A Nice Review of the Real Food Cookbook

8/25/14

I loved this review of my cookbook from the San Francisco Book Review:

The Real Food Cookbook: Traditional Dishes for Modern Cooks

Decadently adorned farmer’s market cookbooks, trying too hard to make vegetables appealing to the common consumer, often leave the home cook feeling overwhelmed by the intricate details and layouts involved in the ostentatious dishes presented. Planck sweeps pretentious fare from the farm table with her traditional, whole-ingredient, real kitchen approach to cooking. Frequent farm shoppers or CSA members will be excited to recognize every ingredient, and note that her dishes, without fanfare, just happen to be wholly seasonal, because that’s what comes natural to her.

A farm kid, she knows that what grows together goes together, and her recipes reflect a lifetime of rhythmic living with the earth. Without fear-mongering or guilt trips about eating “right,” she effortlessly assembles dish after dish of fresh, full-flavored recipes, designed with your modifications in mind. She admonishes the home cook over and over to use her recipes as guidelines, as inspiration. “I will never make this salad in exactly this fashion again,” she brazenly admits, and the reader is instructed to find “distinctive, crunchy things” at their area market that fits their idea of a shaved fennel, apple, and radish salad. “And that is the cast-iron rule about cooking: a recipe is not a commandment; it is a record of something someone once cooked.”

With comfortable family anecdotes, refreshingly straightforward approaches to food preparation and a running commentary on glucaronic acid and finding the tastiest cucumbers, this book is a true boon to the conscientious, farm-fresh cook, and deserves to be spattered, dripped on and scribbled in with love.

— From the San Francisco Book Review, August 20, 2014