A couple of weeks ago I offered you a cocktail while waiting for dinner. Well, here it is, though not from Thai Food, the current DCCC pick, but from Bean by Bean, the latest cookbook by Crescent Dragonwagon. If that name sounds familiar, and who can forget a name like that?, it’s because she’s the author of another cookbook that was the DCCC pick last Spring. Crescent’s lovely publicist at Workman Publishing, Rebecca Carlysle, my review of that cookbook (click here to read it) and so she decided to send me a copy of Bean by Bean to review, and she has graciously allowed me to include a recipe from the book. Since I know you’re waiting for a Thai meal, and not just Thai-inspired drinking chocolate and cocktails, I picked Crescent’s recipe for green curry with tofu. Read on to get my impression of Crescent’s newest cookbook and for her extra-green curry recipe, shown in the photo above.

BEAN BY BEAN
A COOKBOOK
More than 175 Recipes for Fresh Beans, Dried Beans, Cool Beans, Hot Beans, Savory Beans, even Sweet Beans!
By Crescent Dragonwagon
Workman Publishing
370 pp.

Bean by Bean, an essential guide to preparing and enjoying one of the world’s oldest forms of sustenance, is the latest cookbook from Crescent Dragonwagon, who cultivates beans and readers-turned-happy-cooks-and-satisfied-eaters with equal facility.

If I were a bean, I would feel lucky to be planted in Crescent’s garden, and perhaps even luckier when, at just the right moment, I was picked and taken into her kitchen to be handled with care, appreciation, and love and ultimately transformed into an appetizing and sustaining meal—after all, legumes have (more…)

Green Curry Soup (Bowl made by Anne Coneys)

I love greens of all sorts and, though I’ve prepared them in many different ways, I most often fall back on the foolproof preparation of braising them. Fine and dandy, but I was beginning to bore myself, not least my boyfriend Mike who isn’t as greens crazy as I am.

Then I saw Anna Thomas’s story “The Soup for Life” in the current issue of Eating Well, one of the food magazines DCCC is currently reading and cooking from. Thomas loves greens, too, and has found an ingenious way to use them—as the basis of wholesome and flavorful soups. On one gray, blustery day she found herself in need of dropping a few pounds but also wanting to create something comforting and delicious to eat. The result? (more…)