Cooking At The Inn with the book CookWise, by Shirley O. Corriher

I’ve always enjoyed cooking. And eating. As a youngster I used to help my mother in the kitchen when she would be baking… more so at Christmas time. My job was to put the walnut on top of the cookie, or sprinkle the powder sugar on the chruscik (Polish dessert of fried dough covered with a blanket of powdered sugar). I also did the taste testing and also got to lick the beaters and bowel of uncooked cake mix, back when you didn’t worry about uncooked eggs. Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s you just worried about under-cooked pork…. Not like today… chicken, eggs, beef, spinach, peanut butter, hamburger, green onions… wait… is there ANY food that hasn’t been recalled or put on the FDA Alert?

The one thing I always wondered about was, how in the heck did the person who wrote the recipe know to use one cup of sugar and not two, or two eggs instead of three, or why do you use baking soda and not baking powder like the recipe we did last week? Must’ve been the scientist in me. As I got older I once in awhile gave cooking that Why question… why did the recipe call for this or that. Or maybe the How.. How did they know to use a teaspoonful of salt… and then why salt?

Alton Brown’s Good Eats TV show on the Food Channel sort of sparked my interest since he seemed to cover the Why’s and How’s of cooking and not just the “just do this, and mix it with that… and don’t ask questions”. When I started working at a local pharmaceutical company in the Research Triangle, I met Frank Dono, a real foodie!

Now this guy just immerses himself into cooking. I mean he enjoys the heck out of it! He's volunteered to work in a restaurant’s kitchen just to learn more about cooking and not even get paid. One year he grew in his own garden some eggplants…. in the numbers of 40… that’s right 40-some different varieties. He would cook different dishes with them. Now it also helps that he is Italian and learned some of his cooking technique from his grandmother, which explains the eggplant fetish. Over the past year, Frank has been cooking with peppers… all kinds and all varieties. Some of the dishes he comes up with are just fabulous! It also helps that his wife, Leanna, is a master gardener. She gives some brilliant direction on how to properly grow Frank’s fresh ingredients. Between the two of them, they could do a fantastic B & B utilizing fresh home grown garden veggies, fruits and herbs. Frank respects my baking capabilities, but I’ll tell ya, this guy can out cook me any day. I certainly respect his capabilities because he is a Master at the Stove…. and his wife a Master of the Soil!

Anyway, Frank is the one who told me about Shirley O. Corriher’s cookbook entitled CookWise The Hows & Whys of Successful Cooking with over 230 Great-Tasting Recipes. It also has on the cover, “The Secrets of Cooking Revealed”. It also won the James Beard Foundation Award for Excellence. This is a very prestigious cooking award… you can Google it to learn more about it.

This had to be one of the best recommendations I have ever had from Frank. Better than, “Here try this pepper it is only a 3 on the pepper hot scale, 10 being the hottest.” And then I bite into it, and my mouth turns into Hades just as he says, “Wait… oops.. I’m sorry that was a 7!” No kiddin’ my mouth knows it very well by now, Frank. No, really he is a very knowledge cook, chef, and all around foodie. I was just having some fun. He recommended Shirley’s book, and I really have learned a lot about the scientific basis of cooking. This is a fabulous book for anyone who really wants to learn about what happens on the molecular level when cooking. It would make a great Christmas present, or birthday gift for someone you love who just loves to cook.

I promote CookWise by Shirley O. Corriher at the Inn all the time with our guests. It is a cooking reference all good cooks and chefs should have on the book shelf…. and should read it as well.

On my next blog post, I will discuss CookWise in more detail. Until then.. which only should be in a couple of days…. Bon Appetit à l'Auberge!

Oh! One more thing. Frank the "The Little Italian Foodie" (really, I think he is only about 5ft 6 inches) also told me about Penzey Spices... another fantastic recommendation for herbs and spices... another blog post in the near future! Another great Christmas gift.