Oils and Vinegars Do Mix

Oils & Vinegars by Liz Franklin (2008)

To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist -- the problem is entirely the same in both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one's vinegar. ~~ Oscar Wilde

This is my favorite specialty cookbook, and I still use it ten years later.  We live in a wonderful time and country, you can go into even the most simple supermarkets and find shelved and shelves of diverse flavored oils and vinegar. My local Foodmaster has 10 types of olive oil, vegetable oils, 5 types of nut oil, sesame oil. The vinegar section has red wine, white wine, rice, sherry, balsamic, and cider vinegar. When I was a child, there were red, white, and cider vinegar only. If I go to Whole Foods or a food specialty market, the number of oils and vinegar available is double or treble.

Now, what!?! Honestly, most of this stuff I might buy a small bottle of it for a special dinner and never use it up. In the middle-class, we are blessed to have such choices, but choices to do what? And then there are some baffling things such as argon oil & vincotto. Well, I have a few little tomes that cover how to make flavored vinegar and how to use some, and then oils are even more of a mystery. I've books that tell me to make flavored this and that, and some users, and recipes that seem very well dull. What I have always needed and desired was a book to give me a survey of using all these beautiful ingredients of oil & vinegar as an intro. You know the recipes I mean, like when someone makes you a fantastic meat dish, and you get the recipe, and it is easy and perfect all the time. Well, Christmas 2008, I got a book with 40 incredible and delicious recipes. It was so good that in the following 2 days I made four recipes out of it; 

1) Avocado oil, Lemon, and Pistachio Cake, 
2) Rosemary and Roast Potato Tart with Olive Oil Pastry, 
3) Hot Garlic Shrimp with Spinach and Ladolemono Sauce 
4) Olive Oil and Orange Cake

Frankly, this book is excellent for an adventurous cook to a gourmet chef who needs a little pick-me-up challenge. Some specialized tools might make things easier to cook some of these recipes, but don't you just have all those appliances collecting dust anyway.

This book got me on a hunt for a cheap ice cream maker, and at 16 bucks at a yard sale, I got one. We all like ice cream, sherberts, and other frozen concoctions, but what possessed me to get such a limited appliance. I was desperate to make "black-pepper & balsamic ice cream," it sounded so weird that I promised myself if I lost half the weight on my diet I could make this dish. I served it to a group of adventurous people, and they melted at the savory flavor of this dish. You pour fresh crushed strawberries splashed with framboise and sugar over the ice cream to just take it to a new level.

This book is exceptional, and for each oil or vinegar, Liz Franklin presents a fantastic recipe to try, some a just merely scrumptious, other methods are not so easy and require moderate skill, but the results are memorable.

It is not just that she show you beautiful, inspiring pictures, taken by Richard Jung, of the dishes, but there are little gems of cooking techniques in the book to that are explained simply.

The book covers simple, wholesome dressings, fruit oils, nut and seed oils, vinegar, and a list of suppliers; if you don't live near any place that sells things as exotic as pumpkin oil, vincotto, or argan oil.

This book is like having gotten an expert cooks recipe file, with better instructions. Cooking anything from this book makes the house smell incredible, and the plate looks great. The other thing is the bool is small, it is not intimidating, there are just 40 recipes that help you use some of those great ingredients you have always wondered at. They also give you recipes that are solidly good that you could make a couple times over the next couple of months and use up that 12-ounce bottle of $9 oil. I actually improvised with pumpkin seed oil on a squash soup I made that just sent the dish over the top; I learned that tip from this book, and it emboldened me.

Here is a commissioned link to the book on Amazon:  Oil & Vinegar by Liz Franklin


*The link above is a paid link and gives me a commission if you buy something.  I make enough so that I have a regular 9-5 job.  I own and still uses this book all the time.