SINGAPORE – In this week’s Book Box, The Straits Times looks at three cookbooks that make food fun. Buy the books at Amazon. These articles include affiliate links. When you buy through them, we may earn a small commission.
Cookbook author B. Dylan Hollis encourages budding bakers to enjoy the process
Though he is best known for baking strange concoctions like pork cake, chocolate sauerkraut cake and jellied meatloaf on TikTok, B. Dylan Hollis suggests a more normal entry point for new bakers.
Over a Zoom call from Wisconsin, United States, the 28-year-old American social media personality tells The Straits Times: “When I think of entry-level recipes, Betty Crocker cake mix can help you get comfortable in the kitchen. Whether it’s necessary or not, it requires you to mix together dry and wet ingredients and put it into a baking vessel, so you get to actually feel out what it means to bake a cake. It allows you to get quick feedback when interacting with these items.”
Book review: Home chef Tiffy Chen’s debut cookbook full of easy, flavourful recipes
Not all cookbooks take three years of development and three generations of input to develop recipes, but these extra steps taken by Taiwanese-Canadian home chef Tiffy Chen have paid off.
Tiffy Cooks (2024) includes 88 recipes – chosen because the number is considered lucky in Chinese culture – which range from quick breakfast foods to bulk items that can be frozen for months. She also includes basics like perfecting rice on the stove or her trusty chilli oil, which she gifts to friends and family during the holidays.
She took the plunge in 2020, quitting her corporate job as a sales consultant to be a full-time food creator on TikTok and her blog, Tiffy Cooks. Since posting her first video on Sept 3, 2020, Chen has grown her audience to 3.3 million followers on TikTok and 1.8 million followers on Instagram.
Book review: Mark Kurlansky’s The Core Of An Onion will appeal to trivia buffs
Whether you like Mark Kurlansky’s latest book depends on which of his previous food-themed tomes you prefer.
If you enjoyed the narrative-driven Cod: A Biography Of The Fish That Changed The World and Salmon, then this is not for you as, like this reviewer, you would be expecting a deep dive into a vegetable that plays a central role in practically all the cuisines of note around the world.
As Kurlansky notes in his introduction, “in much of the world, from Asia to the Mediterranean, the first step in cooking is often to chop an onion and have a good cry”.
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