This week on Food For Thought, it was my cookbook gift suggestions for those of you who haven’t managed to finish your Christmas shopping yet! To listen to the people I interviewed for this segment, go to my latest All You Can Eat podcast, Cookbooks, Holiday Food Traditions and Ricardo.
Books about food and wine make perfect gifts. There are plenty of places to buy them, from specialized cookbook shops to big box stores, they come in a huge selection, they’re easy to wrap, and you can write a personal message to the recipient on the front page. But give some thought to the person on your list. Do they cook a lot or a little? Are they handy with a knife, do they prefer quick meals or multicourse extravaganzas? Read the back of the book you’re thinking of buying, or the jacket notes for clues as to whether it will make the best gift for that certain someone. Of course I have some suggestions to make your last-minute rushing around just a bit easier.
If you’re looking for a gift for someone who loves to throw parties, you might want to consider ‘Everyone Can Cook Appetizers : Over 100 Tasty Bites’ by Eric Akis. This is another successful entry in his ‘Everyone Can Cook’ series.
For the avid cook, how about The Bon Appetit Cookbook? This tome of over 1200 recipes is an ideal gift for anyone who is a fan of the magazine of the same name.
Let’s see, we’ve covered appetizers, main courses of all sorts with the Bon Appetit books, what about desserts? For the sweet toothed baker on your list, Anna Olson has come up with a sequel to her popular first cookbook of desserts called Sugar. It’s called Another Cup of Sugar.
Sometimes people think baking can be a little too finicky, or they don’t want to take too many steps, or they just don’t want to clean up a lot of dirty pots and pans. For that kind of person, Urban Peasant James Barber has come up with a perfect little book called One Pot Wonders, Recipes for Land and Sea. While the book is ostensibly supposed to be used in the tiny galleys that serve as kitchens aboard pleasure boats, James knew people would recognize this book is for landlubbers, too.
If you know someone who has always wanted to learn how to cook East Indian food but has been intimidated by the techniques or lengthy list of ingredients, they will thank you over and over if they find this next book under the tree. Vij’s: Elegant and Inspired Indian Cuisine by Vikram Vij & Meeru Dhalwala. Vikram is the trained chef, but over the past few years it is Meeru who has started developing new recipes that are perfect for new East Indian cooks:
Now if the person you’re buying for wants to know more about the world of wine, I have four recommendations. To learn more about Canadian wines, try Tony Aspler’s Wine Atlas of Canada or John Schreiner’s Wines of Canada. For the budget conscious, James Nevison and Kenji Hodgson’s Had A Glass 2007 edition lists their top 100 wine picks at less than 20 dollars each. And if you’d like a romp through some of the classic wine growing areas around the world, try on Ottawa-based wine writer Natalie McLean’s Red, White and Drunk All Over. All of the links from the titles of the books listed here go to amazon.ca, where you can purchase with large discounts and help support this blog! (I get a tiny percentage of any books or cd’s ordered if you get there from here)
