The Tale of Two Cookbooks

I love cookbooks because of the sheer diversity of their style and approach to cooking, because I love to try new things and learn new techniques or methods for preparing food. Two recent additions to the shelf approach things from very different directions; one focused on an almost snout to tail approach to cooking, with nothing going to waste and the other an easy home cooking, simple recipe approach.

  

Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse: Another Cookbook of Sorts – Fredric Morin, David McMillan, and Meredith Erickson (Knopf)

Adventurous and dynamic may just barely scratch the surface of the Joe Beef approach to cooking and food. Part cookbook and part gourmet survival guide Fredric Morin, David McMillan, and Meredith Erickson team up to serve up Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse: Another Cookbook of Sorts, is a rambling affair chock full of intriguing recipes (150!) along with a carefully curated selection of essentials to stock up your larder to make surviving the apocalypse less trying.

The trio load Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse: Another Cookbook of Sorts, with tales and reminiscences about long lost summers and unique Sunday dinners. The fact that they are based in Montreal may be a contributing factor to some of the difficulty sourcing some of the ingredients suggested in the book. Not a great choice for the beginning cook, there is a level of skill need to successfully pull some of these recipes off; but the stories make this worth the price of admission.

Comfort Food Shortcuts: An "In the Kitchen with David" Cookbook from QVC's Resident Foodie – David Venable – (Ballantine)

A 20 plus year veteran of the shopping network OVC, David Venable is dubbed the channel’s resident foodie and has successfully introduced curious shopper to a wide range of new gizmos and innovative devices and tools to make meal preparation simple and easy.

Simple and easy is the focus of Venable’s latest cookbook, Comfort Food Shortcuts: An "In the Kitchen with David" Cookbook from QVC's Resident Foodie, which is loaded with 110 recipes that utilize many of the time saving devices that he sells through QVC, combined with great shortcuts that will make it easy to get great tasting food that will become favorites for the whole family.

Busy schedules can make family dinners non-existent, but this simple, stripped down approach combined with easy shortcuts on the ingredients used in things like slow cookers and pressure cookers to simplify the whole process. Think great meals with less muss and no fuss.