy and one that belonged to my mother. They are two different publication dates, and the recipes differ. I’ll likely hang on to both of those.

    Another cookbook I like is called Half a Can of Tomato Paste and Other Culinary Dilemmas, which gives advice on how to use up random stuff you’re not sure what to do with. It has a fabulous recipe for chocolate bread pudding.

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