Ann Hodgman | The Tromp Queen COOKS!

I visited one of my new favorite places recently: Boswell Book Company. (http://boswell.indiebound.com/)

I found this fabulous book for only $5.99. List price is $14.95 even on their website currently so I’m not quite sure how I got it for this very nice price.

This is technically a cookbook, but as the blurb on the front says “More than a cookbook, it is a humor book and a self-help book and a security blanket and a kind of a Bible.” (quote from Elizabeth Berg, NPR interview)

Beat This! book cover

The book is called Beat This!
(written by Ann Hodgman with a foreword by Elizabeth Berg)

Now you may be wondering — Why, dear Tromp Queen, is this blog worthy? Most of you already know that I own plenty of cookbooks (read about it here in Confessions of a Chronic Creative Collector). I love to look through them for new recipes and read about different cooking techniques and cultures. Really. I do. And I really can’t help looking at cookbooks on the sale tables. Really. I can’t.

The blurb on the front enticed me. I grabbed the book. Then I wandered around until I found the cozy couch area so I could sit in comfort to take a peek inside the book.

I instantly fell in love with the author’s humor. The chatty (sometimes snarky) asides sprinkled throughout the book caught my interest:

detail aside from Beat This! Cookbook by Ann Hodgman

I love her recipe names! Descriptive and humorous

There are recipes for “A Really Great Stuffing with Sausage In It,” “Vaguely Thai-Like Beef Salad,” “Magnificent Ultra-Turkey,” and “Powerfully Better Than Any Other Pot Roast.” The first sentence of that last recipe reads like this: “A well-made pot roast is one of those noble, time-honored dishes that — oh, sorry, I forgot I wasn’t writing the lyrical kind of cookbook.”

I haven’t made anything from this cookbook yet, but I’ve gotten enjoyment out of it already. I have high expectations that when I DO make something out of this book; it is going to be fabulous.

*I did make the apple crisp recipe and it was very delicious! We ate it all in one go.*

This little story in the foreword sealed the deal for me: (Yes, I did read the foreword!)

My next door neighbors did something nice for me and so I did something nice for them, which is to say I made them Ann’s Very Controversial Apple Crisp (page 23). The next day, the wife told me, “You know my husband never eats desserts, doesn’t like them. He could not stop eating that apple crisp.” Another friend told me that when she first made it, she and her husband stood at the stove after it came out of the oven and ate the whole dang thing.
(She’d halved the recipe, but still.)
–from the foreword, written by Elizabeth Berg

So, if you are looking for a gift for yourself or for a friend, or you just have chronic cookbook collector syndrome — I highly recommend this book!

Note: This post was previously published on my “regular” blog: The Tromp Queen. I thought it might be good to repost it here in case some of you don’t follow there.