Everyday Dorie: The Way I Cook
Everyday Dorie is the latest cookbook from renowned cookbook author Dorie Greenspan. Greenspan has written and co-written roughly 15 cookbooks, many of which are best sellers and award winners. Each of Greenspan’s books generate buzz; this one was no different. In Everyday Dorie, Greenspan offers up 368 pages of quality recipes that give a new perspective on comfort food.
Often called a guru of many different culinary fields, Greenspan has hundreds of thousands of social media followers. For good reason. She consistently creates simple, easy-to-follow, delicious recipes for everyday home cooks, without talking down to them or making things seem more complicated than they have to be. She brings this personality to Everyday Dorie.
Greenspan states that the recipes in Everyday Dorie are ones that anyone – from the experienced chef to the beginner home cook – can readily make at home. Her writing style is easy to follow. Greenspan once worked for Julia Child, and the way she writes if very similar. She takes you through the process step by step, explaining where necessary why you should take those steps. In this way, she cultivates a beginner’s mind, ensuring each recipe is a success no matter how insecure you may be about cooking.
Anyone familiar with Greenspan’s work knows that she always gives her own spin on a recipe. And that same spin on the classics is evident in Everyday Dorie. Many of the recipes have something unusual that gives them a unique twist. For example: mustard and walnuts in the cheese puffs; cherry tomatoes stuffed into red bell peppers and oven-charred; cannellini beans in cod en papillote. Her suggested alternatives and spins on a technique teach home cooks how to make those twists themselves, without her coaching.
Everyday Dorie has the following sections: Nibbles, Starters and Small Meals, Soups and Salads, Chicken, Meat, Fish and Shellfish, Vegetable Go-Alongs and Go-Alones, Desserts, Basics and Transformers. A gorgeous photograph taken by photographer Ellen Silverman accompanies each recipe. The high gloss paper makes the pictures pop so well that it seems as if you can eat the dish right off the page.
Her recipes cover current food trends, including Asian, Latin, and Middle Eastern… all mixed in with the traditional French cuisine you’d expect to see in a cookbook written by a classically trained culinary expert who spends part of every year in Paris. You may be thinking that this means it’ll include a lot of impractical, high-end ingredients, but that’s not the case. Every recipe contains common ingredients you can find at grocery stores, farmers’ markets or your pantry. On top of that, the recipes truly are delicious. The Portuguese-Style Cod and Beans en Papillote, is so good, it could be served at a restaurant. And the Summer Vegetable Tian is an outstanding dish for end of season tomatoes.
Everyday Dorie is well written and filled to the brim with delicious recipes. Greenspan makes home cooking better, more diverse and easier, all while teaching you how to experiment on your own. It’s filled with unexpected surprises that will keep you cooking from cover to cover.