A review of The Hamptons & Long Island Homegrown Cookbook

The Hamptons & Long Island Homegrown Cookbook by Leeann Lavin features local food and top chef profiles from the Hamptons and Long Island area. This cookbook focuses on sustainable, seasonal foods freshly grown from local farms. The book showcases the hard work, dedication, and passion of food specialists and chefs who make these kinds of ingredients their culinary centerpiece and inspiration. Lavin shares detailed stories and histories that profile the 27 expert chefs from local restaurants who foster long-term relationships with farmers and fishermen.

The food growers and chefs who bring the food to the table, open up their farms and kitchens and share over 80 recipes. Long Island and Hamptons residents can emulate their favorite restaurant chefs in their own kitchens through these recipes, while others can get a taste of the region’s culinary palette. The book is organized by region and large, high-quality color photographs accompany the recipes.

The commitment to healthy local foods is inspirational. However, aside from the interesting stories and mouth-watering food photos, I have some difficulty figuring out how to use this cookbook in a practical way. The Hamptons & Long Island Homegrown Cookbook requires access to fresh, top-of-the-line seafood, and farm stand vegetables for most of its recipes. Since the cookbook illustrates the hard work and determination this takes for chefs,  imagine how much more difficult it would be even for a passionate cook of a Mom making weeknight dinners.

While the dishes look delicious, they come across as complicated and expensive. I wouldn’t be able to use this cookbook on an everyday basis for family meals and could not serve most of these recipes to a large hungry crowd. Even so, if you do have the budget or easy access to homegrown and local foods, this cookbook would serve you well.

Here’s one of the less complicated dishes from The Hamptons & Long Island Homegrown Cookbook, a recipe for summer blueberry tart:

Summer Blueberry Tart

Recipe from Chef Guy Reuge at Tavern Mirabelle

Serves 6

Dough

Ingredients:

• 2 cup plus 1 tablespoon flour
• 1 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 stick plus 1 tablespoons (or 9 tablespoons) butter
• 1 large egg

Directions:

1. Sift the flour, sugar, and salt together. In a mixer fitted with a paddle, combine all of the ingredients. Remove the dough from the bowl, form a ball, cover, and refrigerate for a few hours.
2. Roll the dough to mold sixteen 3-inch-diameter tart molds. Freeze the tartlet shells before baking them in a 350-degree oven for about 10 minutes or until they turn golden.

Blueberry Compote

Ingredients:

• 4 pints blueberries
• 2/3 cups of sugar

Directions:

1. In a small pot, combine 2 pints blueberries and sugar. Place the pot on the stove, and stir until the mixture appears to be cooked and liquefies slightly. Remove from the stove, and add the remaining 2 pints blueberries to the cooked mixture. Refrigerate rapidly.
2. At serving time, add a few spoonfuls of Blueberry Compote to the prebaked tartlet shells, top with a scoop of honey or vanilla ice cream, and a small amount of raspberry coulis to decorate each plate.

The Hamptons & Long Island Homegrown Cookbook sells for $30 and can be found online.

Disclosure: Mom Central received a copy of The Hamptons & Long Island Homegrown Cookbook in order to facilitate this review. There are also Homegrown Cookbooks for Boston, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay Area.