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After the success of the other Bouchon Bakery recipes I tried, and in light of my efforts to bake bread more regularly in order to better understand the process, I thought it would be interesting to try the Bouchon Bakery “Master Recipe” for bread. Nearly all the breads in the book call for a pre-ferment, either [...]

My husband gave me a copy of Bouchon Bakery as a gift in December, bringing my total collection of Thomas Keller Restaurant Group cookbooks up to four. After opening it, I wasted no time in diving in. The book approaches baked goods, both pâtisserie and boulangerie (with a little confectionery thrown in for good measure) in [...]

In keeping with my annual tradition of starting off the year on a Japanese-cuisine kick, I made my first nabe of the year last week – a fitting dinner given how cold and snowy it’s been. I turned to Japanese Hot Pots, which is the indispensable reference on the subject, and used the recipe for [...]

It has long been a source of frustration to me that sushi is so much better known than any other aspect of Japanese cuisine. Even in a big city like Toronto, the ratio of sushi restaurants to other types of Japanese restaurants is about a zillion to one. Japan’s culinary traditions are so much broader [...]

This fall has been another excellent season for cookbooks. The ones I’ve been most excited about include Paula Wolfert’s The Food of Morocco, Jennifer McLagan’s Odd Bits, and Ed Behr’s The Art of Eating Cookbook. Those have all been on my wish list since long before they were released. There are a handful of others [...]

One of the many hats I wear is as a recipe tester for Michael Ruhlman on his last couple of books, first Ratio and now the upcoming Ruhlman’s Twenty. Throughout the testing process, hosted by the inimitable Marlene at Cook’s Korner, I got to see a number of the recipes in the book, but by [...]

Here’s hoping your 2011 is filled with all manner of tasty things! As for me, it looks like I’ve got my reading cut out for me in the next little while.

I didn’t make it very far into my latest cookbook purchase, Fresh Canadian Bistro , before landing on a recipe that caught my eye and drove me into the kitchen to check my vegetable supplies: Chives Chef Darren Lewis’s “Grosse soupe du petit jardin” (literally “big soup from the little garden,” but glossed in the [...]

I’m just back from a week away on Canada’s East Coast, where I picked up a copy of this cookbook, Fresh Canadian Bistro, by Craig Flinn of Chives restaurant in Halifax. I’m looking forward to browsing through it for some new recipe ideas!