EE Berger

Blueberry Spelt Muffins
Blueberry Spelt Muffins

Blueberry Spelt Muffins excerpted from Pulp: A Practical Guide to Cooking with Fruit by Abra Berens. Photography by EE Berger.

Pulp: A Practical Guide to Cooking with Fruit Hardcover by Abra Berens

Pulp is a hardworking book of recipes that focuses on all the ways fruit can enhance simple, delicious mains—for example, by elevating roasted vegetables, garnishing soup, or adding perfume to a roasted pork or brisket. Unlike Ruffage and Grist, Pulp is about regularly incorporating fruit to add variety and seasonality to main dishes.

Home cooks and bakers alike will rejoice in the alternately sweet and savoury recipes such as Roast Chicken over Blueberries, Cornbread + Lemon; Melon, Cucumber + Chickpea Salad; and Rum-Plum Clafoutis. The book also features helpful reference material, a Baker’s Toolkit, and more than 100 atmospheric photos, delivered with the can-do attitude and accessibility of the Midwestern United States. This next generous offering from beloved, trusted author Abra Berens is a necessary addition to any kitchen shelf alongside its predecessors and other mainstays like Plenty, Six Seasons, and Small Victories. (more…)

Tomato panzanella with corn, cucumbers, and herb salad

Tomato PanzanellaPhotography by EE Berger

Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables is not your typical cookbook—it is a how-to-cookbook of a variety of vegetables. Author Abra Berens—chef, farmer, Midwesterner—shares a collection of techniques that result in new flavours, textures, and ways to enjoy all the vegetables you want to eat. From confit to caramelized and everything in between—braised, blistered, roasted and raw—the cooking methods covered here make this cookbook a go-to reference.

Spanning 29 types of vegetables—from asparagus to zucchini—each chapter opens with an homage to the ingredients and variations on how to prepare them. Over 140 photographs show off not only the finished dishes, but also the vegetables and farms behind them.

(more…)