WEEKEND COOKING
WITH ETHNIC FOODS AND WINE PAIRING

Review by

The Splendid Table's - How to Eat Weekends
(Clarkson Potter) ISBN 978-0307590558 0307590550

Weekend cooking is easy with the recipes for ethnic foods in this radio show cookbook. For each ethnic recipe, The Splendid Table radio host and producer add wine pairings, variations and ways to use leftovers.

Food quotes, culinary trivia and cooking tips enhance each weekend recipe. Ethnic menus combine cookbook recipes with advice about cooking foods from Vietnam, Mexico, China, India, Italy, Morocco, Malaysia, Scandinavia and the West Indies.

Weekend cooking tips

The 100 recipes in How to Eat Weekends are organized by meal course, from appetizers to desserts. Each ethnic recipe begins with the quantity it makes, as well as preparation and cooking time.

Lynne Kasper and Sally Swift introduce each weekend recipe with cooking tips and ingredient substitutions (e.g., use grated lemon zest if you don't have the time to make Moroccan preserved lemons for their oven-roasted carrots recipe).

Sidebars feature cooking tips. For example, the recipe for moussaka of lamb in red wine ragu includes a tip for cooking eggplant so it doesn't absorb a lot of oil. (After roasting whole eggplants in the oven, slice them and brown each piece in a small amount of oil.)

Several Splendid Table recipes include variations, e.g., charred ginger-chili corn pudding and bread & butter jam pudding are variations of the summer tomato pudding recipe.

Food photos by Ellen Silverman depict ethnic recipes in The Splendid Table's - How to Eat Weekends.

Wine pairings for ethnic foods

Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Sally Swift suggest wine pairings for each ethnic dish in How to Eat Weekends. For example, they recommend an Australian Grenache or a Grenache-Shiraz-Mourvedre blend as a wine pairing with their recipe for brown sugar chili flank steak.

The authors of The Splendid Table's ethnic cookbook also provide leftover recipes for the remnants of weekend meals, e.g., how to make home-smoked salmon mousse from leftover smoke-roasted salmon.

Ethnic menus, at the beginning of the 337-page cookbook, combine Splendid Table's recipes with a cooking timetable, advice on culinary techniques, recommended ethnic foods and cookbooks.

For example, the home-style Vietnamese Sunday lunch menu includes five weekend recipes from the cookbook, information about nuoc cham dipping sauce, names of Vietnamese food brands (e.g., Three Crabs and Pearl River Bridge) and a list of Vietnamese cookbooks.

The cookbook also features several ethnic recipes for vegans and vegetarians, e.g., a vegan Thanksgiving dinner.

Sample weekend recipes

Wild mushroom and walnut pâté. Homemade ricotta. Golden pie of winter vegetables in cinnamon pastry. West Indies spice blend. Crispy feta-stuffed phyllo torte. Cider-glazed chicken. Apple brandy pan gravy. Sweet-sour chicken meatballs with candied lemon peel. Malaysian spiced pork. Leg of lamb with honey and Moroccan table spices. Gingered purée of winter roots. Rosemary orange cauliflower. Double pear pudding cake with warm caramel cognac sauce. Five-nut caramel tart. Venetian iced raspberry cream. Triple chocolate brownie cake.

The Splendid Table's How to Eat Weekends

Contents

Introduction
  • Menus, Backstories and Game Plans
  • Starters, Snacks and Small Plates
  • Soups and Salads
  • Pasta and Grains
  • Casseroles
Main Dishes
  • Vegetarian and Vegan
  • Fish and Seafood
  • Pork
  • Lamb
  • Beef
  • Sides
  • Sweets
Index

Authors

Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Sally Swift are co-creators of The Splendid Table, an American Public Media radio show, and co-authors of The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper. Lynne Kasper is also the author of The Italian Country Table and The Splendid Table.


Return to Food & Drink Index