Book Review- Better Homes and Gardens Can It!

Now that it's getting time to start planting, it's also time to start planning canning projects. Can It! from Better Homes and Gardens is a book full of boiling water canning recipes with a few freezer recipes. No pressure canner recipes in the book at all.

If you don't know anything about canning, and it's something you're just starting to get interested in to take advantage of gardens or local farmer's markets, boiling water canning doesn't take expensive equipment. I do my canning in my biggest stock pot.

The book is laid out well with good explanations for people who've never canned before. It explains the equipment you'll need, how to follow a recipe, and how to process in a hot water bath.

There are also lots recipes that are easy to follow  for experienced canners who want to go beyond their usual recipes. Savory recipes, sweet recipes and seasoning and combinations that will appeal to foodies.

Fantastic photos, and a good index in the back of the book to find things fast. The chapters are separated by types of food. 

There are traditional recipes in here, like strawberry jam which is a staple for anyone starting to can, but where it shines are in recipes that appeal to people who are really interested in experimenting with flavors.

Adults will enjoy Strawberry Margarita Jelly made with Triple Sec and tequila, and people who enjoy savory sweet will like the herb jelly recipe.

There are a lot of recipes that will be in regular rotation here. My daughter really enjoys canning and is looking forward to making and canning the spicy roasted tomato pizza sauce. My son, who is wild for pickles of all sorts really likes the Asian Pickled Carrots. We plan our canning by what's seasonal as well as what is growing in our garden to take advantage of low prices on in season produce. 

Lots of types of vegetables and fruit are used in the recipes, so if you grow a great crop of beans, you have several options for canning them with different flavors. All the recipes are very safe, with acid added for low acid foods. 

I recommend keeping one jar out of anything you are canning for immediate consumption if your family is anything like mine. Canned food also makes a wonderful gift.

Great variety of recipes, a lot of which can become the basis for meals in the winter, and well written instructions make this the kind of winner you expect from Better Homes and Gardens. It's a book I'll recommend to my friends who can. 

Published by Better Homes and Garden, An imprint of Wiley.

You can get this book from Amazon using the affiliate link below.

I received a complimentary copy of this book to review, my reviews are always my personal and honest opinion. You can read more about my review policy here.

Shamrock Plaid Box!

If you click on the shamrock label in my tags, there are a few more shamrock printables on the site. I hope you enjoy this one. Tomorrow I'll post coordinated 2 inch circles for labels or cupcakes!
Click on the image for a larger version, and print, cut, score, fold, glue.

Did you know clover is an edible weed? I consider dandelions my first harvest, but clover certainly comes in fast behind it. Fireweed, which is less common in other places than it is here, and chickweed round out my "weeds" harvest. An Alaskan tradition is something called Homesteader's Honey, it's a honey like sauce that's made using fireweed, red clover and white clover blossoms with sugar. Since sugar is a staple that ships and keeps well, and it's less expensive than honey, it was a popular alternative for some families. I collecting blossoms for my mother when I was a kid, and she would put up jars to gift and for our family. She always just used our Cooperative Extensions recipe. While I buy locally produced honeys, this summer, I plan to make some just like my mom did. But she had a gorgeous lawn, where I've allowed my edible weeds to flourish, so I should be able to collect all the blossoms in my yard.

Homesteader's Honey

Ingredients:
10 cups sugar
18 red clover blossoms
18 fireweed florets
2 1/2 cups boilng water
30 white clover blossoms
1 teaspoon alum
Procedure
In large pot with boiling water, sterilize canning jars, lids and rings. For up-to-date information about safe home canning practices, see for approved canning methods .
In a large saucepan, bring water to a boil. Add sugar and alum whule stirring. Continue to boil and stir until mixture is clear, may take up to ten minutes.
Remove saucepan from heat and add the blossoms and allow to steep for 15 minutes.
Pour through multiple layers of sterilized cheesecloth into the prepared jars. Allow ½-inch head space. Apply lids and bands immediately. Snug bands and invert jars, allow to cool.
Use as you would regular honey. If crystallization occurs, carefully warming uncapped jars in the microwave can liquify the mixture.

This recipe is the one my mom made from our local cooperative extension service. You can download the PDF of fireweed recipes for free from their site here.

Book Review- The Cookiepedia

The Cookiepedia : Mixing, Baking, and Reinventing the Classics by Stacy Adimando is absolutely a must have cookie book.

The author sets out to create and recreate classic cookies, and has 50 recipes total and probably has your favorite. My favorite are Snickerdoodles and they are in the section with spicy cookies.

It begins with an introduction to the pans and the tools you'll need with a quick overview about what they are used for, then into "Cookie Speak" which defines common baking terms you'll see in cookie recipes. The next part of the introduction is about decorating cookies and various techniques and ideas for that.

Then the recipe chapters. Each chapter starts with a double spread of the cookies in that chapter, photographed and shown in true scale, and looking so good you wish you could pick them off the page. The chapters themselves are arranged by cookie flavor profile. Some of the cookies also have their own full page color pages so you can see nice ways to present them.

The recipes themselves start with a description of the cookie and an adorable illustrated oven with the pre-heat temperature and the number of cookies it makes. They also frequently have sidebar tips, as well as a suggestions after the recipe for ways to modify it, and lined note sections so you can add your own notes.

Buttery starts with frosted animal cookies, and has some very traditional cookie recipes in it, it also has frosted maple pecan cookies. Maple, butter, pecans, I'm drooling a bit.

Chocolatey has recipes for standbys like chocolate chip, but also has a cream filled sandwich cookie recipe which uses butter instead of grease for the cream filling and makes a cookie that will make you swear off the blue bagged cookies forever.

Fancy Cookies are the cookies you impress adult friends with your mad baking skills. Buttery alfajores sandwich dulce de leche, French macarons with a classic almond filling are a lot of people's favorite cookies are two of my favorites from this chapter.

Fruity is fruit filled or flavored cookies. My favorite kind of store bought cookie are fig bars and there is a recipe for those, also for pretty Linzer cookies, thumb prints and homey classics like oatmeal raisin (another personal favorite!)

Spicy is my favorite chapter, with molasses spice, gingersnaps and my favorite, snickerdoodles. It also has a recipe for a cracker like savory "cookie" seasoned with salt and pepper that would be excellent on a cold day with tomato soup.

Finishing up, we have Nutty and Seed, which is cookies with nuts or seeds. Classic peanut butter cookies with their familiar fork pressed hatch marks, almond biscotti and pistachio butter cookies are my favorites in this chapter. The pine nut studded pignoli cookies are just lovely to look at and simple to make as well.

The photographs and illustrations in this book are very well done, and give it a contemporary crafty look and feel that make it a nice gift book as well as one for your personal library.

I do have one minor quibble with the binding, it's spiral bound, then cased in a regular binding. It opens flat, but if you aren't careful to close the pages before the outside binding you can bow the pages that were opened. It's a very minor quibble for a great collection of recipes.

Published by Quirk Books, you can get this book from Amazon.com using the affiliate link below.


Amazon.com affiliate links don't affect your cost, and provide extra income to me personally, which helps support my book addiction.

My reviews are always my personal and honest opinion. You can read more about my review policy here.

 If you click the cookies tag in labels, you'll find lots of printable cookie boxes!

Book Review- Ramen to the Rescue

Ramen to the Rescue : Over 100 Creative Recipes for Easy Meals Using Everyone's Favorite Pack of Noodles by Jessica Harlan is a cookbook filled with recipes for everything from appetizers to dessert using ramen noodles.

There are no finished food photos in the book, so it's not a cookbook for the people who love cookbooks filled with full colored photos. It's recipes. Lots and lots of recipes.

I've done a lot of what I thought was creative ramen cooking. This book showed me how much more could be done with these noodles.

When you're in a hurry, when you know you want to have a real meal but don't want to spend too much time cooking, when you're just saving money by eating at home, this is a great go-to book for recipes.

My son tried this one out for me. He went through the book and marked all the recipes he wanted to try. Then he made up a shopping list and made the family dinner.  He picked a beef and mushroom stew for the first recipe he tried. Doubling the recipe and using minute steaks instead of the flank steak called for, he made stew for the 4 of us for under 10 dollars, and it was so good that my husband went back for seconds.

We've tried a few more of the main course recipes since then. Most of the recipes take under a half hour to prepare and lots of vegetables and small meat servings make them economical.

A lot of Asian style recipes make this book absolutely delightful for my family, especially my son. The Spicy Peanut Noodle Wraps can be made with ingredients we usually have on hand, and he likes those so much more than peanut butter sandwiches.

There are also many salad recipes that would make great summer lunches.  Since most of them have minimal cooking, they won't heat up your kitchen too much.

Clear, easy to follow instructions, wonderful variety of flavors and ideas. It proves that while ramen is still a very inexpensive choice for meals, it can also be used in a lot of ways for more grownup meals, even many things you could serve to guests at a dinner party.

Recommended for anyone who is looking for cookbooks with quick and easy cooking, and as a gift to young people going off to college or to follow their dreams.

You can get this book from directly from the publisher, Ulysses Press  My reviews are always my personal and honest opinion. You can read more about my review policy here.