Customer Reviews

Adventures in New Kentucky Cooking with The Bluegrass Peasant

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"Adventures in New Kentucky Cooking with the Bluegrass Peasant" by David Domine is an innovative collection of delicious and easy-to-follow recipes with a distinctive Kentucky bent, however it is sure to please food lovers the world over. Each recipe features a beautiful color photograph, and not only that, the author includes interesting facts and tidbits about the foods being prepared. For me, the best part is that the author provides recipes for dishes that are entirely from scratch - he doesn't cheat by using boxed mixes or preprocessed foods - and he promotes local producers and farmers as much as possible. He also encourages us to eat in season, thus promiting sustainable agriculture and a generally healthy lifestyle. He has managed to put his finger on all those edible things that are typically 'Kentucky' and has artfully arranged them in a beautiful cookbook that honors time-honored Bluegrass culinary traditions as well as nouvelle cuisine ingenuity. The dishes presented herein are perfect for any time of year, but I can see this really being a great addition to the kitchen bookshelf for the December holidays and especially for the Kentucky Derby in May. These recipes are great for everyday dinners or special occasions, and I predict that "Adventures in New Kentucky Cooking with the Bluegrass Peasant" by David Domine will indeed be a culinary classic for years to come.

This book has a wonderful collection and variety of new-southern-inspired recipes from across the state of Kentucky. The recipes are easy to follow, and they utilize absolutely no pre-processed ingredients in the pursuit of promoting sustainable agriculture. As an added bonus, each recipe has its own beautiful color photograph that shows what the dish should look like; this really sells the recipes. Home cooks and cookbook readers will also find that there is a wealth of information about much of the area's undiscovered culinary history and up-and-coming food products. This recipe collection is great to have for the holidays, and especially for that annual Derby Party in May, but it will come in handy all year round.

I recently moved from NYC to Kentucky and saw this book in the Kentucky Books section of my local big named book store. I was giving a dinner party for my new neighbors that week, so decided to buy it and try out the recipes on them to see how a true Kentuckian would respond to them. I got RAVE reviews with the recipes I cooked from this book! I highly recommend this book.

Apart from the wonderful ideas for New-South, Kentucky-inspired dishes, the best part of this cookbook is the abundance of photographs. Each recipe has a picture with it that shows how the food is supposed to look when you're done cooking it. What they say is true: you eat with your eyes, so this really sells the book. Another nice thing is that each preparation has a brief introduction with it so you know something of the background of the dish - is it an old dish, a new dish, is there a story behind its creation, does the recipe use a unique local product? - things like that. Being someone who likes to support local farmers, I like this book as well because the author shows a preference for regional ingredients and artisanal products. I'm all about sustainability. This author has also penned a successful series about ghosts in "the most haunted neighborhood in the country" and I recommend them as well. Ghosts of Old Louisville: True Stories of Hauntings in America's Largest Victorian Neighborhood, Phantoms of Old Louisville: Ghostly Tales from America's Most Haunted Neighborhood and Haunts of Old Louisville: Gilded Age Ghosts and Haunted Mansions in America's Spookiest Neighborhood

With the exception of Louisiana, Kentucky has the most individual cuisine in the USA. Bourbon, country hams, and southern-inspired ingredients form the backbone for flavorful home cooking that derives much of its tradition from all the things that make Kentucky famous: tobacco, horse racing and distilleries. This beautifully illustrated book (There's a photo with each recipe!)brings all these influences together in an innovative collection of recipes that pay homage to the Bluegrass State. Totally from scratch, the recipes incorporate new twists on old-fashioned favorites such as corn pudding, spoon bread, spare ribs and onions, fried chicken, sally lunn, and fried green tomatoes and completely original recipes from the author, such as hot brown soup, bourbonnaised filet mignon, butter lettuce with benedictine dressing, and guinea hen with ginger. There's even a chapter (8 in total) devoted to Kentucky drinks using bourbon. This book is must for all fans of Kentucky, regional cooking and Americana. Domine is also the author of another great cookbook Splash of Bourbon: Kentucky's Spirit: A Cookbook.

I love David Domine's enthusiasm for local eating and how he strives to showcase Kentucky always in its best light. He makes me proud to be from here. The recipes in this book are easy to follow and tasty. They have good photos to show how the food should look in each recipe and he always makes sure to include a little back story to each recipe - I really like that. You can read this cookbook from cover to cover, just like a normal book.

As the name suggests, this book presents Kentucky cooking in a new light. Many times recipes call for the old ingredients, but much of the time the author uses new things on the local food scene for updated recipes that still have lots of tradition on lots of great local flavor.