Christopher Hirsheimer

Melissa Hamilton

Volumes four through six in Canal House Cooking’s seasonal recipes series, including mouthwatering dishes for the novice and experienced cook alike
Canal House Cooking Volumes Four Through Six is a collection of some of our favorite recipes, the ones we cook for ourselves, our friends, and our families during the summer, fall, and right through the holiday season. They’ll make you want to run straight to the store, market, kitchen, or out to the grill and start cooking. In Farm Markets and Gardens we live in the season by shopping at farmers’ markets and roadside tables, and gathering the very freshest vegetables from our own gardens. Join us as a “salt-and-pepper cook,” making simple yet intensely flavorful dishes such as tomato salad and berry cobbler. In The Good Life we toast the good life and cook lots of big, delicious food. We turn out classic pâtés and terrines; top buckwheat blini with smoked salmon and trout roe; tuck black truffles under the skin of our roasted chicken. We fry apple fritters in the fall and decorate sugar cookies for the holidays. Finally, good cooking relies on good shopping, so in The Grocery Store we buy smoked fish to make a delicious creamy stew. Bunches of fat local asparagus go into our shopping cart—we cook them simply and bathe them in a luscious lemon-butter sauce. We choose hearty escarole and tender young spinach and stock up on bags of frozen peas and fava beans to use in so many ways. We buy succulent rhubarb for an early spring tonic or for an Easter dessert, roasted and spooned over crisp meringues.