Family Comfort Foods – Cookbook Recommendation

This cookbook has been in the works for decades. As a “latchkey kid” long before the term was popularized, I was preparing meals for myself from age ten or so. I would like to be able to claim that I learned the kitchen basics at my mother’s elbow, but the truth is I found my way reading cookbooks and through trial-and-error.

Confessions of An Oenophile = An American Family Cookbook

When I inherited my mother’s and grandmother’s recipes on index cards, I took it upon myself to reconstruct my family’s kitchen legacy which had previously only been preserved in the hearts and memories of our family and friends.

Thus, a fair amount of contemporary thought and planning has gone into this cookbook, and it has been shaped by my own tastes and interests. For example, it has been my goal to put together a practical family cookbook using wine as an important ingredient in a wide variety of menus. I live in the wine country of northern California, where wine is an important influence in the whole culture. I have therefore taken our old family meals and embellished them accordingly.

I have also tended to focus on “comfort foods” which, though some people accuse this use of food as being inherently unhealthy, can be made increasingly beneficial if only the cook will think about how home-grown produce and local ingredients can be integrated and experiment with them. I therefore have included recipes which use those foods and ingredients that are available, not only to us in California, but in the Midwestern, Southern and the Atlantic states.

We are entering an era in which rising transportation costs and food safety concerns will likely change our ways with food.  These recipes limit the mandatory use of gourmet, exotic, and hard-to-find ingredients. I have, in fact, organized the book according to the seasons of the year when local ingredients are more likely to be “in season.”

I can recall during college that my dear future wife tried baking homemade wheat bread. Too bad she got confused between baking powder and baking soda; we ended up using the loaves as doorstops. Remember to have a sense of humor in the kitchen – no matter what may happen.

An Organic Orange Friday – Go Giants!

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