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| Super Natural Cooking Wrap-Up |
| m-c: |
| Well, the month of January is almost over, so it's time to step back a little and look at Super Natural Cooking as a whole. I must say we did an excellent job of choosing our first cookbook of the month. The more I cooked from it, the more I liked it. |
| mb: |
| Oh, I totally agree. This book is spectacular, and I'm SO glad we chose it as our book of the month. It was the perfect choice. |
| m-c: |
| Did you cook more recipes than you reported on? I did. |
| The wheat berry salad (page 52) was excellent -- I made it without feta because it was a vegan day for us (we try to be vegan two nights a week). |
| The hedgehog potatoes (page 97), were such an adorable presentation that after I made them I was inspired to make hedgehog eggplant another day. |
| mb: |
| Well, I was so inspired by your muhammara that I made it myself (several times, I have to admit). |
| The curried tofu scramble (page 90), which was so good that even my meat-loving husband enjoyed it! |
| m-c: |
| Omigosh, yes. I had heard the words "tofu" and "scramble" used in conjunction from various flea-bitten dirty-footed hippie friends of mine and never dreamed what I was missing. I made it twice, once with Heidi's seasonings and once in a sort of Italian way with tomatoes and garlic and basil. |
| mb: |
| The wild rice soup with sweet potato croutons (pages 60-61) was to die for -- warming and filling and perfect for the cold months. |
| I had a vegetable break-through with one of her recipes. My husband said he'd never had brussels sprouts, so I cooked the golden-crusted brussels sprouts (pages 150-151) and he loved them. And I mean LOVED them. He said he couldn't understand why everyone always made such a big deal about brussels sprouts because they are so delicious. I had to explain to him that they aren't normally cooked that well. |
| And otsu (pages 62-63), which is buckwheat noodles with vegetables in an Asian sauce, has become the go-to dish in my house. We eat it at least once a week, no joke. |
| How did you change the other recipes you tried? |
| m-c: |
| I made the cashew cream (page 200), used it for cream puffs, and have some in the refrigerator even as we speak. I plan to use the idea as a springboard to a different kind of nut cream, one made from toasted as opposed to raw nuts -- almonds maybe? -- and forced through a sieve to make it smoother. Forcing things through a sieve is one of my basic kitchen tricks. People draw back from doing it, but really, it's no big deal. |
| mb: |
| Wowsers. As I'm not the biggest fan of cashews, almond cream sounds good to me. |
| m-c: |
| I made the shredded green beans (page 91) twice. I had just learned about the "horse ear cut" from Fuchsia Dunlop (Land of Plenty, W. W. Norton, 2001, page 39) and was delighted to be able to use it so soon. You cut round things like scallions or green beans at a very sharp angle, and the resulting slivers do indeed look like horses' ears. |
| The first time I made the shredded green beans I did them just as Heidi did, with citrus zest and chives. Mark hated them. The next time I made them I cooked them a little longer and flavored them with soy sauce and sesame oil. Mark liked them a little better. When I make them again I'll use soy sauce, peanut oil, and the ingredient that makes any food taste better to him, roasted peanuts. He will be unable to resist. |
| mb: |
| Yum to all of that! |
| m-c: |
| Let's talk a little about the book design. I think Toni Tajima is a genius. |
| mb: |
| A large part of what makes this book so appealing is the layout. It's rich and warm and welcoming and happy while still being intensely cool. It makes me think of saris and sunshine and the smell of freshly‑squeezed lemon juice. I constantly find myself flipping through the book wishing that my entire life looked that good. Honestly, genius might be an understatement. |
| m-c: |
| The biggest challenge in doing text design for a cookbook is how to handle units of such different size. The recipe for agua de jamaica (hibiscus drink, pages 88-89) has four ingredients, three short paragraphs of method, and a little note. The recipe for thin mint cookies (pages 172-173) has 9 ingredients, 6 meaty paragraphs of method, and a little note. The recipe for otsu (pages 62-63) has 17 ingredients, three medium-sized paragraphs of method, and two notes. And so on. All those different elements must be worked into a design where the reader isn't wondering why a small recipe is so spaced out or a long one so crowded. |
| Tajima gives herself (himself?) lots of elements to play around with, yet I feel sure most readers don't even notice how elegantly they all function together -- there's nothing contrived or obvious about them. |
| mb: |
| And the photos? All taken by Heidi herself and let me tell ya, only in my wildest dreams do I wish that I was that good of a photographer. The pictures in this book are of food and people and random objects and they're wonderful. It's inspirational, no doubt about it. |
| What about the indexing? I know that's always a sticking point for you. |
| m-c: |
| Right, I just can't understand how a publisher can get professional photography, professional book design, professional editing, and then have the index done by somebody's boyfriend's little sister. |
| Giant Crusty and Creamy White Beans with Greens is indexed under giant, not crusty, not creamy, not white, beans. You and I have called them "crusty" every time we've talked about them. |
| Baked Purple Hedgehog Potatoes under baked and potatoes, but not purple, not hedgehog. Again, all I ever called them was hedgehog potatoes. Professional indexers identify the salient term or terms; it's their job; they're good at it. |
Three other small complaints:
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| But these are nits. The book is wonderful -- food, writing, pictures, layout ‑‑ even the binding is wonderful. Celestial Arts deserves a big huzzah and hundreds of thousands in sales. |
| mb: |
| I agree 100%. |
| mb: |
| Do you have any other books you would recommend along the same lines as Super Natural? |
| m-c: |
| For another vegetarian book, I'd recommend Angela Shelf Medearis's The Ethnic Vegetarian: Traditional and Modern Recipes from Africa, America, and the Caribbean (Rodale, 2004). Medearis is a real scholar, with bunches of interesting and authentic recipes for stuff like Caribbean Totoes (spiced cake-bread things), Algonquin Wild Nut Soup (hazlenuts), and South African Umngqusho (hominy and black-eyed peas). |
| For more gorgeous photography, I can hardly take my eyes off Diana Henry's Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons: Enchanting Dishes from the Middle East, Mediterranean and North Africa (Mitchell Beazley, 2002), with photographs by Jason Lowe. I love Jason Lowe's photography so much that I'm often tempted to buy cookbooks solely for his pictures, even if I don't need the books. (Well, let's be honest here, do I really need any more cookbooks?) His moody, half-lit oranges for the beginning of the chapter on citrus fruit, his close-up macro-lens forest of parsley and his bird's-eye basil from the chapter on herbs, his Impressionistic portrait of two kinds of chocolate truffles in the making -- I could go on and on. |
| And the recipes are good too. |
Questions? Comments? Corrections?
Suggestions? Contributions?
Please let us know!
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