cookbook club

The Foodie Handbook

by Alison Yost, a reader in Washington D.C.

A foodie can make a mean roast chicken AND loves sushi. At least according to Pim Techamuanvivit. In The Foodie Handbook, Pim, a renowned food blogger, lays out the “rules” of being a foodie, with a few recipes thrown in for good measure. Covering everything from how to eat at a fancy restaurant to how to pair wine with food and travel eating tips, she offers tips to everyone, whether they want them or not.
   The first recipe that I tested was Pim’s roast chicken. The final product was terrific, moist and tender. However, the real experience was in creating the meal. Pim recommends “loving” the chicken, massaging it with butter and herbs and offering readers a starting point for creating delicious chicken, no matter what the interior stuffing was like. This roast chicken is perfect for a Sunday dinner, but certainly would be difficult and time-consuming on a work-day. It was also pot and pan intensive, crowding my small apartment and using all my pots and pans. Worth it, but a little over-whelming.
   The second recipe that I tried was Pim’s Gooey Chocolate Cakes baked in a jar, which lived up to the name. Again, this was not a recipe for a post-work snack, but they were a delicious treat at the end of the day. I didn’t follow her suggestion for adding candied orange peel on the bottom of the jar, but it would be an interesting way to spice up the dessert and add a foodie twist.
   The final recipe that I tested of Pim’s was grilled apricots with saffron and honey. Surprisingly, this turned out to be one of the more complicated recipes to make, simply because the saffron and good honey were not readily available. Also, because this was done indoors, it lost some of the great grilled flavor that it would have otherwise had. The saffron was also a difficult ingredient to purchase and was quite expensive.
   Overall, Pim’s recipes are straightforward and easy to follow. They often include at least one ingredient that is slightly difficult to obtain or one technique that isn’t exactly small kitchen friendly. Her book serves as a good introduction to people who are just now exploring how to become foodies. For more established foodies, I believe that they will be less interested in the more explanatory parts of the book.
   Being a foodie means eschewing the daily grind for something more…for some, it is a search for more adventurous cuisine, for others, it is being able to cook out of a home garden. Foodies break out of the gastronomic box that society has deemed the ‘norm’; Pim does foodies no favors by trying to build another box to contain us.