Book Review: Home Made Winter by Yvette van Boven

It is almost spring, but I was happy that it was finally my turn at the library to collect the book before it was spring. Next to vegetarian and vegan cookbooks I also love seasonal cookbooks and I was very curious about this book. However because it is not a vegetarian cookbook, I didn't want to buy it before I could try it.

Title: Home Made Winter
Author: Yvette van Boven
Subject: Winter cooking, home made cooking
Publisher: Fontaine uitgevers BV.
Release date: 2011
Length: 252 pages

Summary:
Home made winter is a book full of comfort food and the follow up of Home Made. Home Made Winter is the first of a series. Home Made Summer will appear later to make it all complete. This book is inspired by Irish recipes, but also French ones. Yvette gives an easy recipes for dishes that people think are hard to make. It is full of recipes that will warm you up.

Personal opinion:
While this book isn't a vegetarian cookbook, it does have plenty of vegetarian recipes. Also I love the fact that the author states in the beginning of the book that she uses free range eggs and organic meat. This book is very nice to use in combination with my organic vegetable bag in the winter because it is full of seasonal recipes. Most are easy and original. I tried three recipes from the book so far and they all came out good to great. The book is styled in a creative way with lots of gorgeous pictures. However in this case it does make the book a bit less practical to use. The recipes are not in a set format. Some are handwritten, some are printed and others are written over the pictures. For me this makes a book harder to use. It also has recipes related to the Dutch holidays in winter. Unfortunately these aren't in the right order so, that makes it a bit illogical. A last note is that plenty of recipes require more expensive ingredients, so it is not a budget cookbook. I am not saying it is a bad book, because it isn't and it will be great for a lot of people. But it isn't a book that I would buy personally even though I do like it, it is not practical enough for me. I will however check out her other books, because the recipes are great.

Purchase links: bol.com
Challenges: Foodies Reading Challenge

As always a recipe, my favorite from the book. I was looking for a way to finish my green cabbage and this sounded like an interesting recipe, and I just love mashed sweet potatoes! Here is my adjusted recipe.

Sweet Potato and Green Cabbage Mashpot: (serves 4)
- 1/2 a green cabbage, in small shreds
- 1.5 kg sweet potatoes, peeled and in chunks from about the same size
- 2 tbsp fresh thyme
- 100 gr rich butter
- some milk
- salt and pepper

Cook the cabbage for about 15 minutes in some salted water. Cook the sweet potato in water in another pan until done. Drain both pans. Make a creamy mash from the sweet potatoes using a handheld mixer with the butter and some milk. Add the thyme and some salt and pepper to taste. Stir in the shreds of cabbage.

A note on the cabbage: it is always best to remove those thick outsides leaves of a green cabbage because they have a really chewy texture. Use the leaves that are more on the inside of the cabbage for this recipe. I always feed the outside leaves to our rabbits, they love it!

This post is part of Weekend Cooking. Please make sure you check out the other participants as well :)

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