Cookbook Spotlight – Kosher by Design Cooking Coach

The new Susie Fishbein cookbook, the eighth in her Kosher by Design series, is more than just a cookbook filled with recipes and stories. It is more like a lesson book you might use in cooking school. This time around Susie wants you to learn to take off the training wheels. Of course there is always a need for amazing tried and true recipes, but it is time to free yourself form their constraints and learn how to cook with what you have in your pantry.

After a decade of demos and classes, Susie decided to give us a book with how to instructions on all the basic and some not so basic cooking skills. Even if cooking doesn’t come naturally to you, most of us have to do it, but the more comfortable and confident you are in the kitchen the more enjoyable it will be.

In this book, at the beginning of each section you will find the Game Plan. This section covers all the techniques you will need, including instructional photos so that you can see how it is done. You will learn everything from sharpening a knife to using your knives properly. Susie wants to make sure you know, “how important your knives are and how to keep them sharp.” But she doesn’t stop there. In the soup section you learn about sweating and cooling and this refers to vegetables not yourself. You will learn everything about types/cuts of meat, how to carve poultry and how to cook fish perfectly. She offers tips on separating eggs and teaches you how to temper chocolate.

“Once you learn a technique, you own it. If people who read this book come out with some new techniques that they could then apply to all of their cooking, not just a particular recipe, then my biggest goal, will have been met. If you learn the proper way to roast cauliflower for a cauliflower recipe, the same exact tips and techniques as far as spacing and pan selection, which affect results, apply to roasting any kind of vegetable,” explains Susie. After you read through and understand the techniques you can hone your skills with any of her tantalizing recipes. But, before you decide which recipes to cook, don’t miss the section called the Playbook. This section offers ways to use leftovers for many of the recipes to create other dishes, so you can cook one night and eat for two. Susie understands why some readers may be skeptical of seeing last night’s dinner again, “[leftovers] get older and more well done every time they are plopped in front of you. Nothing beats the taste and eye appeal of fresh food. I have given this a lot of thought and deal with it in the PLAYBOOK section of the book which tells people how to reincarnate their leftovers into completely new and unrecognizable dishes.”

To learn more about Susie Fishbein, read our In the Joy of Kosher Kitchen with Susie Fishbein article from two years ago when her last book came out. Susie is not giving away anything about her next project, but she does assure me that there is something in the works.

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Enjoy a sampling of recipes from her new book and then go and BUY IT to get the rest of them unless you are lucky enough to be a winner – enter below.

Tomato Tarte Tatin with Playbook Tips

Green Bean and Asparagus Fries

Turkey Shepbhers Pie