Jasper White: The Summer Shack Cookbook

By JULIETTE ROSSANT Is it summertime in your mind? It seems to be summer all the time for Jasper White. He is somewhere on the East Coast cooking meals in his mind. Want to share his summer? Then read The Summer Shack Cookbook (Norton 2007). Just for this moment, imagine that you are at Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, the Jersey Shore, the Chesapeake, the Carolina's, Florida, the Bahamas, or wherever you favorite coastal place is. (By the way, you don't have to work today.) It is eight a.m., and the sun is bright after burning off the early morning mist….(p. 18) Are you with him? Then all you have to do is follow this wise guide and life will be good. The first chapter is called The Shore Kitchen: Shack Foods at Home – it is a "how to" chapter. It is full of indispensable advice on how to set up your kitchen and how to enjoy yourself. He reviews cooking utensils and pots, the basic beach pantry, with words of wisdom about salt and sugar, which tend to absorb humidity: "A small open bowl of a couple of tablespoons of kosher or sea salt with a demitasse spoon is much handier to use than a shaker that is clogged with table salt." (p. 33) He advises on how to purchase seafood, how to dig for hard- and soft-shell clams, and how to scale of fish. The next chapter called Eat It Raw! includes even more helpful information on how to shuck clams and oysters and a list of oyster varieties on the East Coast. Jasper parts with his famous Oyster Shooter recipe that includes a teaspoon of freshly made horseradish and homemade cocktail sauce. There are recipes for seviche and Conch salad, Bahamanian-style (p. 62-63) which calls for three kinds of citrus and two kinds of chiles. The following chapters cover steaming, chilled salads, grilling, and more from the Summer Shack repitoire. There are even great cool drinks, cocktails and punches. And after all that seafood, there are fun summer desserts like Blueberry Buckle (p.303-4) and Strawberry Shortcake (296-7) from the bounty of the land. Jasper White has seafood down pat. The Summer Shack Cookbook is not his first – he has previous books on chowder and lobster plus a seafood book with the Boston Globe and others, but it is a very complete book of summertime seafood happiness. This is a shore book, and the shore Jasper offers, is in your mind. It certainly is easier to use this book if you live somewhere on the East Coast - but fresh seafood is everywhere these days. Why wait for your next lobster roll or crab cake? Make your own with Jasper. Recipes: NPR Esquire Boston Globe Other reviews: Publishers Weekly Publishers Weekly blog Epicurious Previous articles: Roy Yamaguchi: Roy's Fish and Seafood Todd Gray Champions Mid-Atlantic Cuisine Roberto Trevino: Viva Aquaviva [Cookbook Reviews - complete] Technorati Tags: superchefblog, Juliette Rossant, super chef, celebrities, chefs, food, restaurants, cooking, branding, cuisine, blogging, food blogging, Summer Shack, Jasper White --> back to Super Chef