Still hunting for a memorable Mother’s Day gift? These “hot-off the press” digital cookbooks deserve some attention for their deliciousness.
Written in quarantine, “Family Meal: Recipes from our Community” and “Family Style: a Cookbook by Great Jones & Friends” celebrate a medley of great American chefs, restaurants and recipes easily cooked at home. Proceeds go to urgent causes, and both are loaded with Italian cooking ideas.
Released this month, “Family Meal” –now Amazon’s #1 best selling cookbook– raises money for the Restaurant Workers' Covid-19 Emergency Relief Fund. The collection of meals includes several stellar Italian ones, like Blue Hill Farm chef Dan Barber’s fresh ricotta recipe, Barefoot Contessa Ina Garten’s Penne alla Vecchia Bettola, and cookbook author Katie Parla's onion and tomato flatbread. At the back of the book, sommelier Grant Reynolds, who launched his wine career at Boulder’s La Frasca restaurant, and Restaurant Workers’ Coalition co-founder, Chris Stang’s share “quarantine wine pairings.”
Also published in May by the female-founded Great Jones cookware company, “Family Style” pulls together over 40 recipes from the mothers and grandmothers of prominent chefs. A pleasant plus: most recipes are fun for children. For the cookbook, New York City’s Don Angie restaurant chefs, Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli, “merged” their Italian grandmothers’ recipes for stuffed artichoke oregonata.
“Eating these was always fun as a kid because it was a rare excuse to ‘play with our food,’ picking the petals with our hands and scraping the filling out with our teeth,” they wrote on Instagram.
All sales until June will be donated to No Kid Hungry, a nonprofit dedicated to feeding children.