Half Baked Harvest Cookbook, Recipes from My Barn in the Mountains – Tieghan Gerard

Unstoppable Foodie Cookbook Club – February 2021

Half Baked Harvest Cookbook, Recipes from My Barn in the Mountains – Tieghan Gerard

 

Our featured cookbook for February 2021 is Half Baked Harvest Cookbook, Recipes from My Barn in the Mountains by Tieghan Gerard. We have been following Tieghan for many years, through her award-winning cooking blog, Instagram and Pinterest accounts. We also look forward to her daily email where she shares a new recipe along with her Saturday cocktails and Sunday – Nine Favorite Things. Her second cookbook, Half Baked Harvest Super Simple, is also a top seller. Her type A personality shines through in all she does.

Tieghan is one of seven children who grew up in Ohio and moved to the Colorado mountains. She started her blog in a converted horse barn living on the second floor. She has since built an adjacent studio and filled it with the latest cookware including her favorite line of Kitchen Aid appliances.

It is funs to watch this type a personality come alive in the kitchen. Her creativity shines through in her ability to put a new spin on a classic recipe.

Book Summary

Her book as she describes it are recipes inspired by the people and places she loves most. Her philosophy on food is to be “bright, beautiful and positively cozy.”  Her philosophy on life – “work harder than anyone else.” These philosophies truly shine through as you read through the book and prepare her recipes.

The book is fairly standard in the layout of the food categories. She starts with breakfast and works her way through to dessert. Along the way she nerds out and dives deep on her favorite dishs. For instance, she loves toast and details eight ways she loves to eat it. My favorite being Bubble-Up Cheddar and Tomato. From there she shares all kinds of lovely breakfast favorites with her spin on each – from Soufflé Omlette with Spinach, Artichoke, and Brie to Herb-Whipped Goat Cheese with Harissa, Poached Eggs and Toast. She always does a great job of combining spice blends and cheeses for a memorable twist. This flair for mashing up flavors and creating beautiful versions of a fusion dish combining different ingredients from different regions always seems to work.

From breakfast, she travels through appetizers & snacks, pasta & grains, poultry & pork, seafood, beef & lamb and then adds a meatless section and closes it out with desserts. There is something for someone in every section, which makes sense since she was trying to please such a large crowd around the dinner table. One of my favorite recipes that is not in this book, but is on her blog, is her grilled cheese that she tweaked at her brothers request. Her brother is Olympic snowboarder, Red Gerard, 2018 Olympic Gold Medalist. Her brother was in her studio and requested crispy prosciutto and red peppers on a grilled cheese and she created this lovely French Onion and Apple Grilled Cheese worthy of a Gold Medal. Valarie has made this beauty over and over for me and it always satisfies and has the most amazing profile with salty prosciutto, crushed red pepper flakes, apple cider, Gouda, honey crisp apples all on sourdough bread. It is this spin on a classic grilled cheese that kicks all these recipes up enough or adds a flavor profile that is unforgettable to your classic dishes. This creativity continually shines through and delivers recipe after recipe. There is no wondering if these recipes were properly tested, over the years, this family of nine has tested them over and over again gathering around that big mountain dinner table!

This book, along with her blog of the same name, will help provide endless ideas breakfast, lunch and dinner. Whether you are looking for a quick recipe with maximum flavor to fill you up, or one that is worthy of a candle-lit table, they are all in this book.

Menus / Recipes

She reminds us in the “How to Cook with This Book” chapter, that getting dinner on the table and keeping it interesting and exciting is what this book is all about.

I tend to take everything up a notch. There are a lot of classics that you’ll probably recognize, but all with a little twist or uprise that makes them different and helps mealtime feel special.

Looking for some amazing recipes that are hard to forget, try her Croque Madame Breakfast Pizza, Potato Chip Chicken, Seafood Bánh Mì, Addictive Salted Caramel-Stuffed Chocolate Cookies or Death by Chocolate Ice Box Cake. You will see the unique spin on ingredients and see how she loves to use cheese and chocolate among her secret culinary weapons – flavors we all love!

 

Below are a few amazing recipes from, Half Baked Harvest, that we want to highlight and recommend.

1. Salted Brioche Cinnamon Rolls (Page 36)
2. No-Guilt Broccoli Fettucine Alfredo (Page 89)
3. Creamy Polenta with Garlic-Butter Kale and Mushrooms (Page 105)
4. Beer and Harissa-Steamed Mussels with Parmesan Fries (Page 164)

 

 

 

Photography / Styling / Publisher

The photography and food styling are all done by Tieghan Gerard. She uses her Canon to capture photos that are bright and colorful enhanced with beautiful food styling. You will also see her regularly highlight her favorite Staub cookware in many of the photos.

Graphically, this cookbook is clean and bright. The dishes are aesthetically pleasing.

The book was published in 2017 by Clarkson Potter Publishers, New York.

Recommendation

If you have a busy life and struggle to get something different on the table with amazing flavors in less time, this is the cookbook for you! If Tieghan could prepare these recipes for her Mom, Dad and six siblings, you will be able to pull off these dishes as well. Through her unique sense of style and creativity, these recipes are guaranteed to bring a smile to your dinner table.

Unstoppable Foodie Cookbook Club

Valarie and I love cookbooks. No matter where you sit in our house, a book is no more than an arm’s length away. We have multiple copies of digital cookbooks on our devices, but there is nothing like holding a bound cookbook in your hands, especially one filled with amazing stories and recipes. It is no surprise, whenever you open a cookbook of ours, you may see notes in the columns, tabbed pages, and printed out recipes or ingredient lists stuffed between the covers. Cookbooks are meant to be used just like any other tool in the kitchen.

We love the practicality and usefulness of cookbooks, but we are always hooked by the stories behind the recipes in a cookbook. In that spirit, we combined our intellectual curiosity with our passion for great food. “Exploring the World, One Dish at a Time” will always be our passion and the mission behind Unstoppable Foodie and Unstoppable Foodie Cookbook Club!

We would love to eventually roll the book club into an in-person cooking event, but for now we will keep it a virtual activity of sharing recipes from our favorite cookbooks on social media. We are looking to eventually offer an online class where we can cook together real time through a live stream platform.

The goal of the book club is simply to inspire you to cook more by elevating your home cooking skills. It is meant to be fun. Regardless of your current skill level, we look forward to you joining us. We are sure through this experience you will undoubtably increase your skills in the kitchen.

Please share your photos or your dishes with us so we can feature them on our socials and on our blog. The Unstoppable Foodie Cookbook Club is meant to be a social activity and a two-way street for all of us to get better at cooking and spending more time in the kitchen. We hope you join us on this culinary adventure!

In addition to our monthly blog post, we will give away a copy of our favorite cookbooks on Instagram.

 

Disclaimer: There is an affiliate link in this post that is connected to Amazon Associates. We may make a small commission if you clink the link and make a purchase. Any commission we received would help us offset the endless hours we pour into our foodie blog, Unstoppable Foodie. There are multiple places to purchase this cookbook besides Amazon. We only recommend products we absolutely love, use and giveaway as gifts. We purchased the copy of the book we are giving away in our Instagram Giveaway.