The Winter Table: Fireside Feasts for Family and Friends

by Lisa Lemke

Come in from the cold and celebrate with family and friends! Lisa Lemke’s cookbook presents the comforting delights of hearty wintertime meals.
There’s nothing better than coming home on a wintry evening to the welcoming aroma of a bubbling stew or comforting soup. Lisa Lemke, author of The Summer Table , now changes seasons and brings her prodigious gifts to more than 75 recipes that showcase wintertime ingredients. Her soul-satisfying dishes range from a savory rye risotto with oyster mushrooms browned in butter to mouthwatering roasts and casseroles to blazingly hot chili, and even good old mac ’n’ cheese. To-die-for desserts include an apple toffee, an almond crumble, a fragrant pear pie, and sublime tiramisu. These sensational recipes will assure that everyone you love is warm, happy, and well fed.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Nonfiction, Christmas, Food

224 pages, Hardcover

Published November 7, 2017

Reviews

[Rachael Terry]

This book has beautiful photographs.

[Gina Zappa · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's an entire chapter eggs. You read that right....a whole...entire...CHAPTER...on EGGS! Yes to that. I love me some eggs. There's also a Mexican style corn soup that looks pretty magical.

[Tessa · Rating 2 out of 5]

A serious mixed bag. Although described as a "winter" cookbook, the recipes frequently call for fresh herbs. The recipes themselves are poorly written and not efficient, but many of them have a kernel of a good idea underneath. Some of the recipes I made were quite tasty, but one of them has the dishonor of being the worst recipe I have ever seen. Perhaps worth a flip through for ideas but I wouldn't recommend cooking from it.


Recipes made:
--"Veal" meatballs with dill sauce: I used hamburger instead of veal, but this was a hit with the whole family. The process of the recipe was very disjointed and did not make sense. You ended up with some things cold before the rest of the meal was complete.

--Sardine and sage frittata: this was really good and quite easy to make too.

--Goat cheese filled hamburgers: INCREDIBLE. DELICIOUS.

--Quick muffins with cardamom, muffins, and nuts: I made these but I modified the recipe significantly. The recipe calls for one apple split among the entire batch of muffins, which is clearly not enough? Once again, I found the order/process of the recipe to be illogical and more time consuming than needed. However, we did like the muffins.

--Bacon and roasted root vegetable pancake: THIS IS THE WORST RECIPE I HAVE EVER FOLLOWED. This recipe reads like it was written by AI. It is horrific. The pancake portion of the recipe calls for 1/2 cup of milk and five cups of flour! That is obviously not enough liquid. I did more milk than called for to even get it to come together into a cohesive dough and it was still terrible. It also has zero leavening...so imagine too much flour, not enough liquid, and no leavening. It was like a hockey puck. The vegetables were good...because I added some vinegar and thyme to them and roasted them in the bacon grease instead of vegetable oil (lol) as the recipe calls for. This entire recipe is a flop. I will be trying to recreate it with a real pancake recipe because I think the idea behind it is good, but this execution is literally inedible.

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a pretty and basically inspirational book. Lemke enjoys her food and likes comfort food for winter, with a Swedish twist: so a lot more smoked things, fennel, and beets than I keep in my kitchen (which is none). She uses spices and ingredients differently than I do, and I’m not sure I am motivated enough to buy things especially for any of these recipes. She is a professional cook but it feels like her background is home cooking. I would eat at her restaurant.

Many of her stews and casseroles start exactly the same way, so if I were to make anything from that base I would get a good feel for her flavor profile. She also has a lovely extensive selection of desserts in here. I picked up a couple of ideas I may try, but mostly it put me in the mood for winter cooking now that it’s December. Excuse me: I have chicken bones to go turn into broth.

[J.H. Moncrieff · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are a few recipes that sound quite good in this, but the lower rating is from the fact that the one I tried (Apple Caramel Crumble Pie) was not good at all. The "crumble" (mostly ground nuts) was too salty and dense, and the pie as a whole was watery. So disappointing.

If I have better luck with any of the others, I'll raise my rating.

Overall, I was hoping for a cookbook of comfort food, but even though I'm of Swedish heritage like the author, some of the additions to these recipes, which were often salty or pickled fish and pickled beets, were a bit too jarring to seem appealing to me. That said, the photography, layout, and writing were lovely, which is important when it comes to keepsake cookbooks as well.

[Michelle Chahine Sinno]

“The Winter Table: Fireside Feasts for Family and Friends” by Swedish chef and food writer Lisa Lemke is a seasonal cooking manual and an invitation to explore her world of Scandinavian comfort food, with a focus on winter ingredients, dishes, and especially, a winter feeling. My full review is up on The Cookbook Review.

[Chelsea Simdorn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Definitely has some good recipe ideas, but the recipe writing itself is just not specific enough to me. Even as an intermediate-level/seasoned home cook, I had questions about the instructions (i.e. how long do I cook/boil/saute?). Also, the very last recipe in the book instructs you to "sterilize" jars in an oven - that's proven to not be good enough for food safety standards.

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

So, after I finished going through this cookbook I went back and read my review of her earlier cookbook The Summer Table and I feel basically the same way - there are a lot of recipes that are probably great, but not many that appealed to me. Not saying it's a bad cookbook, just not for me.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pictures of recipes? Yes.
Commentary on recipes? Yes.
Nutrition facts? No.
Recipe Style? Fancy Blogger this-is-my-job style.
Any keepers? Not really.

A very pretty book, but a lot of the recipes require special-ish ingredients I never have on hand.

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

My favorite cookbook style (a picture of every dish and a very short personal note at beginning of each recipe), but barely any of these recipes really called out to me as something I'd want to make that I don't already have my own (better sounding) recipe for.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t really enjoy this. It seemed like a bad translation.

[Dawn Foster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great recipes! Love the one pan cooking/baking.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful photos and tidbits. While I probably wouldn’t utilize this in my life, it was an interesting cookbook.

[Caroline Berg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm very excited to try to root vegetable stew.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

so beautiful, recipes are approachable. best thing-so many pictures!!!