Biblical cooking: breakfast, lunch and the Last Supper

By Julia McKinnell - Saturday, March 16, 2013 at 8:00 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Reena Newman

Christine Andrew, a nutritionist from Vacaville, Calif., has a pet peeve: obese preachers who rail against the sin of adultery while ignoring the sin of gluttony. “They’re quick to talk about licentiousness and alcoholism,” Andrew said in an interview on the phone. “But how come they don’t talk about food and health? Churches want you to pray for [parishioners’] kidney disease and diabetes complications—and they continue to eat their cakes, cookies and pies. I think they’re in denial. That’s why I wrote the book.”

Andrew, who was raised Presbyterian, is a devout churchgoer and author of a new diet book for Christians called Food Isn’t What It Used to Be: A Biblical Approach to Health. Gluttony, lack of self-control and junk food are the main reasons people are getting sick, she says. “The Bible says to deny yourself. Gluttony brings consequences.”

In 2008, Andrew began researching her book by sifting through the Old and New Testaments for references to food and teachings on self-control. “Christians are to bear the failings of the weak,” she writes. “If someone who is overweight eats at our table, we shouldn’t put soda and doughnuts before them any more than putting wine in front of someone who is struggling with alcoholism.” There are examples in scripture of those who go astray, she points out. Samson in Judges 13:24-25 gave in to his weakness, lust, leading to his downfall. “If doughnuts or soda are your downfall and you know this, apply the principle of self-control.”

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The Cookbook Store’s November bestsellers

By Jessica Allen - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Jessica Darmanin

Every month, Toronto’s Cookbook Store shares their bestsellers list, compiled by manager Alison Fryer, with us. The November top-sellers, says Fryer, were an eclectic bunch: “a little Canadian, a little Middle Eastern, a successful food blogger, a TV personality, a chemist, and a dash of baking rounded out with healthy cooking.”

There are some pretty great gift ideas here, people. For example, I would really like No. 2, 3 and 7.

1. Canada’s Favourite Recipes, by Rose Murray and Elizabeth Baird

2. Jerusalem, by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimia

3. Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, by Deb Pereleman

4. Lucky Peach Issue 5, by David Chang and Peter Meehan

5. Bouchon Bakery, by Thomas Keller and Sebastian Rouxel

6. Vegetarian’s Complete Quinoa Cookbook, edited by Mairlyn Smith

7. Barefoot Contessa Foolproof Recipes by Ina Garten

8. Modernist Cuisine at Home, by Nathan Myhrvold and Maxime Bilet

9. Spilling the Beans, by Sue Duncan and Julie Van Rosendaal

Toqué! cooks up a book

By Jacob Richler - Tuesday, November 27, 2012 at 2:03 PM - 0 Comments

Dominique Malaterre

The first thing I thought of while contemplating the simple white cover of Normand Laprise’s long-awaited first cookbook was a conversation we had five or six years ago at a quiet table at the back of his Montreal restaurant, Toqué! As the scheduled interview wound down, I had asked him what he was planning next. “One thing’s for sure—it won’t be a cookbook. Everybody’s writing them these days.”

It was a fair point. Even then, close to 3,000 new cookbooks were being published annually in the U.S. alone, far too many by celebrity TV chefs equipped with teams of writers and researchers who spared them the trouble of writing—not to mention reading—the many recipes published under their names.

Amidst all that noise, the rare chef now and then releases a cookbook that is greeted as a genuine publishing event. Like Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli 1998-2002, say, and more recently Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck Cookbook and René Redzepi’s Noma. And that is precisely the way the original French edition of Toqué! Les artisans d’une gastronomie québécoise was greeted upon its release in Quebec last month. Continue…

Want to publish your own cookbook? There’s an app for that

By Monika Campbell - Saturday, August 4, 2012 at 1:24 PM - 0 Comments

Smitten Kitchen. Orangette. The Wednesday Chef. If you’re someone who loves cooking and baking, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of these well-known food bloggers who not only have successful careers outside the blogosphere, but have also garnered book deals due in large part to the wild popularity of their websites.

Countless food bloggers and home cooking enthusiasts have daydreamed about authoring a cookbook; a glossy paged, artistically photographed volume of the recipes and personal stories that encapsulates what their culinary endeavours mean to them in their daily lives. But for the vast majority of amateur cooks, this dream is largely out of reach, due to both affordability and publishing logistics.

Bakespace.com, a grassroots online community that encourages recipe sharing and connecting to other foodies worldwide, has created a free app called Cookbook Café that aims to remedy this. A self-publishing platform that works as both an iPad app and a web-based e-book, it is designed to facilitate the creation and selling of a personal cookbook.

Initially inspired by the use of recipe-gathering from multiple sources by non-profit organizations for fundraising, Bakespace.com founder Babette Pepaj noticed the limitations in design and circulation faced by many such groups and sought to create a publishing tool that married an easy-to-use formatting system with stronger distribution potential.

Enhancing professional credibility with an increased web presence and adding earning potential to a blog or website are two reasons to spur business-savvy food bloggers to app action. But there are also personal motivations. Take Jodi Lewchuk, an editor in the Canadian publishing industry, for example: she’d been looking to create a collection of her grandmother’s most beloved Romanian recipes to share with the whole family. After learning about Cookbook Café at a TECHmunch food bloggers conference in Toronto, she decided to give the app a try. Her resulting book, Favourites from Ana’s Romanian Kitchen, has already enjoyed several downloads, and she is now reaching a wider audience than she’d anticipated.

Authors can customize their cookbooks with their own photos, videos and other forms of media, while a universal format simplifies the design process. “All an author has to do is upload recipes, accompanying text and multimedia, and we handle the rest,” says Pepaj. Cookbook Café also offers a dedicated cookbook marketplace that’s accessible both online and via the iPad app, plus a search tool that categorizes each recipe individually by type, ingredient and author.

Authors are also furnished with a widget for each cookbook they publish, which can be added to their blogs or websites to cross-promote sales. “Finding an audience for your cookbook can be a challenge if you’re not a big-name chef, so we really focused on marketing and discoverability when we built the platform,” says Pepaj.

In her effort to “democratize cookbook publishing,” Pepaj has made the app available for free. And the final e-book’s price is determined by the author within a range of $0.99 to $9.99 in one dollar increments. Bakespace.com receives a commission only when a book has been sold.

The creative possibilities, for professional and amateur cooks alike, seem endless. And that, as Martha–a cookbook publishing wonder who’s been at it since 1986–would say, is a good thing.

Here’s Pepaj explaining the new app herself:

The definitive ($600) cookbook

By Anne Kingston - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

Culinary splendour: The six-volume cookbook is a visual delight to pore through. Recipes from famed chefs are printed on water- and tear-proof pages.

Alison Fryer, the manager of Toronto’s Cookbook Store, recalls how anxious she was ordering 10 copies of Modernist Cuisine before its publication in late March. “We didn’t know if we would sell them,” she says. Her concern was reasonable: with a $600 price tag, the six-volume set is the most expensive newly published food book in history. Fryer needn’t have worried: the store has sold 35 copies; now she’s fretting about filling demand. “I can’t get them fast enough,” she says, standing amid a new shipment of boxes containing the 2,438-page, 47.3-lb. set housed in a Plexiglas box. The audience for the authoritative reference is diverse—“chefs, food scientists, people who travel for food, people who like to know what chefs are thinking.” Last week, a culinary college in Nebraska desperately called in search of a copy. Currently in its third printing, it’s sold out in the U.S. Fryer now has a new anxiety, she jokes: “People are blaming us for putting their backs out.”

It’s the latest status injury. Modernist Cuisine, self-published by Nathan Myhrvold, abetted by the fortune he amassed in his 14 years at Microsoft, has been heralded as a culinary landmark. In the forward, Spanish chef and food wizard Ferran Adrià praises it as “a stepping stone to the future of cooking” and “a book that raises expectations of what cooking can be.”

The volumes, a visual delight to pore through, are classified by subject: history and fundamentals; techniques and equipment; animals and plants; ingredients and preparations; plated dish recipes; and a spiral-bound “kitchen manual” with recipes from famed chefs cleverly printed on water- and tear-proof pages. Throughout, Myhrvold and co-authors Chris Young and Maxime Bilet detonate culinary orthodoxies with creative gusto: wine can be successfully aerated in the blender, they claim; a one-hour stock made in a pressure cooker is as flavourful as the eight-hour version; it doesn’t damage steak to flip it on the grill repeatedly; there’s no definitive proof that eating fibre reduces the risk of colon cancer. While centrifuges and freeze-dryers are routinely employed to create novelties such as “meat jerky” from watermelon and carrot foam, those lacking the gizmos will find a font of information—from insights about nutrition and food safety to a whimsical version of the Colonel’s secret KFC recipe.

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