Cook at Home: Recipes for Every Day and Every Occasion

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Anna and Michael Olson are well-known and respected chefs long
associated with top-drawer food and wine establishments on the Niagara
wine and entertainment route. Both were early participants in Cave
Spring Cellar’s successful attempt to bring its wine and Niagara’s
produce together at the Inn on the Twenty. Anna now splits her time
between Olson Foods + Bakery (where she is proprietor and pastry chef)
and the Food Network, while Michael is chef professor at the Niagara
Culinary Institute and supervises the kitchen at 17 Noir in Niagara
Falls.

Cook at Home is an intriguing title, for it suggests that these busy
culinary professionals, like the rest of us, have a life in the domestic
kitchen, experience that may convey an understanding of its
opportunities as well as its challenges. It may also imply that they are
offering insights regarding menu planning, organization, and realization
born of hard time in the heat of professional kitchens. What we should
expect in this volume is a useful, perhaps even a happy, marriage of the
domestic and the professional. By and large, that expectation is
realized.

The authors have organized their recipes and menus under
“lifestyle” headings: People, Necessity, Adventures, and Occasions.
Does a teen’s impatience with food as anything but fuel challenge your
imagination and nutritional standards? Baked sweet potato fries, beef
enchiladas, and black bean coriander salad will broaden their
conservative palates. Professional procedures introduce the section
Necessity (basics, budget, cravings, and breakfast). Tasty recipes
reveal the basics of sauces and saucing, an (unspoken) acknowledgement
that so much of our supermarket meat is inherently bland. Techniques of
grilling, baking, taking the boring out of budget meals, and leftovers
follow. The authors encourage cooks and their families to whet a sense
of culinary adventure by visiting farmers’ markets, and introducing
beer and wine into meals (their natural locus). Furthermore, they have
left plenty of space on the pages for notes, and provided just the right
number of ravishing photographs to encourage the hesitant. Best of all,
this is one book by professional chefs that does not reek of vainglory.

Buy the book. It possesses enough charm and good advice to quicken the
spirit.