Weekend Cooking: This Will Make It Taste Good by Vivian Howard

I’m a cookbook freak, and I get especially excited when a cookbook has a unique twist. That’s what Vivian Howard’s This Will Make It Taste Good offers. Thanks to the Voracious Ambassador’s Program for the copy of the book.

You may recognize Howard’s name from her Public Television shows, earlier cookbook, or her restaurant. In this cookbook, Howard concentrates on base recipes (like sauces and spiced nuts) and then shows you how to use those ingredients to amp up your everyday cooking. The recipes are for down-to-earth, easy, busy-day dishes that are also fairly quickly put together.

And great news for those of you who are vegetarians or who follow a gluten-free diet: “more than half of the food I this book” will suit you on either or both accounts. Many others can easily be tweaked with easy substitutions.

At the core of this cookbook are the base recipes, what Howard calls her recipe “heroes.” Among them are an herby-olive sauce, pickled cabbage (kraut), spiced nuts, and a peppery tomato sauce. These recipes are designed to be fairly flexible, and Howard explains the important elements, how to make substitutions, and how to store the finished product.

The easiest way to explain the structure of This Will Make It Taste Good is take you through a chapter. “R-Rated Onions” starts out by giving us detailed, chatty, and very clear directions on how to make a big batch of caramelized onions and then how to store them for future use. The next page, gives us 10 quick ways to use the onions in our everyday cooking: to top baked potatoes, to add to burgers, to stir into a pot beans, and so on.

Next, Howard provides the following recipes that use the R-Rated Onions: onion soup, baked eggs and spinach, cream cheese dip, topped tomatoes, pork sandwiches, grilled eggplant, steak, vegetable soup, and roast chicken. Each recipe starts with an introduction that tells us something about the dish, why Howard likes it, and possible variations. Throughout This Will Make It Taste Good, Howard adds stories and tips, making the cookbook fun to read.

So far, I’ve made two of the hero recipes and several of the accompanying recipes. First, I made a batch of Howard’s Community Organizer, which is a kind of New World sofrito. I used it to make baked nachos and then black-eyed peas, which I served over rice. I also made her version of spiced nuts, which amped up a quinoa salad and then a butternut squash soup.

Recommendation: I was really intrigued by Howard’s hero recipes, and love the idea of having a stash of homemade sauces and flavorings in my refrigerator or freezer to perk up my day-to-day cooking. I suggest you put Vivian Howard’s This Will Make It Taste Good on you library list. Read it, cook from it, and then decide if you want to add it to your permanent collection.

It’s really hard to share a recipe because I’d also have to share the base recipe. Instead, I’ll link you to three YouTube videos that feature Vivian Howard and recipes from This Will Make It Taste Good. I didn’t imbed them here because they (1) are long and (2) were filmed for virtual book tour events and I’m not sure of the videos’ copyrights.

Note: The scans were cropped from photos in the cookbook and used in the context of a review. All rights remain with the original copyright holder.

Shared with Weekend Cooking, hosted by Marg at The Intrepid Reader (and Baker)