When I wrote up a batch of five cookbooks a bit over six months ago, I said that “none of these are really recommended”, as I ended up scoring all of them between four and eight on my 24-point scale, on which you need to land in the double digits to get an unequivocal thumbs-up.  But all four of the cookbooks below will get a double-digit score!

Ellie found this in a Little Free Library box and brought it home; it turns out to be the cookbook of a hipster bakery in Brooklyn (which may be redundant).  At first I thought that the main gimmick here was an emphasis on savory flavors in what are usually sweet offerings: e.g., one scone recipe I made was cheddar mustard, and out of the chapter on muffins I made the feta basil scallion ones and the cheddar corn ones.  These were all pretty good, but my favorites from this chapter didn’t try to straddle the line between sweet and savory: they were the jelly donut muffins.  Anyway, it turned out that the reason I’d misunderstood the emphasis of this book was that the donor had sliced out several chapters before placing it in the box!  If I wanted to make cookies or cakes or brownies, I’d have to check a complete copy out of the library!  So I did.  It turns out that in these chapters, the authors crank up the volume, with recipe titles like “salty super dark chocolate brownies”.  Those were a bit too intense, and I didn’t even add the coffee.  I made the white cake with pomegranate icing, but thought the cake was too dense; Ellie really liked the cake, but said that the icing was just too much to take.  The last recipe I made from this book was the pistachio cardamom cupcakes, which were good, except the chocolate ganache icing was overpowering to the point that I had to scrape it off and mellow it with some extra cream before reapplying it.  So this would probably be in the “high mixed” range if not for the fact that the pie crust recipe out of this book made the best pie crust I’ve ever made⁠—possibly even the best pie crust I’ve ever had.  And the donor was kind enough to leave that one in the book, so I won’t have to copy it down before returning the full cookbook to the library!

I saw this one on the new releases shelf at the Albany library and decided to give it a whirl.  The best recipe was the crispy rice, which I am told should not come as a surprise.  As for the other recipes⁠—I made an avocado dish with serrano pesto, a black bean soup with a bunch of different garnishes, a kale paella, and a few more things⁠—none were amazing, but all were good, and most importantly, they all had that alchemy that I look for in a recipe.  I have a note here about a sauce from this cookbook that, even if I didn’t love it, still impressed me, because it tasted like more than just the sum of its parts.

Gracias Madre is a vegan Mexican rest­aurant in Los Angeles, which surprised me to learn because I’d been to a vegan Mexican restaurant in San Francisco called Gracias Madre in 2017.  Turns out it relocated by four hundred miles or so.  I’d never written it up, because I told my­self that I wanted to come back and try more dishes before rendering a verdict, but I just don’t go into San Francisco town all that much, and I guess now that ship has sailed.  Anyway, I am not a vegan, but I am a vegetarian, and I find that vegan cooking tends to involve a different ethos from vegetarian cooking.  For instance, nearly all taquerias offer up a vegetarian burrito, which is just a standard burrito without the meat: beans, rice, cheese, salsa, sour cream, guacamole.  The exceptions, weirdly, have been the vegan taquerias I have gone to.  They nearly always force you to pick one of their meat substi­tutes: mushroom barbacoa! cauliflower al pastor! jackfruit asada!  And the result is gross.  I love cauliflower; I want it to taste like cauliflower, not like some kind of uncanny valley pork.  And that’s what happened here: when I tried making the tlayuda recipe, the fake meat topping kind of ruined it.  So why am I recommending this cookbook?  Because it was easy enough to leave that topping off, and now I know how to make tlayudas!  And many of these recipes are a lot easier if you’re not a vegan and don’t have to go through the laborious process of making your own fake cheese and fake butter and fake sour cream, which tends to take up the lion’s share of the steps in each recipe: I just swapped in the real thing, and know I know how to make uchepos, and tetelas, and all sorts of other dishes that I jump at when I see them on menus but rarely find⁠—certainly that I rarely find vegetarian versions of.

And here we have the best cookbook from this batch.  Ellie found this in a Little Free Library box and brought it home, and was pretty enthusiastic at the prospect of eating out of it for the next while, saying that this was the food she’d grown up with, or at least a vegan ap­proximation of it, and that it was hard to find in California and she missed it a lot.  And I think I’ve shrunk­en down the cover image enough to make the text illegible, but it says that the recipes between these covers draw from the Ameri­can South, the Caribbean, and Africa proper.  I’ve made some Ethiopian recipes before, and I have a Nigerian baked bean dish in my rotation, but otherwise, these cuisines are well outside my wheelhouse.  But I can follow a recipe, and I’ve developed my palate enough over the years that I can usually steer things in a direction that seems right to me, so I dove in.  Ellie was a big fan of the grits and collard greens⁠—“This is what food is supposed to taste like!”, she declared⁠—and I liked that one too, but the real eye-opener for me was the recipe for vegetable and tofu kebabs with pomegranate-peach barbecue sauce.  I’ve never really gotten much out of a skewer, and the recipe was kind of a pain in the ass to make (you have to freeze the tofu, thaw it out, squeeze it under a weighted plate, toss it in the sauce, refrigerate it in the sauce in a zip-lock back overnight, etc., etc.), but when it was finally done, I couldn’t stop eating these things⁠—I devoured skewer after skewer until I was about to burst.  Scalloped pota­toes in Jamaican curry were way better than I expected, the sweet potato tagine was another winner… blackeyed peas with cornbread croutons were good… there were a few recipes that I probably won’t make again, but all in all I’d call this one an excellent find.

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