Viet World Kitchen

Professional Cookbook Reviews: An Inside Look + CookShelf App Giveaway

I love to read a good book review, one that’s full of insights tinged with humor and sometimes, a bit of well deserved snark. T. Susan Chang is one of the few professional cookbook reviewers in the United States. You may know her work from National Public Radio, the Boston Globe, or her website. She takes every book to task, testing recipes and evaluating the merits of each work on a variety of levels. Susan’s got twelve (12!) years of professional experience to back her up, plus a solid knowledge of cookbooks that goes back further yet.  

You may not agree with Susan on all of her calls but you don’t have to. Like all excellent reviewers, she lays out her deep assessment so that you can form yours. She recently released a nifty phone app called CookShelf. It’s a cookbook rating app—available for iPhone and Android —that’s extremely thorough and handy for whether you're shopping or just catching up on what's out there. 

I bought the $2.99 app, and after reading through a number of reviews (she adds content regularly too so you’re buying into a lifetime subscription, of sorts), I had questions to ask Susan about the art and craft of reviewing cookbooks. Read on and if you’ve got an iPhone, enter the giveaway; sorry, there are no Android giveaway codes available.

Mustard Greens, Tofu, and Chicken Soup Recipe (Canh Cai Dau Hu)

On Monday, my husband had dental surgery and for his post-operation, recovery dinner, I made a comforting (read: easy to chew) tofu, shrimp, and peas stir-fry. The Trader Joe-san medium tofu came in a 1 1/4-pound (565 g) block and I only needed about a pound. I had a little block left.

What can you do with a chunk of leftover tofu? You can save it in the fridge, or in my case last Monday, I added it to a simple Vietnamese soup with mustard greens and a bit of chicken thigh sitting in the fridge.

Blasted Broccoli with Fish Sauce Recipe

I’ve been making very simple foods for the past week, mostly because my days of recipe testing and writing have been very full, often extending till 11 p.m. when I collapse into bed. That kind of work schedule doesn’t permit elaborate cooking.

By late afternoon, the kitchen can look like something exploded. After tidying up, my husband and I usually take a daily walk to buy groceries for dinner. Some days, that’s the only time I leave my house so I relish the chance to stretch my legs and breathe extra fresh air. It’s also an opportunity to ponder dinner.

Local farmers grow some spectacularly tasty broccoli and broccolini, which are sold at weekly farmer’s markets as well as independent grocery stores. My default preparations are to briefly boil broccoli in lots of salted water (steaming tends to unevenly cook the vegetable), stir-fry broccoli with a little meat, or employ it in Chinese-style noodle soups. Here are a couple of past recipes on VWK that involve broccoli:

Viet Scrambled Eggs with Fish Sauce Recipe

It was not so much nostalgia as a yearning for something deliciously Vietnamese that led me to whip up these scrambled eggs today. My mom taught me how to make scrambled eggs – after she let me prepare rice for the family. We’d have the eggs for lunch with bread. At the time, I didn’t realize how genius it was.

There were just a handful of ingredients involved: shallot or yellow onion, tomato, eggs, fish sauce, and black pepper. If things got fancy, green onion was added for color. Making the Viet scrambled eggs got me thinking about the brilliance of simple cooking.