The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook

Starred review from October 1, 2012
A tiny kitchen and great eats are the winning formula for popular New York City food blogger Deb Perelman, confessed “picky” and “obsessive” self-taught cook of smittenkitchen.com blogging fame. In her first cookbook, awaited by an enormous fan base, Perelman shares her undisguised love of cooking and 300 recipes that come out of her apartment’s postage stamp–size kitchen. Driven by curiosity and a desire to share her cooking discoveries, Perelman delivers a collection of lab notes from well-tested culinary experiments and open dialogue with blog fans whose questions Deb credits with having “fine-tuned my cooking by forcing me to question everything.” What makes the best roast chicken? How can you make gnocchi light as pillows? She approaches each cooking challenge with aplomb, breaking the mold while inspiring readers to work with whatever challenges a tiny kitchen, limited budget, equipment, or untried recipes present. What better way to convince a friend of the virtues of popcorn than by combining it with a buttery brown sugar cookie? Perelman’s love of strawberry shortcake inspires a biscuit-as-cradle for juicy tomatoes topped with whipped goat cheese. Included are a great number of vegetarian recipes. This fearless home cook’s humorous anecdotes and delectable photos make for a food blog–gone–book that translates beautifully into any kitchen and fulfills Perelman’s promise to help cooks prepare food that both “she and you will love.” Photos. Agent: Alison Fargis.

June 1, 2012

Just ask the Smitten Kitchen's 63,000 Facebook followers or its four million unique visitors per month: Perelman's supremely helpful, visually stunning, wittily worded food blog really did deserve to be named one of 2011's best blogs by Time magazine. (I know because I just visited it.) Perelman's recipes are accessible but not Betty Crocker plain; this is fun, energized eating.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 1, 2012
Wildly popular food blogger and self-proclaimed obsessive self-taught cook and photographer Perelman's exhaustive research in her tiny NYC kitchen yields somelucky for us!spectacular results in beautiful full color. The chatty warmth of her voice in the friendly, blog-like entry that accompanies each recipe is matched only by her warming food: hearty veggie main dishes relying on seasonal ingredients (e.g., spaghetti-squash and black-bean tacos), carnivorous delights belying her former vegetarianism (e.g., pistachio masala lamb chops), and, testing one's ability to sit through even the most delicious meals, some impressive desserts (e.g., peach dumplings with bourbon hard sauce). Perelman does her part to keep readers from ever resorting tothat dirty worda mix and even includes an exceedingly approachable brioche in the form of a chocolate-chip pretzel. With an efficient approach to gourmandise and a giddily iconoclastic take on traditional recipes, such as replacing beef with mushrooms in a facile bourguignon and making a classic lemon cake with grapefruit instead, Perelman only includes the fussier versions of ingredients or techniques when she's proven that they will make the end results that much better.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)