Alana Chernila is an author you truly want to embrace. Her third book, Eating from the Ground Up, is a tribute to her creative cooking and writing skills. Her earlier books, The Homemade Pantry and The Homemade Kitchen, embraced the idea that the very best, truly great food, can come from your home kitchen.
Now, she’s stepped out of the kitchen, suggesting that your home garden or a farmer’s market can be your best asset towards vegetable nirvana.
Oh, vegetables. Who among us would volunteer to eat veggies first and foremost? Not me, I admit. As a kid, I was never a fan. And my kids? I would sit opposite my daughter at the dinner table for an hour, waiting for her to eat just one spoonful of carrots. I had to check, now and then, to make sure that the carrots were not being dropped to the floor.
I could have used this book a long time ago. And now I will never be far from it. This is the book that can put veggies into your life, into your kitchen, and onto your plate. The subtitle of this book is “Recipes for Simple, Perfect Vegetables.”
This clever book has its recipes organized in a fashion that you have never seen:
- Barely Recipes
- A Pot of Soup
- Too Hot to Cook
- Warmth and Comfort
- Celebrations and Other Excuses to Eat with Your Hands
That first chapter, Barely Recipes, will make you smile. Veggies have acquired a reputation for being, well, difficult. Classic recipes produce flavors that just do not amaze or entice. And cooking veggies takes time, an investment that can strike us as not very profitable. So here the ideas are to give you glorious flavor with so little effort that you will be smiling before the first bite:
Caramelized Turnips
Cheesy Broccoli
Maple Baked Winter Squash
Ginger Pickled Carrots
Butter Braised Cabbage
As you parade through the other chapters, the ideas become a little more complex, and ever more compelling. You read a recipe title and you pause, you must pause:
Cauliflower Cheddar Soup
Nettle Soup [trust me, it’s quite British and quite good]
Pea Soup with Mint and Buttermilk
Tomato Cheddar Pie [pictured below!]
Leek Carbonara
Indian Spiced Shepard’s Pie
Sweet Potato Latkes with Applesauce
The trick to making you crave veggies is the marriage of flavors yielding a sum that is definitely more than its parts. So, in that pea soup, peas and mint are classically complementary while the buttermilk adds body and tang. Shepard’s Pie can be bland, but Indian spices are a sure and rather easy solution.
Some of the recipes will take a few ingredients and a tad bit of time, but really just a few minutes and you’ll soon be hooked to this book. The time invested is surely worth the effort. Consider the Creamed Celeriac Salad with Maple Pecans and Lime. You will need, besides the celeriac, some pecans, maple syrup, just a hint of cayenne, yogurt, lime juice and parsley. You will need to chop and peel to be sure. The only stove time is a few minutes to make the maple-glazed pecans. In twenty minutes or so, you’ll have a restaurant-class salad sitting there on your kitchen counter.
This book is published by Clarkson Potter and the skills of that prominent firm are displayed on every page. The paper is high quality but matted so there is no glare under your kitchen lights. The pages come in two columns, a serif font with the side note [headnote!] that describes the recipe. Then a column in sans serif font, slightly smaller with widely separated lines, that is breezily easy to read and follow. Whether you call it customization or human engineering, the aesthetics of this book make it happily usable.
The recipes here are serious culinary constructions. You can do them for sure. And, once you begin anywhere in Eating from the Ground Up, you’ll be sure to follow all the delicious pathways it reveals.
