Cookbook Survivor: Lora Zarubin, I Am Almost Always Hungry: Seasonal Menus and Memorable Recipes
Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living
So this, in contrast to some other contestants in this column, is a book I’ve looked through heavily and used a few times, with uneven results.
Seasonally-themed cookbooks that are also based around complete menus strike me as having a fundamental weakness. Even if you are inclined to decouple a recipe you like from the complete menu, it’s somehow just cognitively hard to spot the recipe in the first place. At least for me. And the seasonal part means you’re often in a situation where the only time you look at one part of the book is a four or five-week window. If you glance through it at that time and no, you’re just not in the mood for that dish, or more likely, you’ve been making that thing a lot lately anyway because you’re a seasonally-inclined cook, the book goes back on the shelf. Of the things I’m going to do today, a couple of them fall into that gap—I’ve done them earlier this month.
But onward we go. I’m going to indulge—I see a recipe with lobster that’s for late summer and I haven’t made lobster for a long while. It’s a grilled preparation, which seems appealing (though the weather may not cooperate) with a curry-based sauce, which isn’t our usual jam with lobster. The suggested sides use up a lot of what I have in the fridge (tomatoes, corn, etc.) Plus a fig galette to finish.
It looks simple but attractive, though that’s true of a lot of the suggested menus in the book. A bit like Mordechai’s Sunday Suppers conceptually, and that may be part of the problem—the menus are beautifully staged and photographed but some of them seem so deeply attached to the author’s vision of an event or a theme that it’s hard to do a recipe without feeling guilty about not doing the event. So here’s a chance for the book to rise to the seasonal occasion and redeem itself in my eyes.