Fresh Fish: A Fearless Guide to Grilling, Shucking, Searing, Poaching, and Roasting Seafood Paperback – March 22, 2016

This is a beautiful book that will be appreciated by anyone who has had the very good fortune to have spent summers on the Cape and surrounding areas. It's beautifully written with wonderful recipes. I highly recommend it!

On a whim, I bought some mussels while at Costco this past week. I knew just where to go look for a recipe when I got home. Recently, I got this new Seafood cookbook by Jennifer Trainer Thompson. I opened up the cookbook to the index, found a recipe for steaming mussels, and set to work!

In my experience, cookbooks vary a lot. Some have many pictures, some have none. Some have horrible formatting that make them difficult to read because the color of the font is too light to read, the font itself is hard to focus on, or even because there are too many words on a page! As for the actual content, some recipes are written well, making them easy to follow--while other cookbooks miss steps or even ingredients!

I do have another standby fish cookbook that I love--James Peterson's Fish & Shellfish. This has been my go to fish cookbook for years. But, it's not a simple, easy to use cookbook. I also have another one that I use for the simplest recipes, Seafood: A Collection of Heart-Healthy Recipes by Janis Harsila and Evie Hansen. I've used both of these for years. Peterson's for shellfish and more complex fish recipes, Harsila's for the simplest nights when I pan fry or bake fish. But, neither have pictures. Neither are particularly appealing cookbooks visually, Peterson's does have a section of pictures in the middle, though they aren't right by the recipes. Harsila's cookbook has a lot of older recipes that no one would cook today since it is thirty years old. So, it made a lot of sense for me to go to Fresh Fish when I wanted to cook Mussels.

The recipe I found in this cookbook was easy to follow, simple to understand, and was spot on. My husband and I both loved the mussels I cooked Friday night. We let my kids try one or two and they loved them as well, which was quite surprising to me. I did make one simple substitution of minced red onion for the shallots (because I didn't have any), but it still tasted great. There was a separate

Jennifer Trainer Thompson put together a great cookbook. The pictures make the food appealing. The directions are easy to follow and formatted well. Colored font was used for the recipe titles, headings, and step numbers, but thankfully not for the ingredient names and step directions so they can be easily read. One issue I take with many cookbooks is using too many odd ingredients, but this cookbook doesn't do that. I was pleased that there was only the occasional ingredient that would need a trip to a specialty foods store.

There were a few cases where I think there should have been pictures of the recipe steps rather than extraneous (but interesting) pictures of other things. One example is the Seaweed Sushi Roll Recipe. I make sushi regularly for my kids, but I wouldn't recommend following this recipe. First, she said to chop the avocado and vegetables. Instead, when making sushi the cook should julienne the vegetables (including the avocado). If you did want to chop them, it would need to be a fine mince of the vegetables. Also, wrapping the bamboo in plastic wrap is not so simple. You have to wrap both sides of the map so that the plastic wrap will stay on it. One last note, when spreading the rice on the seaweed paper, getting your hands wet periodically will help you spread it--which she does note. I'm glad she mentioned that.

This fish cookbook is going to likely have a place on my shelf for a long time!

Please note that I received a complimentary copy of this book for review from Storey Books.

Beautifully written with a varied selection of fantastic recipes. My new favorite cookbook!

Fresh Fish: Seafood Recipes, Techniques, and Traditions by Jennifer Trainer Thompson is a free NetGalley ecookbook that I read on a Saturday morning in late February, not long before Leap Day. I think that I had chosen to read this book between Red Lobster's long-lauded Endless Shrimp and Lobsterfest 'seasons' - it didn't take much for me to view several commercials, then see the cover of this book, and think, "Hmm, maybe I can make all this for myself at home."

Lovelovelovelove! Instead of being bogged down at the beginning of this book by measurements, technique, and meal planning, I'm bevvied aloft by family traditions and tried & true East Coast history before going straight into the recipes. And, boy, does this cookbook have heft; 300+ pages and nearly every one a picture studded with detail and terrific coastal-minded quotes. This book will be a pleasure to lift and plonk on a kitchen counter as a trusted resource, just as it will be to lift and gently set a Graniteware stockpot full of ocean-caught goodness on your kitchen table.

Visually this book is fabulously presented, not only with photos but with the layout of the book. There is no cramming and trying too hard - the recipes are very simple and the take up (mostly) one page, laid out in steps and paragraphs with ingredients that are simple and easily obtained.
The book also has very good description on detail and how to prepare shellfish. Again wonderful photos and easy to follow details.
There are full page photos of the fish which look extremely delicious. The last couple of chapters cover side dishes to serve with, drinks and desserts. I love the instructions on how to build and cook for a clambake. This book was provided to me in return for a honest and unbiased review

A lot of great recipes. Perfect for the summer grilling season.

If you want to see feel and experience New England seafood this is the right cookbook

Great book!