I wanted to share with you a brilliant cookbook from professional chef and recovering alcoholic Chef Liz Scott. People in recovery often ask how to make some of the recipes on my web site without wine or other spirits and I direct them to my page on alcohol substitutions but now I’m happy to refer them to this incredible cookbook, The Sober Kitchen.

Not only is this a great book filled with recipes and advice for “a Lifetime of Sobriety”, Chef Scott’s cookbook is filled with tips and chef secrets that all of us would be delighted reading whether we are in recovery or not. Glancing through the book, I couldn’t help but stop and read some of her explanations like “Demystifying Deglazing” or “A Collection of Crispy Coatings” for frying fish.
It is exactly the type of cookbooks I enjoy reading…plenty of excellent recipes and lots of cooking tips to help understand the cooking techniques involved.

For Those In Recovery

This is the first major cookbook I’ve seen that really looks at the link between food and recovery. Chef Scott, a graduate of The French Culinary Institute, offers up plenty of helpful advise from her own experiences and provides important information on nutrition, hydration and vitamins needed during recovery. It may sound like it’s not going to be much fun but Chef Scott has written this cookbook in a format that is easy to read with over 300 simple recipes to try.

The recipes and suggestions offered in The Sober Kitchen will help with “repairing your body from the damage of addiction by developing healthy eating and drinking habits” and “help you to cope with common cravings that require attention.”

Melody Beattie, author of Codependent No More writes, “The recipes in this book are easy to prepare, tasty, filling, inexpensive, and especially good for my liver. The Sober Kitchen is a welcome addition to anyone’s library and kitchen – especially those of us recovering from chemical dependency and hepatitis C. “

Recipes and Interview with Chef Scott

I am hoping to interview Chef Scott in the near future for Novice2Pro and will be posting a few of her recipes and tips on this Blog. This is a great book for anyone in recovery but I would be happy to recommend to everyone who enjoys cooking.

Here’s an example of one of Chef Scott’s “Chef’s Notes” you will find for making clarified butter.

Making Clarified Butter

“Make clarified butter by slowly melting unsalted butter, allowing the milk solids to sink to the bottom. Skim off the top foam and carefully pour or ladle out the golden liquid. Without its milk solids, butter can safely reach a higher smoke point without burning, which makes it ideal for frying. You can keep clarified butter (also called ghee), tightly covered, in the refrigerator for up to one month.”

This is the kind of information I love reading in cookbooks.

So if you are in recovery or know someone who is and are interested in cooking, I highly recommend Chef Liz Scott’s, The Sober Kitchen.

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.