If you enjoy “comfort food”, you will be happy to hear my friend and cookbook author Chef Leslie Bilderback cookbook from her line of Complete Idiot’s Guide series called Comfort Food. It “savors the flavors of home cooking with over 350 delicious recipes”.

 What Is Comfort Food?

I guess what foods you declare comfort food is based on individual tastes and memories. For example, growing up, I remember my mom preparing roast leg of lamb with mint jelly on Sunday afternoons. Now when I prepare leg of lamb at home, it conjures up great memories of those earlier meals and is “comforting”. I’m sure we all have these memories.

Today, I think of meals like beef stew, pasta with Bolognese sauce (I plan to make some today), braised beef, lamb or pork shanks & homemade soups as some of my favorite comfort foods. These are meals that I enjoy preparing when it is cold outside while I’m watching a football game on a Sunday afternoon. Yes, you can make comfort foods all year long, but I yearn for them more often in the colder weather. Did I mention mashed potatoes?

But then again, a juicy cheeseburger grilled outside in the summer is also comforting and brings back memories of my dad starting the charcoal grill in our backyard. He would get busy with some project he might be working on and forget about the burgers or the chicken pieces and they would have a crispy exterior but we still enjoyed the food and loved the event.

So before I go too far down memory lane, let me tell you more about Chef Leslie’s book. It’s a guide filled with recipes that she describes as food that will “soothe your soul – and your stomach – with homemade favorites” like creamy potato soup, chili con carne, chicken a la King, Yankee pot roast, meatloaf, crab cakes, candied yams, and let’s not forget green bean casserole or tuna casserole for that matter.

These are recipes that we are all familiar with and crave every once in a while. Chef Leslie offers over 350 “mouth-watering” recipes that are easy to make at home with step-by-step instructions as well as tons of helpful hints that only someone with her experience can provide.

What I really like about Chef Bilderback’s recipes is she gives you a complete recipe with lots of how to’s. They are not just a list of ingredients and a few lines of instructions. They really explain how to prepare the recipe so you get it right. My kind of recipe.

So if you are looking for a collection of simple recipes that will bring back memories of foods that you remember, I highly recommend you check out Chef Bilderback’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Comfort Food.

Tomorrow I will post one of the recipes my wife prepared from the book for Potatoes Anna that we served as a side dish. She added her own “comfort” addition to Chef Leslie’s recipe that I think you will enjoy.

What are some of your favorite “comfort foods”?

You can list some of your favorites below in the comments area or better yet, head over to my new Cooking Community Forum and post the entire recipe.

How to Help Your Kids Enjoy New & Different Types of Food

I receive a lot of emails on this subject and have a few ideas that I try to relate but this week I read an article in the Philadelphia Inquire by Karen Heller about a new cookbook by Jessica Seinfeld, the wife of actor / comedian Jerry Seinfeld called Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids to Eat Good Food.

The article, Mrs. Seinfeld’s recipe to raise picky eaters, is a great read, informative and humorous itself, but I was more interested in Karen Heller’s own “tricks” to get children to eat more adventurous foods at the end of the article. They are right on.

Not that there is anything wrong with Jessica Seinfeld’s methods, they just differ with Ms. Heller’s philosophy. I have not read Mrs. Seinfeld’s book yet so I will reserve my editorial to a later date.

Start Early

Ms. Heller suggests presenting “interesting food to children” as early as possible so they are “more likely to adopt an interesting diet”. I couldn’t agree more. It’s not easy, but I ask my kids to at least try everything I prepare and if they don’t like it, which is more often than not, they can spit it out in my hand. Sometimes I think they fake not liking it just so they can spit in my hand.

And you will be surprised by what they like and don’t like. For example, my youngest does not like hamburgers. I’m thinking, “What kid doesn’t like hamburgers?” but she and her sister both love steamed clams. When I was a kid I didn’t even like looking at steamed clams.

Dining Out

Ms. Heller also suggests taking kids out to restaurants so they can learn to eat different ethnic foods. I could not agree more. Not only do they experience new styles of cooking, they get the whole experience of dining out and how to behave in a nice restaurant. Be careful how young you start taking them out to be considerate of the other people in the restaurant.

One of the first times we took our oldest daughter out to a restaurant as a baby, I was holding her in my arms with her head looking over my shoulder at the table behind us. They thought this was cute until she threw up. Luckily we knew the people and they were ok with it but it could have been a really bad experience for everyone.

Cook With Your Kids

The most powerful suggestion Ms. Heller writes is “Cook with your kids. Children love to cook. They love to eat what they’ve made.”

This is so true. I can’t tell you how much my kids like to help in the kitchen especially my 7 ½ year old with cerebral palsy. We have a special stander that brings her up to counter height and she helps me prepare meals. She gets great satisfaction out of being able to help and she is definitely more likely to try eating something that she was involved preparing than something I throw in front of her.

I get emails from parents all the time asking me about cooking classes for their kids. They are around and I am going to put together a list and post it on my web site but I always respond to the parents by suggestion them to start in their own kitchens. At these early stages, most of us parents have all the skills we need to be our kids’ culinary arts instructors. Besides, it’s a great way to bond with your kids.

Happy Holidays to all of you avid home cooks. 

We had a wonderful Christmas and as usual there were many kitchen items exchanged between my wife and me. I hope to tell you about them all in the next couple of weeks and share with you how I’ve been using them.

My 9 year old daughter using her own savings gave me this wonderful looking, giant cookbook by Aliza Green called Starting with Ingredients – Quintessential Recipes for the Way We Really Cook.

Looks just like the kind of cookbook I will love to learn from. With over thousand pages describing over one hundred ingredients, this cookbook focuses on most of the popular ingredients we cook with every day and describes what they are, how to shop for them and most importantly how to cook them.

For example, she looks at Fennel, one of my favorite and in my opinion, under utilized vegetables used in most households. I love to cook with it or eat it raw in salads. Aliza describes the history of fennel, where it is grown and when it is in season, how to choose it, how to use every part of it and then provides a whole bunch of recipes using it in various dishes and cooking methods.

She has recipes for Tuscan Tuna Salad with Fennel, Chicken Salad with Fennel, Lemon Zest and Currants, Fennel and Tomato Casserole, Braised Fennel with White Wine, Bay and Thyme & Whole Grilled Red Snapper Stuffed with Fennel.

The book is filled with food facts, buying tips, cooking methods and plenty of ideas how to use the ingredient. It’s one of those cookbooks you can just sit down with to read and enjoy whether you use her recipes or not.

Besides, just holding this massive book provides a workout to burn off some of the calories you’ll gain trying all the recipes in it.

I am still browsing through it and will report back on any of the recipes I try, but from what little I’ve seen, this one is a must for anyone who really wants to know more about what they are cooking and why.

You can find it at Amazon here.