Do you want to learn about cooking and just don’t know where to start? Are you engaged, overwhelmed by the sea of kitchenwares, and don’t know what you should put on your registry? Are you a newlywed and don’t know what to do with the kitchenwares you received as gifts? Just Married & Cooking is your beginning survival guide to make every day food for your family and easy luxurious dishes for dinner parties.
The cookbook has an introduction and two parts for recipes. The introduction goes over items for your kitchen registry, pantry items, glossary of cooking terms, and caveats (information that may be common sense to a chef, but not to a beginner). Part 1 “Life As We Know It” contains recipes for everyday cooking for family at home. Part 2 “New Traditions” contains recipes for entertaining or special occasions like Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, and New Year’s Eve to celebrate with your family and friends. I would have found this cookbook helpful when I starting cooking 20 years ago.
Brooke Parkhurst grew up on the gulf coast with down-home, Southern cooking and is now a daily online food columnist for the New York Daily News. Her love of journalism and writing put her in touch with New York City’s culinary scene, where she met her true love, Jamie Briscione. James is a Southern boy himself who got his start in Highland Bar & Grill in Birmingham, AL. He moved to New York City to work with Chef Daniel Boulud. He was the first two-time winner of Food Network’s “Chopped”. Together, Brooke and James teach couples cooking classes at the Institute of Culinary Education and The Culinary Cooperative in New York City. They also create wonderful recipes for Safeway.
Let’s take a look at some of their recipes that I prepared in my kitchen:
In Part 1, they have a subsection called “Mornings.” Brooke’s Breakfast Granola is AWESOME! In the book she describes how expensive it is just to buy a bag at the store. I always thought that granola was a lot of work, but it’s really simple. Her recipe is great – grains, nuts, and fruits. I left it in the oven a little longer than the recipe calls for to suit my taste. Brooke and James also explain in the introduction that once you start cooking, you’ll get to know your oven and cooking times will not always be exact. Every oven is different. The texture of the granola is crunchy with the sweet bites of dried fruit. It’s perfect for snacking on or putting on top of yogurt. Next time, I will also experiment with some different dried fruits, maybe go tropical like mango, papaya, and pineapple. I’m already salivating!
In another subsection of Part 1, you’ll find “Everyday Desserts.” Chocolate Chip Blondies are definitely bar cookies to the max. It bakes up like a cake but as it cools, it starts to settle down. The texture is dense like a chewy bar cookie, almost brownie like. The flavor is good but is extremely sweet. I would probably tone down the sweetness level by removing the ½ cup of brown sugar. The granulated sugar and chocolate chips will make it sweet enough. Also, instead of melting the butter in a sauce pot, I would soften the butter to room temperature for a better result in the creaming process and a fluffier cookie. The melted sugar mixture made a candy-like layer on the top of the cookies which was unexpected and made it rigorous to cut into bars.
Also in Part 1, there is a subsection called “When Your Backyard is the Biggest Room in the House.” Pickled Mushrooms are great little bites while you’re waiting for the meat cooking on the barbeque. I used three varieties of mushroom – button, porcini, and shiitake. I wanted to experiment with the different textures and flavors of the mushrooms to see which ones matched with the pickling marinade. I found the marinade a little too salty. Next time, I will decrease the amount of salt by half. The flavor of the marinade itself is really good, perfectly balanced aromatics and spices. The mushrooms that worked best were the porcini and shiitake mushrooms. The dense texture and woodsy, nutty flavor pair well with the marinade. The button mushrooms were nothing special. As I was eating these, the only thing I could think about was a juicy steak off the barbeque. Now, that’s pretty impressive and why it’s in this section of the cookbook.
Brooke and James also create recipes for Safeway. They developed a recipe using Safeway’s O Organics Organic Butternut Squash Soup. It’s called Butter Squash Pancakes with Pecan-Maple Sauce. OMG! This recipe is fabulous! The butternut squash soup magnificently turns into a pumpkin flavor. The pancakes are fluffy and decadent. The pecan-maple sauce has just the right touch of sweet and the pecans perfume the maple syrup making your kitchen smell like a maple candy factory. I would definitely make these over and over again. You can find the recipe on their website - http://justmarriedandcooking.com/.
With this cookbook, James and Brooke hope to make your cooking fun and simple. You don’t need to go out to restaurants every night when you can make simple foods with gusto at home.
Just Married & Cooking
By Brooke Parkhurst and James Briscione
Scribner (2011)
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