Canal House Cooking - 9780982739464

We are home cooks writing about home cooking for other home cooks. We cook seasonally because that's what makes sense.

Farm Markets and Gardens is a collection of some of our favorite summer recipes. They'll make you want to run straight to the kitchen or out to the grill and start cooking. Our recipes are easy to prepare and completely doable for the novice and experienced cook alike. In the summer, we forsake the convenience of the supermarket to live in the season by shopping at farmers' markets and roadside tables, and gathering the very freshest vegetables from our own gardens. The way we cook couldn't be simpler—slicing big, juicy tomatoes for lunch, preserving tomatoes for later; grilling vine-wrapped whole fish or a peppercorn-rubbed beef tenderloin for dinner; roasting chickens then slathering them with fresh herb butter; cooking corn into succotash; and turning ripe summer fruit into jams, jellies, and cobblers.

The Good Life is a collection of some of our favorite recipes, the ones we cook for ourselves, our friends, and our families during the fall and right through the holiday season. These are recipes that will make you want to restock your pantry and refrigerator and start cooking. In this volume we toast to the good life with ice-cold flutes of grower Champagne and cook lots of big, delicious food. We assemble our version of smØrrebrØd that glorious array of Danish open-faced sandwiches—with smoked, cured, and pickled fish. We turn out classic pÂtÉs and terrines; top buckwheat blini with smoked salmon and trout roe; tuck black truffles under the skin of our roasted chicken; make our own sausages to serve with big spoonfuls of creamy polenta; and fill crÊpes with savory and sweet fillings. We fry apple fritters in the fall and decorate sugar cookies for the holidays.

The Grocery Store is a collection of our favorite recipes using the best that grocery stores have to offer. It is filled with recipes that will make you want to run straight to the grocery store to stock up and start cooking. Good cooking relies on good shopping, so we buy smoked fish to make a delicious creamy stew, and plump organic chickens to roast right on the oven rack over potatoes and vegetables. Bunches of fat local asparagus go into our shopping cart—we cook them simply and bathe them in a luscious lemon-butter sauce. We choose hearty escarole and tender young spinach and stock up on bags of frozen peas and fava beans to use in so many ways. We buy succulent rhubarb for an early spring tonic or for an Easter dessert, roasted and spooned over crisp meringues.