Homemade Holiday Recipes from the Homestead

Have you picked up your copy of Homemade Holiday Recipes from the Kindle Store?  This amazing cookbook brings together the creative holiday cooking of the members of the Homestead Bloggers Network into a single Kindle cookbook.  It has a linked table of contents to make scrolling through your favorite recipes easy and stress free.  And there are over 80 kitchen tested recipes in this Kindle eBook.  In fact, these recipes represent the heirloom recipes that appear on the homestead tables at Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Solstice, and Yule of the writers of the Homestead Bloggers Network.  The recipes are all family friendly.

Don’t have a Kindle yet?  You can download the free app for your phone.  I did, even though I have a Kindle.  I put this cook book on my phone to make it easier to use in the kitchen.

This Kindle Book will help you plan your complete menu from breakfast slow-cooker omelettes, to appies, beverages, sides, the turkey and ham, and dessert.  I’ll admit I spent more time in the dessert section than the appies.  I love reading other people’s recipes to get new ideas for my own cooking.

I don’t usually follow recipes exactly as written.  There’s two reasons — one is I rarely go shopping just to get ingredients for a recipe, preferring to cook from my pantry.  The second reason is I’m a rule breaker in the kitchen.  What I found in this cookbook are many other creative cooks who break rules, cook from scratch with seasonal ingredients, and cook with ingredients that they also keep in their pantry.

Under the beverage section you’ll find two different recipes for sparkling Kombucha.  Did you ever think you’d find healthy fermented drinks in a holiday cookbook?  There are cookies, several very different cornbread stuffing recipes, candy and main dishes that go beyond roast turkey with stuffing.  The homemade toffee recipe is on my list for this week.  You can find it in the table of contents.

Another amazing thing was the list of Homestead Bloggers — real people who are actually living the homestead lifestyle and blog about it, so that you can find the help you need on your journey to homestead bliss.  I put my copy of the cookbook on my phone, and found myself checking out the blogs and social media pages of a few of my homestead “friends” at my favorite wifi bistro.  (That would be the Copper Eagle in Greenwood, BC, if you happen to be in my hometown.)

I’m giving this cookbook 4 stars because I wanted more pictures to demonstrate some of the more complicated recipes, like how to get the jelly in the jelly doughnuts.  Pictures help to bring the step by step directions into an easy to understand language.  Many of the recipes have a step by step meme so you can blow up the picture and get the visual, but more pictures in the body of the recipe would make them easier to see what to do next.

Another drawback was the breadth of certain recipes and the lack of others that you’d expect in a holiday cookbook.  For instance there were 7 recipes for pumpkin desserts — pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin pie, pumpkin pie dip, even pumpkin creamer.  But there were no butter tarts, mince meat pie, or Christmas Cake, things, as a Canadian, I expect in a holiday cookbook.  There was only 5 cookie recipes, whereas I have several holiday cookie cookbooks on my shelf, just for this season.  So this isn’t the definitive holiday cookbook.  You’ll need to keep your Joy of Cooking for that.  But this e-Book will enhance your holiday cooking repertoire, and broaden your ideas of what you can put on the menu this year.

Should you buy it?  80 original, creative, seasonal recipes to help you break through the holiday cooking stalemate and add more creativity to your holiday celebration for less than 3 bucks.  (I heard the price is going up soon, so grab it at the introductory price while you can.) Yep, it’s worth it.

Disclaimer: I am a member of the Homestead Bloggers Network and have a few recipes in this collection. I received a review copy of this eBook, but this review represents my honest opinion of the work.