Spring cookbooks: 3 titles for home chefs seeking substance, style, and culture
Highly anticipated new SoBo cookbook by chef Lisa Ahier with Susan Musgrave tops this season’s list
Lisa Ahier. Photo by Jeremy Koreski
FORGET SPRING CLEANING: it’s time for spring cooking. Here’s a handful of new titles that have us feeling inspired about hitting the kitchen.
Together at Sobo: More Recipes and Stories From Tofino’s Beloved Restaurant (appetite by Random House)
If you’ve been to Tofino in the last 20 years, you’ve probably eaten at SoBo. Having started out in 2003 as a purple community food truck, SoBo soon turned into a bricks-and-mortar restaurant that has been beloved by locals and tourists alike ever since. Founded by chef Lisa Ahier and her then husband (and solely operated by Ahier for the last seven years), SoBo takes its name from “sophisticated bohemian”, reflecting her culinary approach: unpretentious but fantastic food made with the best ingredients available. The place is known for comfort dishes like wild smoked-salmon chowder, fish tacos, key-lime pie, and ice-cream cookie sandwiches… The list goes on.
A follow-up to 2014’s The SoBo Cookbook: Recipes from the Tofino Restaurant at the End of the Canadian Road, Ahier’s new book is special: written from the heart with Susan Musgrave, it introduces readers to people who have helped shaped the restaurant into the dining destination it is today. And what a bonus to have photography by Jeremy Koreski, another esteemed Tofino artist; his studio is one more must-visit spot in town. (And no, he doesn’t take his stunning nature shots with a drone.)
The cookbook by one of the hardest working women you’ll meet grabs you from the get-go with recipes like charcuterie with grilled peaches and sourdough, fried green tomatoes, and watermelon gazpacho, and from there the hits just keep on coming—think summer ratatouille with polenta, seafood saffron risotto, and Southern-style fried chicken dinner. Then there’s a cedar Negroni, mezcal Paloma, and sangria for a crowd—all too good.
If you don’t feel like cooking, you can source many of Ahier’s gourmet treats in specialty stores across Canada, with more to come. (Find SoBo’s Wild Smoked Salmon Chowder and Cornbread at Mitch’s Catch at The Locker at False Creek Fisherman’s Wharf and Dundarave Village.) But you’ll want this cookbook in your collection for those days and nights when you’re missing the Tofino surf and stars and SoBo’s sustenance.
The Ultimate Guide to Food Styling: Essential Lessons for Creating Picture-Perfect Dishes (Page Street Publishing Co)
This one’s a little different. Toronto’s Julia Konovalova is the creator of Imagelicious, a blog focused on delicious and easy meals for busy people, from breakfast to dessert, with a lot of Instant Pot recipes thrown in. The author of The Ultimate One-Pan Oven Cookbook, she has worked with food-photography clients all around the world. In her new title, she shares her secrets when it comes to elevating a meal from looking nice on a plate to completely standing out in a sea of Instagram stories. Think store-bought and hand-made backdrops, props, tools (like poster putty, Q-tips, smoke gun, and cooking torch), colour theory, image composition, textures, layers, heights, and more, the emphasis being on the art of styling and not photography itself (though she does outline a few practical techniques for the latter, too, including how to add action). She also covers how to effectively add the human element, right down to proper hand positioning and the swirl of a drizzle. Her final, eye-catching images belie the great amount of thought and preparation that goes into each one. If there aren’t actual measurements and methods for the dishes pictured in this book, you won’t be short of ideas for what to make, with everything from avocado toast with cucmbers and peas to pumpkin soup to an apple salad; that’s where Imagelicious comes in.
Asada: The Art of Mexican-Style Grilling (Abrams)
Brica Lopez teams up with Javier Cabral (her co-author for Oaxaca: Home Cooking From the Heart of Mexico) for this beautiful guide to hosting a backyard Mexican-style grilling party. Lopez comes from a long line of mezcal craftspeople and is a co-owner of Los Angeles restaurant Guelaguetza; Cabral founded the food blog Teenage Glsutster and has gone on to contribute to various U.S. magazines. Writing in a spirit as warm as freshly made (flour or corn) tortilla, the two share Oaxacan history and culture along with recipes for everything from grilled salpicon tostadas (a version of the traditional Mexican-style pulled beef salad) and four-chile snapper to pibil-style pork chops and so many different types of rice, frijoles, salsas, and aguas fresca. We love the meat and cheese board that swaps out charcuterie for chicharron, and now we know why tio was right to clean the grill with an onion.
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