Congratulations to all of the winners of the 2007 James Beard Foundation/Kitchen Aid Book Awards.
We're especially excited to see that Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours won for best baking book. We made amazing cookies this Christmas with lots of help from Dorie's down-to-earth book and enjoyed her TV appearances. Plus she's a blogger!
BakingBooks.com has great interview with Greenspan. If you want to give one of her recipes a try tonight, the NY Times shared one of her brownie recipes a few weeks ago.
Matt Lee and Ted Lee's The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook: Stories and Recipes for Southerners and Would-be Southerners won for best book about American cooking and also took the big prize for best overall cookbook of the year.
We've read the Lee Brothers articles in the New York Times and Martha Stewart Living, but don't own the cookbook yet. Have any of you cooked from it yet?
There was hot competition in the Writing on Food Category: Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma faced off against Bill Buford's Heat and David Kamp's United States of Arugula. And the Beard Award goes to . . . The Omnivore's Dilemma. Have you read all three of these? Did this one go the way you thought?
James Oseland and Marcus Samuelsson are also among the winners. Here's the full list of nominees and winners. The flashing star indicates a Beard award winner.
I've cooked a number of times out a review copy of the Lee Bros. book before I gave up on it -- I certainly hope that the numerous errors that I experienced were corrected by the time the final book went to press, but I doubt it. The dredge used for fried green tomatoes and fried chicken was inedibly salty. And some of the "quick" recipes required an inordinate amount of prep for a weeknight meal. I wrote about it here:
http://marriedwithdinner.com/archives/390
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The winner that absolutely BAFFLED me was Todd English winning for TV Food Special. Has anyone else caught this on PBS? It's AWFUL. Awful awful awful. There were only 3 shows nominated in the category, which I find astounding, but, whatever... Just another grudge I'll hold against the Beardies.
That said, I'm super happy Lorna Sass' cookbook won. It's phenomenal, and I've even seen her leave posts on peoples blogs when they've cooked from one of her recipes. That's class!
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I don't see TV Food Special on that list . . . but yeah, I saw the Tokyo Fish Market thing English did. Fascinating place, but not fascinating tv. English is not my pic for a tv host.
I'm a little sorry that Heat didn't win, or that Heat was in the same year as Pollan's major book, so not standing a chance.
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and Mollie Katzen got an archival nod to the original Moosewood, which is sooooo well deserved!
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and Leite's Culinaria won for website
good on them!
http://www.jamesbeard.org/awards/index.php
the more complete list
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