The New Midwestern Table: 200 Heartland Recipes

This book is just gorgeous and amazing. I made two recipes from her that were on her television program, the chicken and wild rice hot dish and the old-fashioned, not-from-a-packet onion dip. They were both astonishingly good and the hotdish has become a regular fixture of dinner. This cookbook takes items like that and expands on it. The photography is beautiful, the stories introducing the dishes are well-written and interesting and there is a wonderful variety of old-world food, like pate and salted fish and deviled eggs. Thielen is absolutely right: the Midwest IS rising.

That's a nice cookbook if you're particularly interested in Midwestern cooking, but I prefer the newly released Heartlandia over it. I really craved the Corn Fritters with Green Chile Buttermilk Dip, though! And I'm curious to try the poppy seed streusel bar. It reminded me of those poppy seed pastries they make in eastern europe.