Faith, Food and Family

My latest cookbook to review is Supermarket Healthy by Melissa D'Arabian. If you watch the Food Network, you may remember her from the Next Food Network Star competition. I loved the feel of the book and the beautiful pictures right away. There are plenty of healthy recipes in this book. You'll find things like Morning Glory Muffins, Baked Eggs in Tomato Sauce, Creamy Cauliflower "Baked Potato" Soup, Poached Chicken Puttanesca, and more! There aren't pictures for every recipe, but many do have pictures. The food looks very yummy! One of my favorite parts of the book is where Melissa gives you a blueprint to customize dishes how you like them. For instance, on page 36-37, there is a blueprint to customize your own frittata. I think this would be a great help from those cooks who want to start learning to come up with their own recipes. It's kind of a stepping stone to take to learn how ingredients work together. I think it was a great idea to add that ...

I recently received My Perfect Pantry by Geoffrey Zakarian with Amy Stevenson and Margaret Zakarian. You may know him from the Food Network if you watch that channel often. I was really intrigued by the books premise of “150 easy recipes from 50 essential ingredients.” Zakarian starts off the cookbook with foundation items to have on hand. These are various spices and such to have on hand to help your dishes have more flavor. Then he heads right into the meat of the cookbook, the pantry. He gives recipes for such common items as bbq sauce, rice, ketchup, honey, vinegar and more. There are many beautiful pictures of the food in the cookbook. I have to say, that’s a very important feature to me. I like to see what a recipe looks like before I decided to make it. There are exceptions to that, but they are rare. There are some yummy sounding recipes in the book like Supercharged Chicken Wings, Huevos Rancheros, Veal and Bean Casserole, and even Chocolate-Dipped Candied Oran...

How many of you watch Food Network? I'm guessing there are quite a few of you that do! One of my favorite shows to watch is Chopped, so I was excited to get to review The Chopped Cookbook. I do have a recipe planned to make from this book to share with you soon. I am hoping to get caught up on my cookbook review recipes by the end of next week. I have a recipe ready from each book to share with you, just need more time in the day! One of the neat things about this book is that the recipes all seemed to have easy to find ingredients, so nothing crazy like the show. The book begins with a pantry list of items that are good to have on hand. There is a good variety in the cookbook with chapters on a variety of meals. The chapters that are included in the book are: Pasta Night, Chickens Gone Wild, Eggs after Breakfast, Flash in the Pan (meaty entrees), Completely Fun Ways to Cook Vegetables, All Things Ground: Beyond Beef, Big Salads: Hearty and Fresh, Fishing for Compliments, Gr...