Whoa, where did that week go? A few Christmas shindigs mixed with the fact that I need 9 hours of sleep per night to cope with the depths of winter and time really flies. But it was a dozen BC Anjou pears sitting, forelorn, in the fruit bowl on my kitchen counter that got me I got revved up. For this Combat des Cookbooks pairing, I decided to even the playing field. I would compare pears with pears. (That’s right, you got it, all those homonyms….) Have a ringside seat as Had a Glass: Top 100 wines for 2009 under $20 goes to war with Vancouver Cooks 2.
The fact that Had a Glass (published by Whitecap Books, $19.95, soft cover, two-colour illustrations160 pages) has FIVE whole recipes in it was enough for me to let it be a contender in this cookbook competition. Why not? Had a Glass is exactly what it’s subtitle suggests: a little pocket-sized wine guru that you can take with you to the wine shop and not blow a bundle on a so-so wine.There are enough selections here (100 to be exact) for every taste: reds, whites, pinks, bubbles, aperitifs and dessert wines. The book is a breezy read without any goofy wine-speak that will be completely dog-eared by the end of the year. Good thing it’s an annual publication. But the question at hand is whether the recipes stand on their own? (The truth is these are five recipes pulled from other Whitecap cookbooks, but I’m cool with that too. Each recipe has a few wine recommendations, something I wish more cookbooks did. Oh and the fact that the labels for each wine are reproduced on each entry is sheer genius.)
OK, back to those Anjou pears threatening to turn to mush. On page 43, there’s a simple recipe for Upside-down Pear Tart, courtesy of Karen Barnaby’s lovely cookbook The Passionate Cook. There was nothing tricky or fancy about this pear tart, which is good, because I’m a reluctant, and often unsuccessful, baker. Well, it would have been pretty hard to screw this one up, and I didn’t. It was really good. The pear taste was a bit lost in all that gooey sugary goodness and my pastry was a bit tough, but I’ll take that one on the chin myself. As I said, I’m not a good baker.
Vancouver Cooks 2 is the follow-up cookbook to the 2005 Vancouver Cooks which sold an impressive 13,000 copies. This second go-around has recipes from 70 of BCs best chefs compiled by Jamie Maw, Joan Cross and Andrew 
Morrison (published by Douglas & McIntyre, $40, softcover, colour and b&w photos, 250 pages). Despite the title, the recipes cover a bit more BC geography than just YVR. And each recipe is cleverly paired with a BC wine. So for $40 you get to cook the types of dishes that would cost you about that much for one entrée at the majority of these places. The trouble is that chef-written recipes are, by-and-large, a pain in the ass to cook from. There are usually several steps for any given recipe — and these recipes are no exceptions. But that’s OK. I’ve learned that you can easily skip the unnecessary “jalapeno ketchup” and the “roasted garlic mayonnaise” and still come out with a really delish bison burger thanks to Ned Bell’s Smoked Cheddar Bison Burgers contribution. So despite the multi-stepped recipe in Vancouver Cooks 2 for Thomas Haas’ Pear Almond Tart with Black Currant Jam, which included ingredients like kalamansi pureé and four separate sub-recipes. I was determined, as you can see, to stick to the pear theme. Plus I had another half-dozen pears still in the fruit basket. Read the rest of this entry »
