Books
ENLIGHTENED CHOCOLATE
More Than 150 Decadently Light, Easy-to-Make, and Inspired Recipes Using Dark Chocolate and Unsweetened Cocoa Powder
by Camilla V. Saulsbury
Including both savory and sweet chocolate recipes, Enlightened Chocolate is
filled with more than 200 luscious, inviting recipes that let you have your
chocolate and eat it too, but with less fat, fewer calories, and maximum chocolate
flavor. The first compendium cookbook ever that is exclusively devoted to light
chocolate recipes using antioxidant-rich dark chocolate and cocoa powder, it
is divided into five chapters:
* Chocolate, Morning to Noon
* Chocolate Cookies & Other Petite Treats
* Let Them Eat (Chocolate) Cake
* Chocolate Dessert Decadence
* Savory Chocolate (including sauces, spice rubs, salsas, and other condiments)
All of the recipes in Enlightened Chocolate are straightforward and rely on easy-to-find ingredients. None of them will daunt, not even the chocolate soufflé with raspberry sauce or chocolate crème brulée.
In addition, Enlightened Chocolate provides a brief history of chocolate as "medicine," as well as easy-to-follow explanations-in lay terms-of the most current scientific information regarding the health benefits of chocolate and cocoa. The role of chocolate flavonols in the promotion of cardiovascular health is elucidated, as is how to select and store chocolate and cocoa powder for maximum flavor and maximum health benefits. Includes 30 small color photographs.
$22.95, Hardcover
ISBN-10: 1-58182-607-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-58182-607-4
Available October 2007
PANNA COTTA
Italy's Elegant Custard Made Easy
Panna Cotta: Italy's Elegant Custard Made Easy is a collection of 100 panna cotta recipes that are both simple and sophisticated. It is the perfect book for dessert recipes that have plenty of style but require little fuss.
Born in the Piedmont dairy country of northeast Italy, panna cotta is a soft, creamy, eggless custard whose name translates as "cooked cream." Despite its luxurious texture and elegant presentation, panna cotta is simple to prepare: heat some heavy cream, add sugar, softened gelatin, and flavorings, and then chill until set. And though the name means cooked cream, many of the panna cotte in this collection are reinterpreted with other dairy products, including plain milk, creme fraiche, buttermilk, yogurt, sour cream, cream cheese, and mascarpone cheese.
This collection of recipes highlights how panna cotta, much like vanilla ice cream, is a blank slate for flavor possibilities. From the traditional--Vanilla Bean Panna Cotta with Balsamic Berries and Bittersweet Chocolate Panna Cotta--to nouveau interpretations--Lavender Panna Cotta with Blueberry Coulis and Muscovado Butterscotch Panna Cotta--there is a panna cotta recipe in this collection for most every taste and occasion.
While panna cotta is traditionally a dessert, this collection includes a chapter on savory panna cotta, reflecting recent restaurant trends in serving panna cotta as a first course. Recipes include panna cotta made with vegetable purees, such as Cauliflower Panna Cotta with Truffle Oil, and panna cotta made with a variety of savory cheeses, such as Goat Cheese Panna Cotta with Arugula-Roasted Beet Salad.
Readers are offered tips for adapting panna cotta to a wide variety of occasions, making the recipes suitable for weeknight dining, small supper parties, or large gatherings. Fuss-free entertaining tips are proffered as well as an appendix for locating harder-to-find ingredients and equipment. Includes 28 small, color photographs.
ISBN-10: 1-58182-595-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-58182-595-4
$16.95, Hardcover
Publication Date: March 2007
PUFF PASTRY PERFECTION
More Than 175 Recipes for Appetizers, Entrées, and Sweet Made with Refrigerated Puff Pastry
Puff pastry is the royalty of pastries—crisp, flaky, and especially light, it literally rises to any occasion. And although preparing homemade puff pastry is a labor-intensive process, Puff Pastry Perfection shows that a package of frozen puff pastry sheets makes the magnificence of puff pastry accessible to home cooks everywhere.
Puff Pastry Perfection has eliminated the guesswork. At a cost of less than four dollars, one 17.3-ounce package from a grocer's freezer section delivers two perfect puff pastry sheets, prerolled and ready to use in recipes ranging from the first course to the last.
Oh, the enchanting creations that await! Frozen puff pastry can be used to quickly and easily render classics such as napoleons, cream puffs, strudels, turnovers, palmiers, mille-feuille, and French tarts. It can be twisted into appetizer sticks, cut into tartlet shapes, used as a quick pie or quiche crust, folded over savory appetizer fillings, molded over casserole fillings to create one-step pot pie "lids," or rolled and sliced into elegant, but oh-so-easy cookies.
Puff Pastry Perfection is more than just another collection of baked goods. It is a burst of extraordinary flavors that surprise and delight, along with foolproof instructions to make home cooks into baking heroes.
The result? How about portobello napoleons, wasabi shrimp puffs, dried cherry and almond baked brie, or spicy cumin cheese straws for starters? For supper consider chile relleno quiche, puff pastry po'boys, pizza bianco with prosciutto, arugula and parmesan or chipotle and cheese beef pot pie. Next, the sweets: miniatures such as ginger-lime sugar twists, southern pecan crisps, fresh mango napoleons, and puff pastry cinnamon rolls, all perfect for teatime or an anytime nibble. And finally the grand desserts: from lemon-blackberry cobbler to chocolate-walnut strudel to caramel apple dumplings, there's a sweet treat for every taste and occasion.
$16.95, Paperback
ISBN-10: 1-58182-542-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-58182-542-8
CAKE MIX COOKIES
More Than 175 Delectable Cookie Recipes That Begin with a Box of Cake Mix
Imagine a kitchen warm with the smells of sweet vanilla, fragrant cinnamon, and fresh butter. On the kitchen counter is a cooling rack piled high with fresh-from-the-oven delights filled with chocolate chips and crunchy pecans. Ah, the age-old comfort of cookies.
Next imagine that each of the yummy treats began with a convenient box of cake mix. That's right, a standard 18.25-ounce box of cake mix is the secret to some of the tastiest, simplest, and most irresistible cookies imaginable. With a few extra ingredients, turns of a spoon, and whirrs of a mixer, cake mix can make anyone a prize cookie baker.
Like Cookie Dough Delights and Brownie Mix Bliss, Cake Mix Cookies is the first cookbook of its kind. Although several cake mix cookbooks exist, including the bestselling Cake Mix Doctor books and 101 Things to Do with a Cake Mix, they offer only a small number of cookie and bar recipes and overlap one another.
By contrast, Cake Mix Cookies is filled with an array of more than 175 drop, shaped, filled, and bar cookie options for every occasion. Numerous all-American favorites are used as starting points: chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, jam thumbprints, and dark chocolate brownies. There are also new takes on classic European cookies; for example, crunchy Italian biscotti, tender French madeleines, and rich Viennese teacakes. Finally, a healthy dose of new cookies has been created for the book: blackberry-lemon buttermilk bars, triple chocolate chess squares, and chocolate blackout.
Cake Mix Cookies contains the broadest range of new recipes for cookies and bars that is unavailable elsewhere. And while it capitalizes on the popularity of baking with cake mixes, it has its own unique niche on the home cook's shelf.
$16.95, French-Fold Paperback
ISBN-10: 1-58182-475-0
Currently Available
NO-BAKE COOKIES
More Than 150 Fun, Easy & Delicious Recipes for Cookies, Bars, and Other Cool Treats Made Without Baking
Flavors worth splurging for with little effort. Readily available ingredients. Perfect results time and again. These are the principles behind No-Bake Cookies.
It may be a surprise to learn that some of the best-tasting cookies and bars can be made without turning on the oven. No magic is involved, just a few time-honored techniques for producing irresistible goodies while the kitchen—not to mention the cook—remains cool. With an assortment of cereals, crushed graham crackers, cookie crumbs, butter, nut butters, cream cheese, and chocolate (and some delicious options for adding flavor such as dried fruits, nuts, toffee, vanilla, coffee, spices, and more), no-bake cookies are a matter of mere minutes in the making.
The recipes in No-Bake Cookies are a boon for busy home cooks with a penchant for sweet treats. They make "first time" cooking fun for kids, too. Even the youngest of children can help with measuring and stirring the ingredients while Mom, Dad, or big brother handle more demanding tasks such as chopping nuts and melting butter on the stovetop.
Most people are familiar with Rice Crispy treats, peanut butter bars, and chocolate-oatmeal no-bakes. No-Bake Cookies expands the horizon with such mouth-watering treats as Maple Praline Drop Cookies, S'Mores Clusters, Quick Caramel Delightfuls, Mixed Fruit, See & Nut Energy Bars, PB&J Bites, Maui-Wowie Macadamia Bars, Irish Creamy Mousse Bars, Key Lime Squares, Butterscotch Pudding Bars, Blackberry Mascarpone Bars, and dozens more.
So whether one is looking for a fun-time treat for the kids, or a healthy snack for the lunchbox, a dreamy chocolate indulgence, or a creamy-cool summery icebox bar, a recipe from No-Bake Cookies cookbook always fits the bill
$16.95, Paperback
ISBN-10: 1-58182-504-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-58182-504-6
Currently Available
BROWNIE MIX BLISS
More Than 175 Very Chocolate Recipes for Brownies, Bars, Cookies & Other Decadent Desserts Made with Boxed Brownie Mix
In Cookie Dough Delights, Camilla V. Saulsbury worked magic with refrigerated cookie dough. With Brownie Mix Bliss, she turns her attention to the familiar box of brownie mix and the many possibilities contained therein.
Incredibly, all 175-plus recipes in Brownie Mix Bliss begin with a standard box of brownie mix. What's more, all the recipes have been streamlined for easy, everyday baking. The problem, if you can call it that, will be deciding which treat to make first. How about Mocha Buttercream Brownies? Or Snickers Supreme Brownies? Or maybe Mint Julep Ganache Brownies? And that's but the tip of the chocolate iceberg. While brownie mix can be used to create all manner of mouthwatering concoctions, it can also be transformed into countless other very easy, very chocolate desserts ranging from sophisticated biscotti, souffle cakes, madeleines, and cheesecakes to nostalgic drop cookies, ice cream novelties, gooey layered bar cookies, and so much more.
In addition to the recipes, Saulsbury offers "Brownie Points," or tips for baking success. For the accomplished baker as well as the novice, Brownie Mix Bliss takes the chocolate dessert to a new level of, well, bliss!
$16.95, Paperback
ISBN: 1-58182-444-0
Currently Available
COOKIE DOUGH DELIGHTS
More Than 150 Foolproof Recipes for Cookies, Bars and Other Treats Made with Refrigerated Cookie Dough
Chocolate chippers, lemon bars, madeleines, brownies, short-bread, thumbprints, rugelach, biscotti, mandelbrot, and fortune cookies—we all love them. We love them even better when they are home-baked. The ultimate comfort food, fresh-baked cookies offer instant reassurance, consolation, and community.
One of the reasons we hesitate to bake cookies is that all too frequently we discover that we don't have all the ingredients we need (or we don't have enough time to bake them from scratch).
Cookie Dough Delights conveniently solves both problems. Its easy recipes will tempt everyone back to the oven with an assortment of delectable home-baked cookies (and a smattering of other mouth-watering desserts), all of which begin with an 18-ounce roll of refrigerated cookie dough from the supermarket dairy case.
With little more than a few easy, simple steps, the ordinary can be transformed into the extraordinary. Using refrigerated cookie dough is not about abandoning traditional cookie and dessert recipes; it is a celebration of the options available to bakers today.
The ease of working with refrigerated cookie dough also helps bakers of all abilities to focus on the aesthetics of cookies and desserts—including fancy decorations and icings—if they so choose. Recipes include drop cookies, formed and fancy-shaped cookies, bar cookies, filled cookies, special treats, icings, frostings, fillings, and other extras.
$16.95, Paperback
ISBN: 1-58182-393-2
Currently Available
DISSERTATION
Consuming Home Cooking: An Investigation of the Contemporary Meaning of Cooking and Identity in the Domestic Sphere
by Saulsbury, Camilla Vivian, Ph.D., Indiana University, 2005, 300 pages; AAT 3178479
Abstract (Summary)
This study encompasses an examination of the meanings individuals attach to home cooking and, in particular, how such meanings are linked to issues of identity and home. Food and food preparation are such mundane aspects of everyday life that it is tempting to dismiss both as trivial. But the two are never simple matters of sustenance. The preparation and subsequent consumption of home cooking are, and always have been, fundamental markers of culture and identity. The three principal research questions for this study are (1) What is the contemporary meaning of home cooking? (2) What is the link between home cooking and identity? (3) What is the link between home cooking and metaphorical constructions of "home"? Data for the study are collected from three sources: in-depth interviews with cooking professionals, in-depth interviews with cooking contest participants, and focus groups with American consumers in Northeastern, Southern, Western and Midwestern regions of the United States. The findings indicate that home cooking can be understood as a form of cultural production in several respects. First, home cooking both establishes and reflects the temporal order and rhythms of everyday life. Home cooking is a reflection of the harriedness of modern life, but also serves as a means for creating a sense of "timeless" time. Additionally, the acts and products of home cooking serve as symbolic "gifts of time" both for those who cook and for those who receive home cooking from others. With regard to identity, the results reveal that a home cooking identity is based on traditional qualities (including creativity, generosity, competence and commitment) as well postmodern traits related to consumption and consumerism. Finally, the study findings indicate that the routines, constancy and control generated by participation in home cooking establish the meaning of home as a secure haven from the outside world.