It's not hard to get inspired to cook when wandering through Pike Place Market. Walk past towering displays of red, ripe berries, and displays of fresh seafood on ice, and your stomach begins to growl at the idea of turning a basketful of goodies into a meal. Turning the pages of Pike Place Market Recipes, a new cookbook from local author Jess Thomson, is inspiring in the same way.

Included in the 130 recipes in this book, are dishes market-area restaurants have become famous for. Things like Le Pichet's salade verte, gold bar brownies from Fran's Chocolates and pulled pork sandwiches from Matt's in the Market. But there are also dozens of original recipes in the book that draw on Thomson's own inspiration from the market since moving to Seattle in 2006. Recipes like potato and pea samosas, inspired by Saffron Spice, a spring frittata using foraged foods like morel mushrooms and ramps, and a Spanish chickpea and chorizo stew using sausages from Uli's.

More >>

The Edible Seattle magazine has been celebrating local food and small farms since it began publication in 2008. Now, Edible Communities--the company behind the series of regional magazines--and magazine editor Jill Lightner have released Edible Seattle: The Cookbook, a collection of over 100 recipes, cooking tips, and stories about food grown in the Pacific Northwest and the people who grow it.

This cookbook isn't your garden variety Northwest-centric cookbook. It's your heirloom garden, pesticide-free, p-patch variety cookbook. There are hyper-seasonal dishes such as clam linguine made with razor clams. Roasted potatoes aren't made with just any potato you can find at the supermarket, but rather with Ozette potatoes, an heirloom variety that was brought to the region by Spanish missionaries in the 1700s. And there are various foraged ingredients used in recipes throughout the book, like sea beans, elderflower, mushrooms, and shellfish.

More >>

In a time before Crisco--a time before refrigeration was common--Americans' go to cooking fat was lard. Pork was widely consumed in the late 1800s, and the by-product of pork production was creamy and flavorful fat that could be rendered into lard for use in cooking and baking. It wasn't until a smear campaign by the makers of Crisco that lard fell out of favor. But what is old is new again and cooking with lard is being rediscovered.

In Lard: The Lost Art of Cooking with Your Grandmother's Secret Ingredient, the editors of Grit Magazine have put together 150 recipes alongside family memories and cooking tips all using lard. While lard does contain fat, it contains less saturated fat (54%) than butter, and none of the trans fats found in many cooking oils and vegetable shortening. The argument supported by this cookbook is that lard should have a place in your kitchen as a healthy fat. That, and because it's delicious.

More >>

In 2008, Molly Moon Nietzel left the corporate world for a more satisfying and fulfilling livlihood. She yearned for something more like her ice cream scooping days during college, and the ice cream sundaes she made with her grandparents. She wanted to create a place of community, where many generations could gather for something they all enjoyed. That something was ice cream. And Molly Moon's Homemade Ice Cream was born. Now, four years later, there are five Molly Moon locations around Seattle and a new cookbook, Molly Moon's Homemade Ice Cream

The book is focused on recipes for Molly Moon's style of ice cream, which is cream-based versus custard-based. This means no egg yolks are needed and cooking is rarely necessary. And most of the recipes just require a handful of ingredients--plus an ice cream maker and some time--before you've got a quart or two of ice cream as a result. There are recipes for popular Molly Moon flavors such as salt licorice, salted caramel and "scout" mint ice cream using Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies. Plus unique and savory flavors like carrot cake, olive oil and toasted pine nut, maple bacon, and cheese ice cream.

More >>

Ree Drummond's second cookbook is less love story and life on the ranch, and more comfort cooking and classic recipes. Accompanied by her signature step-by-step photos, recipes are full-fat, full-flavor and full-on family cooking. There's a reason Drummond's popular blog, The Pioneer Woman, gets an estimated 20 million page views per month. Her style of cooking is how the majority of Americans cook and eat. As Drummond herself describes on her new TV show on the Food Network, her food is "simple, yet scrumptious," and her recipes are "approved by cowboys and hungry kids."

In The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food From My Frontier, Drummond cut back on the stories about her "frontier" and her husband, nicknamed "Marlboro Man," and instead just features the food. There are comfort food classics like sloppy joes and beef stew, kid-friendly pasta dishes and pizzas, and party-ready appetizers such sliders, fried mozzarella, chicken wings, and stuffed mushrooms. It's not all meat and cream however, there's also pan-fried kale, roasted cauliflower, watermelon granita and other sides, salads and soups.

More >>

Paula Wolfert is the author of eight cookbooks on the food of the Mediterranean. She first traveled to Morocco 50 years ago and in The Food of Morocco shares her knowledge of the food, culture and people of that country. Her immense knowledge infuses the book from cover to cover. Recipe headnotes and essays throughout include the history of various dishes in addition to their importance in daily life or religious celebrations.

Recipes are divided into chapters on soups, salads, breads and pastries, cous cous, fish, poultry, meat, bean and vegetable dishes, desserts, and drinks. The introductory chapter on "The Essentials of Moroccan Cooking" introduces readers to techniques, equipment and ingredients that are used throughout the book, such as tagines, preserved lemons and spice mixtures like ras el hanout. Wolfert knows her Western readers well, and includes short-cut alternatives and suggestions for many of the more labor-intensive recipes, like an "express" meat confit.

More >>

High Times magazine has been a trusted source for information on growing, smoking and eating marijuana for nearly 40 years. And finally, they have published their first ever cookbook. With this book, they have managed to elevate cannabis cuisine above pot brownies and space cakes, to dishes such as potato gnocchi with wild mushroom ragu and financiers. You won't find recipes for dishes such as a galantine of black-skinned chicken with pink grapefruit segments, which Los Angeles Times food writer Jonathan Gold recently tasted at an underground 9-course cannabis-themed menu, but you will find enough recipes to assemble your own multi-course marijuana-laced meal.

Eating marijuana is an important alternative to smoking that many medical marijuana patients require. The base of all good cannabis cookery is cannabutter. In this cookbook, there are recipes for the pot-infused butter (both a quick version and a two-day method), as well as cannabis infused olive oil, coconut oil and mayonnaise. There are also recipes for infusing vodka or rum with weed, or making pot tinctures using glycerin. These base recipes stock your pot pantry with the base ingredients used in the various recipes throughout the book.

More >>

With a cover photo like the one on April Bloomfield's new cookbook A Girl and Her Pig, you'd think the recipes would be carnivorous and primarily pork. Surprisingly, the recipes I chose to cook from it--and fell in love with--were the vegetable ones. Her recipe for Swiss chard is the only way I'll ever cook it again; the simple ginger cake may just become my go-to cake recipe; and a salad of oranges, roasted carrots and avocado was packed with more flavor that it's simple name would lead you to believe.

Bloomfield is the chef and part owner of Spotted Pig, the famed NYC gastropub that opened nearly 10 years ago and brought the term 'gastropub' to the U.S. from England. Her cooks describe her as "anal rustic" because she cuts radishes a precisely rustic way, so their browned tips fall off in a sauce; she likes to mix, toss and plate dishes with her hands; and she prefers pan liquid to complicated sauces.

More >>

French native Beatrice Peltre's debut cookbook La Tartine Gourmand is subtitled, "Recipes for an Inspired Life." The photos, recipes and stories border on precious, but are charming and inspiring nonetheless. Peltre's stories and inspiration come from Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, and her current home in Boston, but it's her childhood in France and travels around that country that can really be seen behind most recipes.

In part one of the cookbook, Peltre introduces you to "My Kitchen," and the pantry staples, basic techniques and kitchen equipment she relies on. While this isn't a gluten-free cookbook per se, she does not eat gluten. There is information on various gluten-free flours such as rice, buckwheat, amaranth, and millet, and how to work with them. And there are recipes for basic tart and pie crusts using various combinations of flours. There isn't a recipe for gluten-free bread however, which is a shame since there are many recipes for tartines--or open-face sandwiches--in the book. Heck, "tartine" is even in the title.

More >>

Cocktails, smoking and sex appear to play a much more central role than food does in the AMC drama Mad Men. The food however, whether prepared at home or eaten at iconic New York restaurants, has been more prominent than many may have realized. Scheduled to return to the air on Sunday, March 25 for season five, the series has highlighted some of the most popular dishes of the 1950s and 1960s. And most of them are detailed in The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook.

Authors Judy Gelman and Peter Zheutlin have arranged their book like most other cookbooks. There are chapters for appetizers, salads, main courses, and desserts. And of course there is a chapter on cocktails. For nearly all of the 70 recipes though, there is a paragraph or two--and sometimes more than a page--describing which episode and scene it appeared in, and why it's significant to the show and the era. There's the steak tartare Don ordered at Sardi's in season 2, during a clandestine meeting with Bobbi Barrett. There are mint juleps, served at Roger and Jane Sterling's Kentucky derby themed party in season 3. And there's beef wellington from season 1, when Joan and Roger were lovers, and Roger ordered lunch from room service, in an attempt to get Joan to stay the rest of the afternoon.

More >>