I happened across this one at the library, and since my Deborah Madison “how to make everything” cookbook was a foun­dational text for me back in the ’00s when I was first learning to cook, I thought I’d check it out.  The gimmick to this one is that the vegetables are grouped into families, so if you have ever found yourself thinking “I feel like having a crucifer for dinner”, this may be the book for you.  None of the recipes I tried from this one were particularly memorable, though, so I’m not sure how likely it is that I’ll revisit it now that I’ve returned it to the library.

When I first moved back to California in the mid-’00s, one of the places I found myself eating a lot was Tacubaya, on Berkeley’s Fourth Street.  It was a taqueria, but an unusual one: instead of the usual burritos and tacos it served up tamales and chiles relleños with high-end fillings that changed with the seasons.  I soon learned that Tacubaya was a casual spinoff of a sit-down restaurant in Oakland’s Temescal, Doña Tomás; I went there once.  Sadly, even though I live a lot closer to Tacubaya than I used to, I can’t eat there nearly as much: prices have shot up over the past couple of decades.  However, this cookbook is a good substitute!  Though most of the recipes are full of meat and therefore of no use to me, I tried making huevos divorciadas, quesadillas, frijoles con todo, enchiladas, and those chiles relleños⁠—and they all did indeed taste exactly like their counterparts at the real Tacubaya!  Thumbs up.

I have an Instant Pot, but prior to getting hold of this cookbook I had never used it for anything other than preparing dried beans.  Now I can say that I have used the sauté function!  …which is basically the equivalent of a pot you can’t take off the stove.  I tried a few recipes from this book⁠—a cauliflower soup; a version of the lobhia aur khumbi I developed a liking for after getting it at the late, lamented Silk Road in Chapel Hill; a kale and rice dish; some dal tarka⁠—and they all amounted to frying up some aromatics and spices on the sauté setting, adding vegetables and/or beans and water, pressure cooking for a few minutes, and opening up the Instant Pot to feast upon the very soft stew that resulted.  Not bad, but skippable.

The first recipe I ever attempted that turned out well was not from a cookbook, but from the pre‑web Internet: the Gopher net­work had a recipe archive, and my whole senior year of college, my go‑to when it came to potluck dinners and whatnot was an Oreo cheesecake I found there.  Nearly thirty years later (gack!) I still get lots of recipes from the Internet⁠—which the all-seeing eye of Google is well aware of, as it has Youtube feed me all sorts of cooking channels.  So I thought that I should start including these in my cookbook posts.

This channel is widely regarded as the forebear of all other Youtube cooking channels, as it dates back to the George W. Bush administration.  It’s very eclectic: while in the early days it may have focused on basics like pizza sauce and lentil soup, 15+ years later most of the videos on the channel focus on what one com­menter termed “hypothetical foods”: potato chip pizza, deviled egg noodle salad, sushi roll gratin.  The creator, who calls himself “Chef John”, has been called the Bob Ross of the Internet cooking world, with his relaxed vibe and sing-song delivery.  But I’m only going to be looking at these channels as sources of meals rather than of entertainment, and I am sad to say that, for me, Food Wishes has been kind of a flop on this score.

Take the spaghetti alla Nerano dish I tried a few days ago.  Thanks to Jack Bishop, pasta with vegetable sauce is the staple of my diet.  I’ve made it multiple times a week, week in and week out, for twenty years.  But this was just a bad recipe⁠—bland and poorly proportioned.  The ratio of pasta to sauce was wrong.  The amount of basil was wrong.  The amount of salt was wrong.  Yeah, I could adjust those things, but at that point the credit for the meal goes to me and not the recipe.  I decided to see whether a Mexican dish would fare better, and tried the chile relleño pan­cakes.  And, nah.  Real chiles relleños are significantly better and not actually harder⁠—in fact, I’d say the Doña Tomás chile relleño recipe came together with less effort.  Asia, perhaps?  I tried the Korean cream cheese garlic rolls, and while the filling tasted good raw, and they came out looking pretty good, the finished product was underwhelming to eat, especially given the many hours the recipe took to complete.

Other baked goods were similar.  The chocolate-cherry loaf was just the sum of its parts, and by the time the center was no longer goopy, the outside was dark and dried out.  Raspberry and white chocolate scones⁠—yes, the recipe warned that they weren’t sweet, but I still had a visceral “ugh” reaction when I bit into the first one, and had to smother them in powdered sugar to make them palatable.  Cornbread pancakes with strawberry syrup?  Well, the syrup was sweet enough, but the pancakes were pretty gummy⁠—I’d rather just make a regular pancake.  Probably the worst of all the recipes I tried was the state fair lemonade.  Chef John crows that it’s “the greatest lemonade you’ve ever tasted”…and it was a contender for the worst.  I wound up pouring most of it down the drain.  The secret, such as it is, is to peel the lem­ons, bury the strips of zest in sugar to make an oleo saccharum, boil up the oleo saccharum, chill it, and then add lemon juice and water.  The result tasted like a liquefied urinal cake.  By way of comparison, I hopped onto the Google machine and pretty much at random grabbed another lemonade recipe that did not use the lemon peel, and it was delicious.  So, yeah⁠—if Youtube keeps recommending Food Wishes videos to me, I might use the titles to give me ideas for recipes to look up elsewhere, but I won’t be following along with the videos themselves.

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