Featuring “down-home, soul-satisfying dishes,” Joan Aller’s cookbook is filled “with passages on the history, places, and people of southern Appalachia, along with lush full-color photography of the food and scenery of the southern Appalachian Mountains.”  The 100-plus recipes range from more familiar fare such as Southern Butter-Crusted Chicken and Old-Fashioned Southern Tea Cakes to off-the-beaten-path dishes such as German Bierocks, Burgoo, and Butternut Squash Soup with Sweet Tea and Ginger.

Cooks&Books&Recipes Guest Cook:
Merry-Jennifer, the merry gourmet

Breakfast is often a hurried affair in our household. We’re big fans of granola bars and bananas – easy to grab foods that will get each of the four of us out the door and off to school or work with the least amount of hassle and fuss. The weekends, though, are different. We get to slow down a bit on the weekends.

Now, I won’t lie and tell you that we do it up on Saturdays and Sundays with full spreads of bacon and eggs, pancakes and hash browns, biscuits and muffins and platters of fresh fruits. Oh, no. Slowing down at my house means that we have time to sit down at the table and enjoy a bowl of cereal at a leisurely pace. And I get a cup of coffee. Or two.

Featured Recipe: Oven-Baked Blueberry French Toast

Author Joan E. Aller says:

This recipe, from the Cripple Creek Bed and Breakfast Cabins in Crockett, Virginia, was handed down from the owner’s grandmother. Cripple Creek is situated in the Blue Ridge Mountains on 35 acres of wooded hills and rolling pastures dotted with wildflowers, blackberry bushes, and apple trees. I just love blueberries, so I hope this recipe from Cripple Creek will become one of your favorites!

Guest Cook Merry-Jennifer says:

This past weekend I decided to bake up something a little special for breakfast, something beyond what my family was used to eating on the weekends. I treated them to the Oven-Baked Blueberry French Toast from Joan E. Aller’s Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly.

I intended to follow the recipe exactly, but I just could not bring myself to use 2 packages of full-fat cream cheese. I substituted one of them for 1/3-reduced fat cream cheese. Of course, that probably only saved me about 5 minutes on the treadmill, but hey – I tried. I also couldn’t find fresh blueberries so I (gasp!) used frozen ones. But they were organic. I swear. As called for by the recipe, I used wonderful French bread, fresh made by that day by my local neighborhood bakery.

After making the dish, I have a few things I’d point out to those who decide to make it next. First, don’t turn on your stand mixer after adding the milk unless you particularly like mopping. I’m not a huge fan of mopping, and luckily, I did not have to mop all that much, but next time, I’ll just use my trusty spoon to stir at that point next time. Second, the recipe says this will serve 5. I think it would be a conservative estimate to say it really serves 8 to 10. Also, before I forget, I prepared this french toast the evening before, and making it in advance was a huge time saver.

The final verdict? The Oven-Baked Blueberry French Toast was warm and comforting, with just the right amount of sweetness. The cinnamon and cream cheese filling was rich, but not cloying, and the blueberries (even though they started off as frozen) were a hit with my kids. My daughter has already asked if we can have this again next weekend. I’d say that’s the sign of a winning recipe.

Cooks&Books&Recipes Editors’ Notes:

THE BOOK

For this cookbook, Southern Appalachia covers sections of eight states. One of my favorite aspects is the number of recipes that the author collected from historic inns and bed-and-breakfasts in those states. I can’t wait to take a road trip to the region so that I can stay — and eat! — at as many of these as possible (all listed in the Sources section). In the meantime, we’ll need to make do by cooking Garlic-Cheese Grits Souffle, Mississippi Sin, Okra Soup, Freezer Coleslaw, Bourbon-Sweet Potato Casserole, Corn Pone, George Washington Carver’s Sweet Potato Pie… How about Dandelion Wine or Green Tomato Pickles? Informative sidebars talk about the Appalachian Trail, the music, and the moonshine. We can almost hear the fiddles playing and smell those sweet potatoes cooking.

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