Our eight-year-old daughter, Lily, is allowed one thing she doesn't have to eat. While this hasn't quite gelled enough in her mind to influence her behavior, she likes me to tell her the one thing I won't eat. It's been the same my whole life: egg salad. Trace it back to the kid at the end of my grade school lunch table who ate it every day, on Wonder Bread. It was drippy. It smelled. He licked his hands. Yuck.
Then I read an entry by Heidi Swanson on her website, www.101cookbooks.com, about how she didn't get egg salad, either. So she reinvented it, with yogurt and dill and chives on toasted whole grain bread. Suddenly, I was dreaming about egg salad--in a positive way.
With all the wonderful cookbooks featured in this special cookbook issue of Shelf Awareness, we wanted to tell you about staff favorite go-to cookbook author Heidi Swanson. Her most recent cookbook, Super Natural Every Day, has become such a part of our repertoire that a dear friend now calls it "Super Natural Every Meal." Heidi focuses on whole and natural foods but she does it with style and amazing taste, with relatively easy-to-find ingredients and she somehow pulls this off in a non-preachy and sexy way.
I never thought I'd have my family regularly asking for Otsu (buckwheat noodles with tofu in a zesty ginger sauce) or farro soup with salted lemon yogurt or be drooling over Quinoa Patties, but now they do, and we and our bodies are happier because of this. Heidi makes it look chic, yummy and just generally cool to cook this way. Heck, she even got me and Lily to love egg salad. --Jenn Risko
We asked Heidi to answer a few questions about books and, of course, food:
Books on your nightstand now:
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, Solar by Ian McEwan, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, The Food of Morocco by Paula Wolfert and Mission Street Food by Anthony Myint and Karen Leibowitz.
Favorite food as a kid:
Quesadillas.
Favorite book as a kid:
Any and everything Judy Blume.
Book that (cookbook or otherwise) most influences your food:
Chez Panisse Vegetables and Chez Panisse Fruits by Alice Waters.
Favorite new ingredient:
The tin of Sesame a la Prune Ume (umeboshi plum-coated sesame seeds) I found in Paris a couple months back. Or June Taylor's Black and Tan conserve (Triple Crown Blackberry & Tayberry).
Favorite guilty pleasure:
Mast Brothers Fleur de Sel.
Cookbook you'd like to discover again for the first time:
Moro East by Samuel and Samantha Clark.
Cookbook you're an evangelist for:
Kim Boyce's Good to the Grain.
Cookbook you bought for the cover:
Breakfast, Lunch, Tea: The Many Little Meals of Rose Bakery by Rose Carrarini
What would your last meal be?
I genuinely try not to think about that.