Glen: Today we’re going to take a look at another new cookbook that’s come across my desk and this one is called the Wine Bar Food and it’s by Cathy and Tony Mantuano. This is a great little book. It deals with foods that we’ve come to know in North America as tapas or small plates and deals with these foods on a region by region basis as you go around the Mediterranean and it’s broken down in the cities around the Mediterranean.
So, as you go through the book, you open it up and you’ll come to Milan and in this section you’ll see foods that you would typically see at wine bars in Milan. You can take these small plates and assemble them into a larger meal or just use them as appetizers, but also as you flip through the book you come to sections where they’ve laid it out and they show you the different types of cured meats, the different types of cheese, and the different pantries and you’re just going to need to prepare these recipes and for the most part the ingredients that you use in the recipes are very easy to find in most North American supermarkets.
They not only tell you what these ingredients are but they also give you hints on the different types of wine such as you will be serving for the dishes from each region and how to incorporate those wines in the course into the cooking.
The recipes are laid out the way that’s really easy to understand. The preparation is laid out so that it’s easy to follow and the photography is absolutely fantastic.
This is a great little book. It’s something that I’ve already made some of the recipes from and it’s something that’s going to end up on my bookshelf and probably be used quite a bit. I like the idea of small plates. I like the idea of having little bites that you can mix and match in parties. That you can actually serve as a dinner which is fantastic because everybody gets a little taste of everything and you can go back to the things that you really like and you can essentially test drive things that you’re not sure about.
So, if your guest aren’t sure if they like a particular ingredient, they can have a little taste and if they’re not so fun of it they can move on to something else and if they really do like it then they can have some more. This is a fantastic cookbook for that type of entertaining. I would highly recommend it. Again, it’s called Wine Bar Food by Cathy and Tony Mantuano.
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