I first heard of Jane Grigson in the pages of Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking. Colwin often references Grigson as the source of some of her most beloved and delicious recipes. Her affectionate description of the food in Good Things made me tuck it away in the section of my brain in which I store things I long to read and explore. I had the opportunity to browse the cookbook section of the main Powell's a couple of weeks ago and there it was, tucked away in the English cuisine section. I added it to my stack, internally crowing a little at my good fortune.

And good fortune it has been, as this is a wonderful book. Written in 1971, Grigson's voice is down to earth and helpful and her recipes are easy to follow. I also adore the way the book is organized. It is broken down into large sections that include Fish, Meat & Game, Vegetables, Fruit and a section simply entitled And...

Within each of those sections, the contents are further broken down into specific ingredients. There are a full ten pages of recipes devoted to carrots. That section begins with these words, "Carrots are sweet. And carrots are a beautiful colour. And they are cheap." How can you not fall in love with a cookbook that speaks that honestly and charmingly about this basic root vegetable? It might help slightly that I am somewhat partial to carrots.

As I looked around to see what other people have said about Good Things and Jane Grigson, I came across this blog entry. Written by a woman from the UK who has been cooking from this volume for years, the affection she feels for Grigson shines through readily. I hope you feel the same way if you happen to get your hands on a copy for yourself.

I picked up my copy of Nigel Slater's Real Fast Food several years ago at a thrift store. It was actually my initial introduction to Nigel Slater and I was totally smitten with him within the first few paragraphs. His voice is appealing and basic, especially in the Notes section towards the beginning of the book. The copy I have is a squat paperback British edition published by Penguin, which is additionally endearing because of the differences in spelling and vernacular. However, it was also published in the United States, so there are lots of copies available.

The really terrific thing about this book is that it contains so many tasty, easy recipes. I love the section on eggs, because I always have eggs in my fridge and often get tired of the ways in which I typically make them. With 20 pages of egg recipes, I always have a good place to turn when I want something different than what is in my inner food rotation. The section on vegetables and salads is also one of my favorite resources. This is a great cookbook for January as it contains lots of simple, healthy recipes.

Looking to save a little money this holiday season? One way to do that is to curb your restaurant habit. However, so many of our social lives revolve around going out to eat with friends and so to eat in is to give up those opportunities to socialize and hang out. Luckily, Catharine of the food blog Not Eating Out in New York (we did a feature about her just over a year ago) has just posted some helpful tips about cooking at home, keeping it fun and making sure you still have a social life while you're doing it. Here are some of her suggestions.

• Buy fresh veggies often so that there's a "perishable presence" in your home that you've got to use.
  
• Read cooking sites or food blogs just as you're getting hungry to inspire yourself to feed that appetite
• Share your food with friends. You invite them over for dinner, chances are they'll return the favor and suddenly, you're hanging out and doing it outside a restaurant.
  

She's got lots more useful thoughts, but I don't want to be a spoiler, so I'll just stop there. She's certainly got me thinking about cooking at home more than I already do.

Monday was cool, overcast and rainy here in Philadelphia. I know that some people hate that kind of weather, especially in summer, but over a decade of living in the Pacific Northwest during my formative years left me conditioned to think of it as cozy and comforting. It just so happens that I've been re-reading Laurie Colwin's book Home Cooking over the last few days, which is the perfect accompaniment to cozy weather.

Towards the end of the book she has an essay entitled How to Make Gingerbread. I finished it right around dinnertime, and being that I had nearly all the ingredients necessary (I didn't have buttermilk, but I followed her tip to stir a little yogurt into milk) I figured fate was telling me to whip up a batch. It turned out well, except that for that fact that I made a very poor choice in pans and so had some overflow that accumulated on the already dirty bottom of my oven. Despite that minor disaster, it turned out well and has left my apartment smelling of warm spices and the coming of fall.

Laurie's recipe is after the jump.

Because I'm fascinated by food, it should come as no surprise to any of you out there that I read a lot of food blogs. There are a bunch that I've been following a long time, and some that are relatively recent additions to my RSS reader. One that has become a new favorite of mine, is French Laundry at Home.

Carol started her project back in January and has been steadily cooking her way through Thomas Keller's cookbook ever since. She not only prepares his recipes, but documents each step along the way with pictures and notes about her progress. She is not shy admitting where she deviates from the written recipe and lets her readers know how she and her tasters enjoyed each dish. In addition to being a pretty able cook, she's an entertaining writer, and when I read her posts, I begin to feel like she's a friend of mine.

The picture above is from one of her latest posts, when she made Nectarine Salad with Green Tomato Confiture and Hazelnut Sabayon.

The politics of food was at the forefront, making people aware of issues like obesity and food safety, as well as introducing (or reintroducing) consumers to the idea that their food comes from farmers and fields, not faceless factories. Organics exploded in popularity and so did animal activism issues, like the ban on foie gras in Chicago. Speaking of bans, the trans fat ban in NYC has sparked nation-wide interest and prompted many politicians to suggest similar legislation.

Home cooking was also hugely popular this year, as evidenced by the growing popularity of food blogs, the fact that most of the popular food programs on TV use words like "home-style," "country" and "everyday," and that the top ten bestselling cookbooks "have a decidedly nonprofessional focus" designed to appeal to home cooks, not would-be chefs.

Frank Bruni's dream dinner takes place at a number of restaurants because he "didn't have the perfect meal in 2006," so he has imagined a restaurant crawl to take him around the city fro course to course.

Eric Asimov names key wine trends, like the growth of Spanish wineries, the popularity of Pinot Noir and the fact that you'll always remember the good, not the bad, in the long run.

Mark Bittman, the minimalist, recommends his rich and cheesy Welsh Rarebit as a perfect late-night snack on a night of overindulgence (in drinks, not food).

Frank Bruni gives Sasabune one star.

The average family seems to get carry-out food far more often than any time in the past, and the number one reason cited is convenience. It seems easier than cooking at home, since there is no planning and no shopping required. One Chicago family realized that they got take out meals just about every single day and Mary Ann Schultz suggested to her husband and son that they try going for 30 days without carry-out. They didn't have a problem affording all their meals, as both Schultz and her husband are well-employed, but she wanted her son to actually experience "family meals" as she did growing up.

The family took on the challenge and, after a rocky start, they learned to plan meals and write out shopping lists. They learned to stock the freezer and pantry so that they would have options at home. Quick-fix cookbooks were helpful for providing inspiration and do-able recipes for an inexperienced cook. You can take a look at her ongoing journal to see how the challenge went from day to day.

Overall, the family learned that cooking at home was just as tasty as restaurant food and they enjoyed it more. They saved over $200 and Mary Ann lost 7 pounds during the switch. They're probably not going to cut it out completely, but perhaps their challenge could lend a bit of inspiration to anyone else who uses the "carryout menu folder...as a crutch for meals."

Some cookbooks are really meant for professionals, with professional kitchens, equipment, access to ingredients that aren't readily available in the grocery store and knowledge of cooking techniques that may not be common among home cooks. So when a home cook wants to recreate their favorite Alain Ducasse dish at home, he or she will probably have to make some changes to the original recipe. Chef, Interrupted is a cookbook that has done all of that work for you.

Author Melissa Clark has taken recipes from famous, popular chefs and "interrupted them," streamlined them to make restaurant dishes more do-able for home chefs. She offers substitutions for some less common ingredients, or explains where and how to find them, and rewrites the recipes, streamlining the process and eliminating unnecessary components, such as garnishes or extra, non-critical accents. Because she worked alongside the chefs who provided the recipes, as the photos in the book will testify, she knows what can - and what cannot - be eliminated and still preserves the integrity and taste of the final dish. The recipes are not dumbed down, pale copies of the originals, nor are they "quick-fix" recipes that appear in many compendiums; they are the real deal, just slightly simplified.

Who says that down-home soul food has to be unhealthy by definition? Soul food is about satisfying food that tastes great because it is made with flavorful ingredients and love. Both are things that can carry over to slightly lighter versions of favorite dishes without loosing anything but the fat.

Neo Soul is soul food with a healthy twist, but it is still only a twist because although this is a lower-fat cookbook, the author chooses to include some fat when flavor might suffer - a nice touch that some healthy cookbook authors forget about. Author Lindsay Williams grew up on soul food (he's the grandson of the founder of Sylvia Woods, founder of Silvia's restaurants and known as "the queen of soul food) and turned into a food addict. By tweaking his favorite dishes, he managed to put out some delicious food and loose about 200 pounds at the same time. If you need a little bit of convincing that healthy soul food is still soul food, try his recipe for Oven Fried Chicken before you buy the book.

It is not surprising to note that a meal eaten at a restaurant is more expensive than one eaten at home. You are paying for the cooking and service, as well as for the food itself. What is surprising is that people are actually spending more money eating out than eating at home overall.

Official figures released in Britain show that people are spending £2 billion more on restaurant food than on food that they might cook themselves. On top of that, spending on food and drink has more than doubled in the same time period, which indicates that people are eating more food, more often.

With the rise in popularity of cooking programs and the ever-growing trend for gourmet home cooking, it is possible that the numbers will hold as they are, though few people want to give up "exotic" foods that they think they can't cook at home, like curries and sushi.

The New York Times tried, rather sadly, to take a sort of road trip with their food section this week. The Sterns, the founders of Roadfood, know what road trips are and they involve more than two hours of driving. Over the last 25 years, they have driven more than 4,000,000 miles of road around the country and eaten more than 72,427. That is some serious road tripping. For a sneak peek into some of their finds, check out this column they did for Conde Naste Traveler that highlights 20 great food finds around the country. It may take more than a day to get to some of these places, but you'll have at least as much fun on the journey as you will at the destination. Hot spots and good eats include:

• Mr. Beef in Chicago, Il
• Cuban sandwich at El Siboney's in Key West, Fl.
• Creamy Grits at the Old Post Office in South Carolina
• Fried Clams at the Clam Box in Mass.
• Chili at the Little Diner in Canutillo, Texas
• Fried Chicken at Bon-Ton Mini Mart in Kentucky

Despite all the hype about celebrity chefs - whether they're on TV or simply known because they're good at what they do - and their cookbooks, the best selling ones are still the same type of cookbooks that have always been popular: basic, all-around cookbooks with tried-and-true recipes. But how could books from Phyllis Pellman Good's Fix it and Forget it series outsell books from the likes of Rachael Ray, whose name alone is definitely a household word?

The answer is simple and lies just underneath the surface of current cooking trends. Right now, both slow food and "30-minute meals" are popular, as are organic ingredients, exotic flavors and learning to cook as a pastime, the premise that reinvented the Food Network. The fact is that, no matter what the trends are, most people already know how to cook something and have been cooking longer than the Food Network has been telling them how to do it.  Recipes were passed around and improved over time. It may not have been organic or gourmet, but food had to be cooked and whatever it was usually tasted pretty good to everyone in the family.

 

There are lots of packaged mixes at the store that can make cooking a meal for your family fast and easy after a long day at work. Generally speaking, these mixes are grains with spices and sometimes vegetables and include favorite brands include Rice-A-Roni and Zatarains. Hamburger Helper operates along similar lines, but calls for the addition of meat. These options are already a cut above precooked frozen foods, but there is still something commercial about them. Many new gourmet mixes, with fresher vegetables, original spice combinations and unusual grains are coming out, like the Trader Joe's Spelt with Red and Green Peppers mix pictured here, which make for a lovely change on the dinner table.

To add a touch of homemade flavor to what is essentially a meal from a box, without taking too many extra minutes out of an already busy evening, try sauteing some garlic in the bottom of the pan before adding the mix, or dicing an onion or a shallot and tossing it into the pot with the cooking liquid. Read the ingredients and see what might pair well. This spelt mix, for example, would be good with extra peppers or, since it was well spiced, a vegetable like sweet potatoes or squash to round it out. Or, for heartier fare, take an example from Hamburger Helper and heat up some sausages while the grains cook and toss them in before serving.

[Photo by Nicole Weston]

Last weekend, The Washington Post featured an article about the movement toward dumbing down recipes to meet the skills of home cooks in the U.S. Words like dredge, saute, blanch, fold and cream have left the vocabulary of many would-be cooks and, as a result, such words appear less frequently in recipes from the likes of Kraft Foods and The Joy of Cooking. (A new edition of the latter will include a glossary of cooking terms.) The WaPo article cites some particularly funny anecdotes by General Mills, Inc. chairman Stephen W. Sanger, who spoke of emails and calls from confused home cooks. One wondered if they could substitute peaches for eggs, another started a fire by literally greasing the bottom of a pan before putting it in the oven.

Meatloaf is the ultimate comfort food. It is hearty, flavorful and can be subject to nearly infinite variations. Some meatloaves are all beef, while some are made with turkey or even faux meat, which preserves the spirit of the dish, if not the meat. Meatloaves have been around as long as ground meat and are larger versions of meatballs.  Due to their size, they can easily be served as a main course and the leftovers sliced for sandwiches. Flavorings and some "filler," in the form of vegetables, egg, breadcrumbs or rice, are added to help the loaf maintain its shape. The practice of "stretching the meat" with filler was popular and widely practiced during the lean war years of the early 20th century.

After a decline in popularity, due in part to many years of inclusion in frost-bitten, over-processed, microwaveable meals, meatloaf is working its way back onto the plates and into the hearts of diners everywhere. It is on upscale restaurant menus, where it is recognized as classic American fare, as well as being a staple at diners and neighborhood restaurants across the country.