Review
Title: Raised in the Kitchen: Making Memories From Scratch One Recipe at a Time
Author: Carrian Cheney
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Genre: Cookbook
Year Published: 2021
Number of Pages: 220
Binding: Hardback
ISBN 13: 978-1-62972-938-1
Price: 27.99
Reviewed by Christine Tensmeyer for the Association of Mormon Letters
Carrian Cheney, author of the popular food blog “Oh Sweet Basil,” has released a cookbook called Raised in the Kitchen: Making Memories from Scratch One Recipe at a Time. This cookbook, which is very much an extension of her blog, is based on the premise that cooking can be a family affair and that there’s a job for even the smallest of helpers. The book includes, as you may expect, pictures of some of the finished recipes. But there are even more pictures of Cheney’s family helping her cook as they exemplify the idea of being “Raised in the Kitchen.”
I appreciated that Cheney divided the recipes in Raised in the Kitchen into three categories. From Level 1 recipes which are quick and easy to Level 3 recipes which are more difficult and time-consuming. Each of the recipes in Raised in the Kitchen starts with a “blog entry.” These “blog entries” explain why Cheney loves a recipe, or how she only makes treats once a week, etc.
I follow Carrian Cheney on Instagram, where she regularly posts various recipes from her blog and cookbooks. I happened to see one post that mentioned the chocolate chip cookie recipe in her book was incorrect, and she gave the corrections on that post. While I appreciate her trying to fix this error, I found that this cookbook had a few other inconsistencies with her recipes. I don’t know if this is due to poor editing or a lack of thorough recipe testing on the author’s part. For example, we made the “Chocolate Smoothie Bowl” (p. 7) a level one recipe and the very first one in the book. This recipe calls for chocolate milk, banana, spinach, and peanut butter as the main ingredients. I followed the recipe closely, and it turned out green, not chocolate brown like the picture, and all you could taste was the peanut butter. It was rather disappointing, and the chocolate milk seemed to be wasted flavour wise in that recipe.
Another recipe we tried was her “Pizza Dough” (pp. 112-114). I liked that Cheney included a quick version and a slow version of the recipe. What I didn’t like is that there is an inconsistency in the book about how many pizzas worth of dough the recipe would produce. In the “Pizza Dough” recipe, Cheney said that it made 2, 10-inch pizzas. But when you make her “Traditional Italian Pepperoni Pizza” (pp. 115-117) recipe, she says to use the “Pizza Dough” recipe in its entirety yet, that recipe says that the “yield” is only 1, 8-inch pizza. We doubled the Pizza dough recipe, and got 4-16 inch pizzas, and had enough dough leftover that we could probably have gotten one more 16-inch pizza out of it. We choose to freeze it for another time. While we are on the subject of pizza, Cheney’s “Pizza Sauce” recipe (p. 110) is delicious! I was nervous after making it because it had a LOT of spices in it and seemed over-spiced at first, but it tasted fantastic on the pizza.
While most of the recipes in Raised in the Kitchen are from scratch, Cheney does include some recipes that use some shortcut or ready-made ingredients such as croutons, pre-made crescent rolls, ranch packets, Italian dressing, and cream of chicken soup.
I would say that Raised in the Kitchen is filled with familiar, classic American food but nothing very innovative. For example, we made Cheney’s Apple Dumpling recipe, it was absolutely delicious, however “The Pioneer Woman” had posted almost the exact same recipe on her blog back in 2008 (See, The Pioneer Woman, Apple Dumplings). The biggest difference between the two recipes is the choice of soda. One recommends Sprite, the other Mountain Dew. I’m not saying Cheney stole from Ree Drummond because I’m sure that recipe doesn’t really have an origin because it’s such an old recipe. It’s just that Raised in the Kitchen doesn’t have anything really new in it.
Due to the mistakes in this edition, I would recommend Raised in the Kitchen to intermediate cooks as you will need to use some common cooking knowledge to recognize and fix the errors. I would also recommend Raised in the Kitchen to parents who want to teach their children to cook and people who like classic American food. Out of the seven recipes that we tried in this book, only one was disappointing flavour wise. As my daughter is getting older, I think Raised will be a good resource to help us make our own “memories in the kitchen”.