Occasionally, publishers contact us to ask if we’d like a copy of a book or two. We have a big enough library that we tend to be somewhat choosy about which books we say yes to. (A lucky place to be in, as we well know.) Recently, Harper Collins offered us a copy of Adam Perry Lang’s new book BBQ 25 and Farm to Fork by Emeril Lagasse. We said yes to both, and they arrived today.
Now, it’s a rare day when we can be surprised by a book, but BBQ 25 was so darned smart right out of the box that I couldn’t help but share. It’s a board book with plastic-coated pages, compactly sized at 8″ x 5″. With a little pressing, it happily seems to stay open for easy access. Even better, every single recipe is written and illustrated on two pages facing each other, so whatever page you turn to has all the information you need to complete the dish. Pretty cool.
Now, we haven’t actually tried any of the recipes, but the design was so clever that we couldn’t resist writing about it anyway. It’s inspiring just to flip through it, and we don’t say that about every book that we open. And for the record, the new Emeril book surprised the heck outta me. It’s got some really fun stuff in it, and this coming from someone who’s never bought an Emeril cookbook. After reading some of these recipes, I can honestly say the man can cook.*
It turns out that Adam Perry Lang also has a more complex and equally intriguing BBQ cookbook out this spring, which we did not know of until after writing this post. It looks like I will be off to the bookstore to pick up this companion piece.
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