Alaska Roadhouse Recipes

This is a really fine & useful cookbook. As the full title says, it features recipes from Alaska and Canada's Yukon Territory. Calories are a good thing in the frozen North, so this is definitely not a diet cookbook. That said, there are plenty of recipes which do not put consumers at risk of instant heart attack.There are a number of real gems in here, including a lot of special breakfast dishes among the recipes, as one might expect from a book representing a lot of B & Bs. Many of them can be put together the night before and just cooked in the morning (Heavenly French Custard, Freezer French Toast, a wide variety of Strata recipes) and most of them would be really great for a Sunday brunch. My current nomination for the best recipe in the book is Halibut Surprise, p. 134. I've made this for a number of potlucks since I found it. The first time EVERY adult at the meal asked for the recipe. Since then it's just been the ones who haven't already gotten it from me. This is an incredibly easy recipe to make, you can use halibut, salmon, shrimp, or crab (fresh king crab is awesome), and people will think you are an amazing cook. You can put it together before guests arrive; it doesn't need to be hovered over while cooking -- all in all, great for entertaining. Probably worth buying the book just for that!A lot of the recipes feature local specialities, but only of the sort which can be obtained in local supermarkets in the Lower 48 (I'm not saying it'll be just as good as using fresh halibut or Copper River reds, folks, but it will still be good). Unlike most Alaska cookbooks, this one has no recipes for moose or caribou. About the only ingredient that might be hard to find is fiddlehead ferns, but they can be mail ordered in cans if you can't get fresh.