Thanksgiving Cookbook Compilation

Disclaimer: I received these releases from the
publisher in exchange for honest reviews.

Three days until Thanksgiving!

I've been scrolling Pinterest and flipping through my cookbooks (old and new) for inspiration and recipes to finalize my menu today so I can finishing my shopping tomorrow (grocery store, Costco, and liquor store). Are you looking for a great cookbook to help you in the Thanksgiving final stretch? Here are 6 of this season's top cookbook releases that are sure to help you out (including their corresponding Goodreads summaries):

The Couple’s Cookbook by Cole Stipovich and Kiera Stipovich 

(released 11/12/19 from Ten Speed Press)
A beautiful primer for newlyweds starting their first home together, full of achievable, modern recipes for weeknight meals, weekend brunches, and everything in between. The Couple's Cookbook is an inviting collection of simple and comforting recipes for any food-loving pair that wants to learn to cook together. Written by a husband and wife who also work together as wedding photographers, this book is romantic, playful, and fun. The recipes are designed for a couple to eat together or to use for entertaining, with modern classics such as Grilled Curry Chicken Salad, Red Potato Salad with Smoked Bacon and Chives, Spicy Shrimp Tacos with Mexican-Style Slaw, and Caramel Cheesecake Jars. Nearly every dish is photographed to help new cooks learn with ease, and the recipes are foolproof. A section on cocktails and setting up a home bar helps make any of these meals into a dinner party. With tips and tricks for cooking alone or together, and recipes for any occasion, this book will teach any couple how to eat and live well.

Sean Brock’s South by Sean Brock 

(released 10/15/19 from Artisan)
Southern food is one of the most beloved and delicious cuisines in America. And who better to give us the key elements of Southern cuisine than Sean Brock, the award-winning chef and Southern-food crusader. In Sean Brock’s South, Brock shares his recipes for key components of the cuisine, from grits and fried chicken to collard greens and corn bread. Recipes can be mixed and matched to make a meal or eaten on their own. Taken together, they make up the essential elements of Southern cuisine, from fried green tomatoes to smoked baby back ribs and from tomato okra stew to biscuits. Regional differences are highlighted in recipes for shrimp and grits, corn bread, fried chicken, and more. Includes key Southern knowledge too: how to fry, how to care for cast iron, how to cook over a hearth, and more. This is the book fans of Sean Brock have been waiting for, and it’s the book Southern-food lovers the world over will use as their bible.

The Ultimate Kids’ Baking Book: 60 Easy and Fun Dessert Recipes for Every Holiday, Birthday, Milestone and More by Tiffany Dahle 

(released 11/12/19 from Page Street Publishing)
Now your kids can bake their cake and eat it too (with a little help from mom and dad). There are so many reasons for a kid to celebrate and this book has desserts for every milestone, from First Day of School Smart Cookies and Family Road Trip Muddy Buddies to Fall Break Snickerdoodles and the Best Birthday Cupcakes. The Ultimate Kids’ Baking Book makes it easy for your child to learn baking basics like how to use a mixer to cream butter and sugar, how to melt chocolate and make chocolate flourishes and how to make their own buttercream frosting. Tiffany Dahle was inspired by her two growing daughters to create recipes for young bakers. Suitable for children 6 and up this book modifies recipes with a little parental involvement, like preheating or taking cakes from the oven, so that little bakers can take on more responsibility as they grow. With recipes for Hot Cocoa Cookies, Movie Night M&M Sandwich Cookies and Snow Day Peanut Butter Cereal Bars, these desserts are something the whole family can be proud of.

Vegan Holiday Cooking: 60 Meatless, Dairy-Free Recipes Full of Festive Flavors by Kirsten Kaminski 

(released 10/29/19 from Page Street Publishing)
Scrumptious Plant-Based Recipes Full of Nostalgic Holiday Holiday Flavors
Never miss out at a holiday feast again! Kirsten Kaminski, founder of The Tasty K, provides all the recipes you need to transform your meat-based holiday staples into satisfying vegan options. Swap out fatty ham for an irresistible Mushroom Wellington with Gravy. Capture all the flavors of traditional stuffing in the even-better Roasted Acorn Squash with Quinoa Stuffing. And no one will miss store-bought desserts once you have a homemade Cinnamon Apple Pie on the table. Kirsten makes each celebration delightful with 60 exciting appetizers, entrées and sides. With hearty, satisfying dishes such as Mushroom Bourguignon, Miso-Tofu Meatballs and Dijon Scalloped Potatoes to replace all the old meat-heavy, dairy-filled fare, you can feel the holiday spirit any time of year.

From Scratch: 10 Meals, 150 Recipes, and Dozens of Techniques You Will Use Over and Over by Michael Ruhlman 

(released 10/15/19 from Abrams)
An indispensable new cookbook from James Beard Award-winning food writer Michael Ruhlman. From Scratch looks at 10 favorite meals, including roast chicken, the perfect omelet, and paella—and then, through 175 recipes, explores myriad alternate pathways that the kitchen invites. A delicious lasagna can be ready in about an hour, or you could turn it into a project: try making and adding some homemade sausage. Explore the limits of from-scratch cooking: make your own pasta, grow your own tomatoes, and make your own homemade mozzarella and ricotta. Ruhlman tells you how.
There are easy and more complex versions for most dishes, vegetarian options, side dishes, sub-dishes, and strategies for leftovers. Ruhlman reflects on the ways that cooking from scratch brings people together, how it can calm the nerves and focus the mind, and how it nourishes us, body and soul.

Skillet Love: From Steak to Cake: More Than 150 Recipes in One Cast-Iron Pan by Anne Byrn

(released 10/29/19 from Grand Central Publishing)
A delicious celebration of the cast iron pan--by the mega-bestselling author of THE CAKE MIX DOCTOR. Beloved by home cooks and professionals alike, the cast iron skillet is one of the most versatile pieces of equipment in your kitchen arsenal. Perfect for every meal of the day, the cast iron pan can be used to cook eggs, sear meat, roast whole dinners, and serve up dessert warm from the oven. Bestselling author Anne Byrn has carefully curated 160 recipes to be made in one simple 12-inch cast iron skillet. These are dishes everyone can enjoy, from appetizers and breads like Easy Garlic Skillet knots to side dishes like Last-Minute Scalloped Potatoes, from brunch favorites to one-pot suppers like Skillet Eggplant Parmesan. And of course, no Anne Byrn cookbook would be complete without her innovative cakes like Georgia Burnt Caramel Cake, cookies like Brown Sugar Skillet Blondies, and pies and other delicious treats. Scattered throughout are fun tidbits about the origin of the cast iron skillet and how to properly season and care for them. Anne Byrn has crafted an informational, adaptable, and deliciously indispensable guide to skillet recipes the whole family is sure to love.

Tell me about your Thanksgiving dinner: 

Do you make the same dishes every year or do try to rotate in some new additions? 

Do you have your menu planned and all your grocery shopping done for the big day? 

Does your family have any special Thanksgiving traditions? 

The Good House by Ann Leary

Published January 15th 2013 by St. Martin's Press

The Good House is one of those books that has been hanging around on my shelf for years. I initially grabbed it because it popped up on some lists for books about witches, though when I read the summary I wasn't sure exactly how. 🤔 But, I decided I needed to bump it up my TBR when I heard that filming had begun (I'm someone who has to read the book before I see the movie. Are you?) and the staff looks like it's going to be stellar: Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline, Morena Baccarin, Rob Delaney, Beverly D'Angelo, David Rasche, Rebecca Henderson, Molly Brown, Kelly AuCoin, and Kathryn Erbe. 

I ended up listening to The Good House on audio and I would highly recommend it! Hildy Good cracked me up and the narrator, Mary Beth Hurt, delivered each line with perfection. I especially loved that the protagonist of this novel is "of a certain age"--a rarity in mainstream fiction. 


Goodreads Summary:A funny, poignant and revealing novel that’s become a huge word-of-mouth hit in the US.
How do you prove you're not an alcoholic? 

Hildy Good has reached that dangerous time in a woman's life - middle-aged and divorced, she is an oddity in her small but privileged town. But Hildy isn't one for self-pity and instead meets the world with a wry smile, a dark wit and a glass or two of Pinot Noir. When her two earnest grown-up children stage 'an intervention' and pack Hildy off to an addiction centre, she thinks all this fuss is ridiculous. After all, why shouldn't Hildy enjoy a drink now and then?

But as the story progresses, we start to see another side to Hildy Good, and to her life's greatest passion - the lies and self deceptions needed to support her drinking, and the damage she causes to those she loves. When a cluster of secrets become dangerously entwined, the reckless behaviour of one threatens to expose the other, with devastating consequences.

Mary Toft, or The Rabbit Queen by Dexter Palmer

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this novel from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I am always looking to read something that is a little quirky, a little left of center, or weird enough that it probably won't flood the Bookstagram feed. When I read the summary of Mary Toft, or the Rabbit Queen, I thought "ding ding ding...we have a winner." A woman giving birth to dead rabbits? Yep, that's my kind of weird. Upon further research I found out that this a historical fiction novel based on real events! Needless to say I couldn't wait to get my hands on it! While the main storyline of this novel is about a woman giving birth to rabbits, the story really revolves around everyone else involved. As the story of Mary's births spreads throughout her small town and then to nearby London, more people are drawn into her circle. Characters in this novel range from a small town surgeon and his apprentice to a traveling team of performers in an "Exhibition of Medical Curiosities" to a variety of King George's agents. Their interactions show their class differences, pride, and cunning and the jabs, barbs, and stories they tell are so subtly snarky that I was laughing quite a bit. Another great layer to this novel was the vocabulary. I loved reading this on my Kindle so I could look all the words up with a touch. I loved this novel but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. 

Goodreads Summary:
From the highly acclaimed author of Version Control a stunning, powerfully evocative new novel based on a true story--in 1726 in the small town of Godalming, England, a young woman confounds the medical community by giving birth to dead rabbits.
Surgeon John Howard is a rational man. His apprentice Zachary knows John is reluctant to believe anything that purports to exist outside the realm of logic. But even John cannot explain how or why Mary Toft, the wife of a local farmer, manages to give birth to a dead rabbit. When this singular event becomes a regular occurrence, John realizes that nothing in his experience as a village physician has prepared him to deal with a situation as disturbing as this. He writes to several preeminent surgeons in London, three of whom quickly arrive in the small town of Godalming ready to observe and opine. When Mary's plight reaches the attention of King George, Mary and her doctors are summoned to London, where Zachary experiences for the first time a world apart from his small-town existence, and is exposed to some of the darkest corners of the human soul. All the while, Mary lies in bed, waiting for another birth, as doubts begin to blossom among the surgeons and a growing group of onlookers grow impatient for another miracle...

The Vine Witch by Luanne G. Smith

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this release
in exchange for an honest review.

Wine + Witchcraft...yes, please!
I thought this would be a cute and fun little read but it was so much more. The characters are well-rounded and the author's descriptions were detailed without going overboard (as some fantasy novels can do.) I'm so happy that this is the first in a series. I'm excited to return to witches in the the Chanceaux Valley.  

Goodreads Summary:
A young witch emerges from a curse to find her world upended in this gripping fantasy of betrayal, vengeance, and self-discovery set in turn-of-the-century France.
For centuries, the vineyards at Château Renard have depended on the talent of their vine witches, whose spells help create the world-renowned wine of the Chanceaux Valley. Then the skill of divining harvests fell into ruin when sorcière Elena Boureanu was blindsided by a curse. Now, after breaking the spell that confined her to the shallows of a marshland and weakened her magic, Elena is struggling to return to her former life. And the vineyard she was destined to inherit is now in the possession of a handsome stranger.
Vigneron Jean-Paul Martel naively favors science over superstition, and he certainly doesn’t endorse the locals’ belief in witches. But Elena knows a hex when she sees one, and the vineyard is covered in them. To stay on and help the vines recover, she’ll have to hide her true identity, along with her plans for revenge against whoever stole seven winters of her life. And she won’t rest until she can defy the evil powers that are still a threat to herself, Jean-Paul, and the ancient vine-witch legacy in the rolling hills of the Chanceaux Valley.


  

The Secret Commonwealth (The Book of Dust #2) by Philip Pullman

Goodreads Summary:
It is twenty years since the events of La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust Volume One unfolded and saw the baby Lyra Belacqua begin her life-changing journey. It is seven years since readers left Lyra and the love of her young life, Will Parry, on a park bench in Oxford's Botanic Gardens at the end of the ground-breaking, bestselling His Dark Materials sequence. Now, in The Secret Commonwealth, we meet Lyra Silvertongue. And she is no longer a child . . .The second volume of Sir Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust sees Lyra, now twenty years old, and her daemon Pantalaimon, forced to navigate their relationship in a way they could never have imagined, and drawn into the complex and dangerous factions of a world that they had no idea existed. Pulled along on his own journey too is Malcolm; once a boy with a boat and a mission to save a baby from the flood, now a man with a strong sense of duty and a desire to do what is right. Theirs is a world at once familiar and extraordinary, and they must travel far beyond the edges of Oxford, across Europe and into Asia, in search for what is lost - a city haunted by daemons, a secret at the heart of a desert, and the mystery of the elusive Dust.

My Review:
I loved Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, was VERY disappointed with the terrible 2007 movie starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, and anxiously anticipated The Book of Dust series. 

This is one of my favorite pics from Book Expo 2017.

I read La Belle Sauvage (The Book of Dust #1) in a single day but was a bit let down because Lyra is a baby and the entire book is about Malcom Polstead 🙄. When I read the summary for The Secret Commonwealth (The Book of Dust #2)I was so excited because Lyra is at college! I really loved this book and was so glad that it was over 600 pages because I didn't want to leave the world of alethiometers, daemons, and the search for Dust! My heart is breaking for Lyra and Pan! Are you reading this series? Have you read the His Dark Materials trilogy? Are you watching His Dark Materials on HBO?