Book Review: Martha Stewart's Quick Cook Menus

Happy Valentines Day, Gentle Readers! Here is A Fair Trade Book that contains a selection of romantic home-cooked recipes...

Title: Martha Stewart’s Quick Cook Menus

Author: Martha Stewart

Author's web site: https://www.marthastewart.com/

Date: 1988

Publisher: Crown

ISBN: 0-517-57064-5

Length: 221 pages

Illustrations: full-color photos by Christopher Baker

Quote: “In the last five years, more of us have gone to work...we have even less time to devote to cooking and housekeeping. At the same time, we have perhaps become even more conscious of what we eat...It has been great fun addressing these concerns in this new book.”

Fun? Yes...if you have a crew of at least 29 people and a plummy book and TV contract, I’m sure writing a book like this one is fun. For the frazzled homemaker who’s typically not being paid to shop for Treviso arugula and miniature cauliflower...? Real-world homemakers have always displayed a wide range of mixed feelings about Martha Stewart, whose idea of quick cooking involves making your own pasta and finding room to stock thirteen kinds of oil, eleven kinds of vinegar, and thirteen kinds of sugar. And most of her recipes serve four...seriously hurried cooks often eat more than one serving portion, because they cook only one thing at a time, but they typically cook for two. Assurance that the other member of the household will eat his or her share of their concoction may be a priority...

If you do want to whip up a “balanced meal” of multiple cooked dishes for company once a week, and who doesn’t, here’s Martha Stewart’s trademark take on the subject. She’s not exactly a food snob. She likes things like porkchops and popsicles (the home-frozen kind, anyway). However, one can’t build a TV show on peanut butter sandwiches. There’s this continual ongoing tension between the real woman who I suspect really could live on things sold at K-Mart, and the TV personality who must, in order to survive as a TV personality, have asparagus tied with leeks and hazelnut ice cream and sautéed morels in winter.. There’s a reason why every dairy offers butter pecan ice cream, and why Martha Stewart has to show off homemade hazelnut ice cream. More people actually like butter pecan, but roasting, skinning, and grinding your own hazelnuts for hazelnut ice cream is better television.

I actually think it’s liberating to be able to like Martha Stewart’s books. I do not believe for a minute that any ordinary cook without twenty-nine off-camera assistants is going to roast her own fresh jalapeño, brown her own garlic, chop and bake her own rhubarb, puree her homemade corn chowder and float chopped cilantro on it, and grate little worms of orange peel all over her own fried chicken, in an hour or less. And I’m not sure why she’d want to. Browned garlic is extremely bitter; I’ve never known anybody who actually liked rhubarb; scattering orange peel over fried chicken is likely to make some family members say “Eww” and others say “Dear...”

But suppose we translate this menu from TV back to reality. The menu calls for corn chowder made with chicken stock, fried chicken breaded with cornmeal, and broccoli. That rhubarb...I’ll humor Stewart on that. Maybe in Connecticut rhubarb grows in everybody’s garden and people develop a taste for it. We, in spring, have strawberries, for those who are determined to eat something sweet at every meal. Anyway, the general idea is: corn and chicken. So what I’d be likely to do is poach some chicken with some frozen corn, garlic and/or onion and maybe even the jalapeño if others enjoy those, maybe some parsley, and then steam the broccoli, either above the stew or in a separate pan, and serve it all by itself. I am most likely to poach chicken for the purpose of removing all the noticeable fat and blood from the dark meat, which takes a little more than an hour, but is worth it. By cutting the chicken in bite-size pieces and mixing it with the corn kernels and chopped seasoning veg, I can use only one pound, not three pounds; no need for cream or butter in the corn, less meat and almost no fat in the chicken, no simple carbs from a breading of flour and cornmeal. My fancy meal is lower in cost and calories than Martha Stewart’s, equally high in nutrients, and gluten-free. I probably never will have a different set of cute dishes and linens to go with the colors in every single meal, but that’s reality as distinct from television.

Also Martha Stewart still appears to be gnawing on rhubarb when people I know are eating strawberries. Strawberries can do a lot to help people resist the Deadly Sin of Envy. So can watermelon.

If you can relax and enjoy her suggestions as inspirations, this is an inspiring book not only for the cook but for the needlecrafter. You can have the cute linens if you really want them. For embroidery you need only the pictures. For the crocheted pieces in this book, also, the pictures will do; this is simple crocheting.

One thing you’ll like: No complete menu is vegan—although several are gluten-free—and though Stewart seems unaddicted to cow’s milk she does throw cream and cheese about with abandon, but each menu does contain at least a side dish that’s “free” from meat and/or wheat and/or lactose. Even some main courses can easily be tweaked into vegan dishes, and dishes that are naturally “free” from whatever you want to avoid can usually be tweaked into main dishes if they’re not.

Another thing you’ll like: If you’re willing to make and freeze homemade pasta, soup stocks, ice cream, etc., on weekends, you can whip up the dishes that suit your tastes (and budget) after work.

And a thing you might like: If you can pry them away from the television long enough, your family might actually bond over foodie-chores like shelling, roasting, and skinning their own nuts.

To buy it here as a Fair Trade Book, send $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, or to the e-mail address you get from Salolianigodagewi, as shown at the very bottom of the screen. In order to encourage a living writer we will then send $1 per book of hers to Martha Stewart or a charity of her choice. At least one, possibly two, more books of this size can be shipped in one $5 package, so feel free to browse...I don't physically have other books by Martha Stewart, but if you want to buy them as Fair Trade Books I'll order them for you.