cookery

last updated 10/13/2010 – new cookbooks added

If you’ve gotta eat, you gotta cook, and if you’ve gotta cook, you might as well enjoy it.

cook·er·y (kŏŏk’ə-rē)

n.  pl. cook·er·ies

1. The art or practice of preparing food.
2. A place for cooking.

My cooking and food related posts can be found here.

Current Cookbook Library – those I recommend are +ed

• +Betty Crocker’s Cooky Book
• +Fish – the Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking
• +Grandmothers of Greenbush: Recipes and Memories of the Old Greenbush Neighborhood
• +The Greens Cook Book: Extraordinary Vegetarian Cuisine from the Celebrated Restaurant
• Healthy Life kitchen
• Lean Italian Cooking
• +Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian: More Than 650 Meatless Recipes from Around the World
• +Madhur Jaffrey’s World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking
• Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home: Fast and Easy Recipes for Any Day
• +The New Moosewood Cookbook (Mollie Katzen’s Classic Cooking)
• The Book of North African Cooking
• +A Taste of Memories from the Old Bush Vol 1
• +A Taste of Memories from the Old Bush Vol 2
• +Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces
• +The Varied Kitchens of India : Cuisines of the Anglo-Indians of Calcutta, Kashmiris, Parsis, and Tibetans of Darjeeling
• +Sunday’s at Moosewood – Ethnic and Regional Recipes from the Cooks at the Legendary Restaurant
• +Vegetarian Dishes from Across the Middle East
• +The Curry Book
• +Love Soup
• +Kneadlessly Simple: Fabulous, Fuss-Free, No-Knead Breads
• +How to Cook Everything
• +Food Matters
• +Vegan Soul Kitchen
• +Classic Vegetarian Cooking of the Middle East and North Africa

Cookbook Wishlist

• We Called it Macaroni – an American Heritage of Southern Italian Cooking
• Easy Family Recipes from a Chinese-American Childhood
• Savoring the Seasons of the Northern Heartland
• A Cook’s Tour of Minnesota
• Blue Corn and Chocolate
• Biscuits, Spoonbread and Sweet Potato Pie
• Dungeness Crabs And Blackberry Cobblers: The Northwest Heritage Cookbook
• Veganomics
• Eat, Drink and Be Vegan
• Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking
• Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day: 100 New Recipes Featuring Whole Grains, Fruits, Vegetables, and Gluten-Free Ingredients
• Momofuku

Online cookery and food content

• Bitten – Mark Bittman on Food
• 101 cookbooks
• Fatfree Vegan
• Ahmed Hamdy Eissa’s Egyptian recipes
• Cake Wrecks
• Green Zabiha
• Arabic Bites
• Tammy’s Somali Home
• Sustainable Table
• NY Times Health News Section
• The Meatrix
• Jamie Oliver
• Civil Eats

Healthy, Humane and Halal reads

• Animal Factory
• The CAFO Reader
• Hope’s Edge – the Next Diet for a Small Planet
• Diet for a Hot Planet
• The Food Revolution
• The New Good Life
• Slaughterhouse
• Eating Animals

Articles of Interest

• Putting Meat in it’s Place
• Assorted Michael Pollan articles

No Alcohol in my food

shafi’i ruling on vanilla extract:

So vanilla extract is essentially a mixture of vanilla in a liquid intoxicant (namely, ethanol). It is therefore filth and forbidden to ingest, etc. Anything with vanilla extract added to it would be filthified and therefore also haram to ingest.

Chocolates without vanilla do exist. Not every product on the following pages is vanilla free. Always read the ingredients, and when in doubt, contact the manufacturer.

Chocolate without vanilla extract

Coppeneur

Domori

Rococo

Theo Chocolate

New Tree

Michel Cluizel

Terra Nostra

Dagoba

Wildbar

Rapunzel

Equal Exchange

Reviews are forthcoming.

Alternatives to Extracts for baking

I’m not endorsing the shops linked herein, unless I explicitly say so. It’s just to give you an idea of what’s out there.

• Frontier Coop Vanilla Flavor – found this at my local coop.  Growing up, my mom only used the real, alcohol laden stuff, and with this, I can’t taste the difference.  Scroll down to the bottom of the page.  If you click on “products” and then “baking flavors and extracts,” you’ll find a bunch of other alcohol-less extracts.
• Vanilla Beans Nector
• Ground Vanilla Beans – I’ve seen this on occasion at Marshall’s/TJ Maxx quite cheap, but haven’t tried it yet.
• Vanilla Powder
• Vanilla Beans – cut it open, scrape out the innerds and let them sit with something liquidish in your recipe. I do this for cookies, and OMGosh, delicious! I can recommend Penzeys (anything from them is great), although they’re expensive. I’ve seen places online that sell them in higher bulk for cheaper prices.
• Make your own vanilla sugar -if you have used vanilla pods, throw them in a canister with sugar. Makes tasty vanilla tinted sugar that’s great in coffee.

What about other extracts? If you look hard enough, you can find it. Thanks Sheikh Google!

• Cook’s Alcohol Free Flavors
• Alcohol free extracts – almond, banana, butter, butter pecan, cherry, coconut, lemon, maple, orange, pineapple, raspberry, strawberry, walnut
• Extract Substitutes
• Nature’s Flavors – search “alcohol free,” dozens upon dozens of different flavors
• Spicery Shoppe
• Word is Whole Foods has alcohol free extracts. Haven’t been there to confirm, but it’s on my list of things to do.