Eat Me - The Food Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin
(Alfred A. Knopf) ISBN 978-0307264930 0307264939
Kenny Shopsin is cook and owner of Shopsin's, a New York City restaurant, formerly in Greenwich Village and now in Essex Street Market. Shopsin shares more than 100 recipes for comfort food, popular with regulars at Shopsin's restaurant. Eat Me also discusses Kenny Shopsin's philosophy about cooking quickly with few ingredients, family, customers, publicity and life in New York City.
Egg salad. Fellini (tomato, garlic bread, ricotta and egg casserole). Lemon ricotta pancakes. Pita feta salad and tahini dressing. Senegalese chicken soup. Turkey Sloppy Joe with marinara sauce. Cuban black bean soup. Cream of garlic soup. Egg cream. Frozen fruit ice tea.
In The Art of Griddling sidebar, Kenny Shopsin describes how to season a griddle with peanut oil, how to test a hot griddle with a drop of water, why the first pancake never turns out and which side up to serve pancakes.
In Burger Fundamentals, readers learn how to make a perfect hamburger with high-fat chopped meat, ideal hamburger size, cooking temperatures for rare, medium and well-done hamburgers, making juicy burgers by not pressing down on the meat, toasting the buns and other great burger tips. Burger Variations add ingredients to create a Reuben burger (Swiss cheese and sauerkraut), patty melt (rye toast, American cheese and grilled onions), hamburger salad (served with a bowl of greens), chili burger, Thai burger (Thai green curry paste) and Jamaican jerk burger (Jamaican jerk seasoning).
Eat Me - The Food Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin features short-cut recipes like how to make crepes from flour tortillas, grilling bread pudding like French toast and making soup by adding sauteed meat and vegetables to broth. Recipe substitutions include making guacamole with green bananas instead of avocados.
Readers learn many ways to cook rice such as coconut rice, guacamole rice, pistachio ricotta rice and artichoke tomato rice. Kenny Shopsin reveals the secret of making great milkshakes (homemade ice cream and malt powder). He provides recipes for milkshakes and malteds including butter pecan, maple walnut, piña colada and chocolate peanut butter.
By the time you finish reading Eat Me, you'll feel like you know Kenny Shopsin and what makes him tick. Eat Me - The Food Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin is a very personal cookbook with attitude (Kenny Shopsin doesn't mince words). The tone of the 290-page cook book is entertaining and written the way Kenny Shopsin talks (contains language which may be offensive to some readers).
The no-nonsense, straightforward recipes are easy to make, easy to adapt into countless variations and easy to prepare quickly. Many of Shopsin's recipes are addictive, like his crispy fried onions, tahini dressing and scrambled egg, blue cheese, avocado and spinach dish.
Each Eat Me recipe begins with comments by Kenny Shopsin. For example, he explains that to make a good cheesy steak sandwich, you must use rib eye steak, slice it very thin, and serve it with lots of fried Spanish onions. Colored sidebars provide cooking lessons, like how to make clarified butter.
More than 225 color photos by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin illustrate Shopsin's restaurant, general store, family, customers, dishes and ingredients. Some photos show cooking techniques like how to make tortilla chips and when to flip a pancake. A series of photos depict pancake variations: chocolate peanut butter, coconut, cinnamon raisin, bacon and cranberry orange. Shopsin's 900-item menu is an insert in the Eat Me cookbook.
Kenny Shopsin and Carolynn Carreno