Food 52 Holiday Recipe and Survival Guide

An interactive Holiday cookbook? How brilliant is that! A few days ago, I came across the launch of Food 52 Holiday Recipe and Survival Guide, and was giddy to find its nifty collection of Holiday recipes. I’ve downloaded digital cookbooks before, and they are usually striking and beautiful, but feel that they miss one key component: usability. The digital pages of the Food 52 cookbook for the iPad, on the other hand, are filled with photos, easy-to-follow instructional videos, slideshows, shopping resources – and everything has been integrated seamlessly throughout. It also has user-friendly features like notes and bookmarks that allow you to scribble digital notes and save the recipes you want to make in the future.

The authors Hesser and Stubbs of Food 52 say that this cookbook is the road map you need to deal with Holiday stress (on the entertaining side of things, at least!), and I think they’ve done a great job. The cookbook app offers useful tips to get through the frenetic whirlwind of holiday entertaining, like shopping lists and menus, that will help with the logistics of hosting at home. Following their crowd sourcing philosophy, the authors have curated festive recipes from the FOOD 52 community. Recipes include everything from Drinks (Dirty Chai Toddy) to Salads (Blood Orange Salad with Olives) to Main Courses (Super Simple Glazed Ham), all of which look amazing, by the way. Although Latin recipes are few, since many of the dishes lean towards the European I found one for Salvadoran Breakfast Cakes that I can’t wait to make this upcoming Saturday morning. The cakes resemble delicate, airy muffins, and served with coffee, tea, jam, and fresh cheese will make them a perfect start to a shiny Holiday weekend.