My dearest favorite scones,

You are so fluffy and light, and I love your for it. I really do. You always put a smile on my face on a grey day, or a sunny one. You play well with my favorite fruits. My friends comment on how great you are, and ask me to share you with them. I still remember the giddy first days of loving you, when I brought you to my friend’s going away to London party. You fit in so well, and I just wanted to gobble you all up. I couldn’t keep my hands off of you.

But I have a confession. Over the past few years, my eyes have, on occasion, strayed. To scones with a little more substance. Scones that are a bit more hardy. Scones with a depth of flavor. Scones that are a bit less simple.

The moment I saw these certain buckwheat cornmeal scones and I was taken in. I must have had too many spoonfuls of the strawberry rhubarb jam that was simmering away on the stove top. I didn’t know what I was doing. Before I could come to my senses, my hands were sticky with dough. I had crossed the line.

June 5th was National Doughnut Day. Did you make doughnuts?

I was out of town, so I sadly missed it this year, but I’ve been making up for it since I’ve been home and getting very excited about the upcoming launch of Doughnuts! Did you know it comes out on October 1st? Did you know you can pre-order it on Amazon now?

Can I tempt you with a sneak peak of the book?

How about, to tide you over for a bit, you try making vetkoek (which translates to fat cake)?
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Are you a cookbook person? I am. Actually, more specifically, I am a book person. I love books. I love bookstores. I love books on shelves. I love book covers. And cookbooks, especially those with beautiful photography, are really one of my biggest weaknesses. But I have to tell you that my cookbooks have been extremely under used, and I’m quite embarrassed by it. Because as much as I love books, finding one specific thing out of many, many books is too hard. It’s just so much easier to grab my laptop, fire up google or even better, food blog search, and find a recipe that is exactly what I’ve been looking for. So the books, sit there, on the shelf, untouched. It is too sad.

I guess it must have been a couple of years ago, I had a crazy thought to build a website to help me start actually using my cookbooks. The point of the site would be to let people create a simple catalog of the cookbooks that they own to help them search through the recipes in those books. Anyone using the site could enter the recipes from one of their cookbooks and then be able to search it from then on out. The scale of the web would mean with enough users, each person would really only need to spend time entering one or two of their own cookbooks, and before long, there would be a very good sized catalog. Or, if all of that failed, at least I’d have a site that I could enter my books and search them.

So, in fits and starts, I eventually built it. It’s called GobbledyBook, and it’s free for anyone to use. I’ve kept kind of quiet about it because, to date, just about the only person who has used it has been me and it’s always a little nerve wracking to have other people start playing with your baby.

I’ve used it quite a bit already. In fact, I’ve entered over 4,500 recipes in more than 40 of my cookbooks. And even though that is only a small part of my cookbook library (yes, I am one of those freaks), it’s already come in handy to help me find the right recipe and actually cook from my cookbooks! Woo Hoo!

The basic scenario is pretty simple. Say, I want to make some bread pudding. I know I have a lot of bread pudding recipes in my cookbooks, but which ones? I’m sure that Donna Hay has a recipe, but I own 6 of her books. With GobbledyBook, I can simply type bread pudding into the search box, and it shows me 26 recipes out of my cookbooks and what page the recipe is on (Donna Hay has a Marmalade Bread and Butter pudding in Modern Classic Vol. 2, page 146, by the way). You can also see a full list of ingredients for the recipe as well as comments. (To actually cook the recipe, you have to go to the cookbook… I’m not trying to steal from cookbooks, just make them easier to use).

Or, maybe I need to bring something gluten free to a pot luck? I can browse all gluten free recipes, and then narrow down the selection by what ingredients I have or the type of food I like to cook, like Italian. I can limit the search to just cookbooks I own, or any cookbook that has been indexed. Then, I just go grab the book off of the shelf (or order it from Powell’s or Amazon!) and get cooking.

It’s also been wonderful for helping me figure out what to do with the ingredients in my market basket each week. Once I get tired of my old standards, I just plug in a couple of ingredients and see what other dishes I can make. Like, for example, this Swiss Chard Frittata that I made for lunch today.

Actually, this is a combination of two recipes… a basic baked frittata and a swiss chard tart recipe from Sunday Suppers at Luques. I didn’t quite have all the right ingredients for the tart, but I did have (most of) the makings for the pine nut relish that tops it. So, keeping with the basic seasonings of the tart, I skipped the crust, bumped up the egg and turned it into a lovely (and gluten free) lunch treat (recipe below!)

Anyway, back to Gobbleybook. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one with the problem of using their cookbooks, or the idea to solve it. Late last year, another site launched called Eat Your Books. With a slightly bigger staff (than my 1, so anything is bigger!) and interns helping out with the data entry, their catalog is significantly bigger already. Good for them! I’m sure if I hadn’t spent the last couple of years building my own site, I would totally sign up.

There are some differences between GobbledyBook and Eat Your Books though. First and foremost, GobbledyBook will let you catalog your own books, so you don’t have to wait for someone else to add your book. You can just do it yourself (and you’ll most likely find a few great recipes to bookmark along the way… I know I have).

GobbledyBook is also free to use. There are no sign up fees or subscriptions fees, and it is my intention to keep it that way. You sign in with your Facebook account, and you are good to go.

GobbledyBook also lets you enter the data the way you want to and the way the recipe is written. If the recipe calls for spring onions, you enter spring onions. Behind the scenes, we’ll match up ingredients that are the same (so if you search for scallion, you’ll see recipes for green onions as well. Search for soup and you’ll see recipes that are bisques). I’ve had numerous searches on Eat Your Books fail because I didn’t use quite the right search term.

So, if you find yourself wanting to make your cookbook library a little easier to use, I hope you’ll give GobbledyBook a try and enter a cookbook or two. To entice you a bit more, I’m giving away a $50 gift certificate to your choice of Powell’s or Amazon to the first person to catalog 500 recipes!

PS: GobbledyBook is a labor of love. It’s been a long time since I’ve done any “real” software development, so you may, at times, find a glitch or two. If you do, I hope that you let me knows so I can keep making the site better!

There is nothing new here today. I’d love to give you a recipe that I haven’t given you before, but I’m afraid I can’t. My grand ideas of trying something new last week failed and I decided to stick with a good old favorite. Muffins, nice and easy. Because when isn’t a good time for a muffin?

I don’t even have a new muffin recipe for you either. When it comes down to it, I just love the one I always make. I toy with the idea of trying othes, but in the end, I always come back to the one from Seasonal Kitchen that I used for my Muffin-mixed Berries which are so loaded with fruit that the muffin is just a mere hint of shape and crust. Boring, maybe. But I do hope you give it a try anyway because I think you’ll find you’ll come back to it again and again as well.

Instead of my usual flurry of berries, I swapped in diced pears, cranberries and a touch of orange zest. Nothing new really… it’s still just fruit and batter… but oh my lord, these are some muffins. The pears melt into the batter and the cranberries give the perfect tart balance to the pear’s buttery sweetness. This time around I also used superfine sugar and butter (instead of the coconut oil and brown sugar). If I had thought of it, I would have also sneaked in some toasted pecans.

What’s your favorite muffin recipe?  

The summer we went to Italy, Cam & I came home with dreams of packing up and finding some little Italian cottage to call home. I’d meet local food artisans and do what I do… write and photograph about the food and culture. I’d write a cookbook on traditional Italian cookery that went much deeper into regional dishes than most Italian cookbooks do. Of course, that’s far easier to dream about than actually do, so here I still sit in Seattle, longingly flipping through The Italian Farmer’s Table cookbook, written by a a pair of chefs who turned their dream into a book of real Italian cooking.

Yes, I am quite envious of Matthew Scialabba & Melissa Pellegrino who got to live one of my dreams. For 4 months, they traveled around Italy’s agriturismi, harvesting grapes, making goat cheese, hunting for local venison. I’m also thankful that they shared so much they experienced in their cookbook; not just recipes, but stories of the families they met along the way. They sent me a copy of their book several months ago, and it’s taken me a while to sit down with it and take it in. I still have much I want to cook from it, but today, I finally picked out a recipe to try, a simple salad of cabbage, pear and orange.

This recipe is definitely not what you’d think of if you think of Italian cooking, and that’s one of the reasons that I picked it. I appreciate the fact that this is not simply a cookbook of those recipes that everyone thinks of when they think of Italian food, but gets deeper in to what people really eat. This particular recipe is from the chapter on Casale Cjanor, an agriturismo/poultry farm in the San Danielle region of Friuli. Recipes in this region are heavily influenced by Germanic and Slavic roots, and you’ll find all sorts of ingredients that wouldn’t come to mind when thinking about Italian food.

This particular recipe is a bright salad that would be a perfect accompaniment to any heavy stew (like perhaps, the hearty looking braised duck just a few pages past). The celery, cabbage, pear and oranges are remind me of a Waldorf salad, but without the goopy mayo. It’s really the perfect side salad to have in winter, when citrus is at it’s peak.

I’m very much looking forward to trying many of the other recipes in this book!