A Month With The Honeysuckle Cookbook And What Worked

I try cooking through one cookbook for a full month and realize the idea sounds better than it feels once the flavors start to repeat. I review the Honeysuckle Cookbook by Dzung Lewis with the recipes that shine, the ones that miss for me, and the techniques I’m stealing for weeknight cooking. 
• Why a monthlong cookbook challenge sounds fun but gets old fast 
• What the Honeysuckle Cookbook is like and how it’s organized 
• Matcha recipes that confirm I don’t like matcha plus one matcha loaf I do love 
• A crumble topping trick I plan to use on all quick breads 
• Breakfast hits and misses including overnight oats, chia pudding, and orange pistachio French toast 
• Salad and soup attempts that feel just ok plus two seasonal salads I still want to try 
• A sesame noodle stir fry that becomes a clean-out-the-fridge keeper 
• Weeknight mains I’d repeat and ones I wouldn’t including chicken adobo and butter chicken 
• Turkey meatballs with oats and fish sauce for moisture and umami 
• Slow cooker banh mi pork as an easy family favorite 
• A sheet-pan preheat method for crispier roasted vegetables 
• Dessert standouts including ginger cardamom lemon bars 
Make sure to head over to my Instagram. You'll see some pictures there of some of the recipes that I have made. And let me know if you've ever cooked from this cookbook what your thoughts were as well.

Transcript

Meet The Honeysuckle Cookbook

Matcha Trials And Breakfast Wins

Salads That Miss And Ones To Try

Noodles And Weeknight Keepers

Slow Cooker Wins And Smart Side Tips

Desserts Worth Repeating And Wrap-Up

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to Novel and Nush, where books, food, travel, and the art of living fully come together. Today I wanted to share with you something that I decided to try that I thought was going to go over well but didn't enjoy it as much as I had hoped. So I may I decided to cook through a cookbook all month long. Now normally what I do is I'll take one cookbook off my shelf and I will meal plan for the week through that cookbook. And I always feel like I didn't get to cook as much as I'd like to out of the cookbook, even though I know I can go back to it anytime. So that was what kind of led me to think, oh, let me cook through it for a month. The problem with this was that one, the cookbook I chose has an Asian flair, so I think that just kind of got old for me after a while. And it it wasn't something I enjoyed quite as much as I thought I would. So today I'm going to share with you my cookbook, just kind of a slight review on it, and I'm not sure how I'll go forward with this. I was thinking maybe doing like a couple weeks at a time instead. I don't know. I mean, have you ever tried? I'd love, I'd love to be one of these people who tried every single recipe in a cookbook, but I don't know if I have the stick toitiveness to do that. But that was what I was going for with this, and I fell very, very short. So the cookbook I'm sharing with you today is the Honey Suckle Cookbook by Zung Lewis. And I'm not sure if it's pronounced correctly. I did go to her YouTube and Instagram handle to see if she introduced herself, and unfortunately she did not, so I do not know if that if I'm pronouncing it correctly. But it's D Z U N G. And if you look at the Honeysuckle Cookbook, it has a beautiful cover of Bon Mize on the cover. Um, and then inside, looking at all of these pictures, they are absolutely gorgeous recipes, and definitely ones where you're like, I want to make that, I want to make that. Everything looks delicious in here. And for the most part, everything was really tasty. There were a few misses for me within this cookbook, and I'll make sure I share that with you. Um, but it definitely was something that I enjoyed. Zung talks about how she grew up in Santa Clara, California. Her parents are Vietnamese immigrants, and her grandmother was very much someone who loved to cook. She would uh bring in kind of these French flared recipes, and she loved watching cooks on the TV making dishes. So food was definitely a part of her life, and then she also um has a few recipes from her husband, who also is half Korean. So, as you can see, there's going to be a lot of Asian style recipes in this book. The contents, the way it's separated, I really enjoyed. I thought it was really cute. She says uh there's morning rituals, must include coffee and tea, breakfast is the MVP of meals, salads and soups, a seasonal take, which you know I would love because I love seasonal cooking, new favorites, noodles and grains, give me an hour weeknight mains, multipot magic, low and slow, or pressure cooking, sidekicks, we all need them, and then hashtag mix, mix, mix your favorite desserts. So really cute how she um separated everything out. I will say a couple of things this cookbook taught me. One, I don't like matcha, I don't like the taste of matcha. I do think that the recipe I chose was very matcha heavy. So if you look for something a little less matcha heavy, you may enjoy it. So in her morning rituals, she has matcha three ways, and she has the matcha and condensed milk latte, which I wanted to make, but at the time I didn't have condensed milk on hand. So I chose to make the matcha and coconut cooler, which is quite literally matcha and coconut water. So definitely was not a favorite of mine, but I did make the matcha almond bread, and that was delicious. And I think part of that is the fact that she uses almond extract in that quick bread. So almond extract tends to overtake the flavor of anything, so it very much tasted more like that, and I actually enjoyed that bread because of that. So I think if you find the right matcha recipe, it would work. The other thing about the matcha almond breakfast loaf was the crumble topping she used. I have made the decision I will be adding that to all my quick breads. That was absolutely delicious, and it was a it was a fairly basic crumble topping. There was butter, flour, granulated sugar, brown sugar, salt, cinnamon, and almonds. And I just thought it was absolutely delicious. I did hold off on the almonds because I wasn't sure if my kids were going to eat it, but that is a quick and easy thing that you can add to your breakfast loaf quick breads. So I think I'm going to start adding it to more of my breads. In the breakfast portion, I made the overnight oats. She offers them four different ways. I decided to try the creamy vanilla orange overnight oats. Unfortunately, here again, I think this was a me problem. Mine came out a little bitter. I must have gone too far into the rind when I was grating it. I didn't think I did, but it just had a very um sour taste to me. But it looking at the recipe, it might have been the orange as well because there is no sugar in this. It's just yogurt, milk, orange zest, orange juice, vanilla, and rolled oats. So for me, that was a slight miss along with the chia seed puddings. Those were a miss as well. She has chia pudding four ways, and I tried the raspberry lemonade chia pudding, and I did not enjoy it. I felt like it was kind of gloppy. The um chia seeds never kind of developed the way that I had hoped they would, and it was not my favorite. Now, one recipe I absolutely loved in the breakfast portion was the orange pistachio French toast. And I made a note here that it tastes like summer, it was so so good, and definitely something I'm going to do from now on when I make French toast is add a little bit of orange juice and zest to the milk mixture because it just took the French toast up a level. So I would highly recommend you try that. Or if you wanted to try this cookbook, definitely try that recipe. It was so, so good. The salads and soups. I tried a couple of recipes. Again, there were a couple of misses for me. I tried the Spring Pharaoh and veggie salad, and it was just okay. The chili lime street fruit salad was okay as well. She did add tahine to the dressing, which wasn't my favorite. Um, my husband enjoyed it, but I didn't like it. I felt like let's just keep the uh tahine on margaritas or over top of pineapples instead. I do want to try her summer sunset salad. This looks absolutely delicious. There's a basil dressing, and there's peaches and tomatoes and basil and avocado with um some burrata cheese and basil dressing over top. That looks so delicious. So that is something I would like to try, along with her fall harvest salad, which I'm hoping to get to in the fall, which has a goat cheese log, a lemon basil dressing, and then the salad itself has green beans, kale, cannellini beans, carrot, dried dates, red grapes, and a pear. Oh, and walnuts. Both absolutely gorgeous salads. Moving on to the noodles and greens section. I tried her sesame soba noodle stir fry. I could not find soba noodles at our grocery store, so I just used ramen noodles. This was a keeper. I will make this again and again. It was like the perfect recipe to have on the weekends when you're going through your kitchen and trying to clean out all your vegetables. It was one of those recipes that is so quick and easy to do. And this has a delicious soy sauce, sesame oil, tahimi sauce that everything is going to go into after it's been cooked. And then you add, like I said, um, any kind of vegetables that you have. Her recipe calls for celery, cabbage, carrots, and snow peas. So that is what I did with this dish, and I absolutely loved it. We did add chicken to ours just to kind of make it more of a filling meal, but it is definitely one that I would recommend you try in here. The other thing was the rockin' beef bowl and the chicken Tinga burrita bowl. Both of these I made with tomato fried rice, and that's another one of those fun things that I would recommend you try. Basically, it's rice, and then she adds ketchup to it, and it just adds a fun, different flavor to the rice that um makes it delicious. Once we got to the weeknight mains, I did make the chicken adabo. This was a really tasty dish, but I will say in the picture it looks very orangey, and it mine just kind of looked brown. It didn't have the beautiful color that the cookbook appeared, but it was still really tasty. I would say her butter chicken was just kind of bland, it was not my favorite. I've had better butter chickens than this, but then she also had a tamarind cumin grilled pork chop. I could not find tamarind concentrate, so I just ended up buying a tamarind marinade, and that was delicious. So ultimately, did I try this recipe? No, but if you find tamarind marinade, I would definitely try it. It is really quite tasty. Another keeper for me was Neats Turkey Meatballs. This is again one of those things that I will carry on cooking with from now on when I make meatballs. Instead of using breadcrumbs, he uses oats, which I thought was delicious. It created a moisture meatball. And he also adds fish sauce to the recipe, which gave such a delicious umami flavor. And you know, fish sauce just adds that umaminess, it does not add a fishy taste, or you will smell the fishiness when you're cooking, but it does not turn into that taste with the meatballs, and these were absolutely delicious. Everybody in the house loved them, so that will be a meatball that I will continue to make over and over again. Definitely a keeper for me. The slow cooker pork for bon mi sandwiches was another recipe that we absolutely loved. It was easy just to put everything into the slow cooker, the pork, you know, just cooked for hours in there. You shred it up and then you add it to a sandwich with the bon mi ingredients, which was so so tasty. Absolutely loved it. I will say I want to try, she has a honey soy glazed ribs in here that look delicious as well. Once we get to the sidekicks, I did try her crispy Brussels sprouts with chili lime garlic sauce. I was not a fan of the garlic sauce, but the way that she cooked the crispy Brussels sprouts was amazing and one that I will steal for now on for all my roasted vegetables. While the oven is heating up, she takes the pan and places it in the oven so it gets really hot, so that when you put the roasted vegetables on them, it kind of sears them immediately, which was absolutely amazing. I make roasted Brussels sprouts all the time, and it changed, it just made them that much crispier, and I absolutely love that. I also really enjoyed her cheesy garlic bread. Everyone in the house loved this. This was really good to make with Nate's meatballs. Again, another favorite in our household. And then the mix, mix, mix dessert section. We did try the chocolate cherry blondies, they were okay, but the ginger cardamom lemon bars were absolutely amazing. The cardamom was in the shortbread crust, and then the ginger lemon was the filling that really set up nicely. Um, some lemon bars I have end up being more gooey, and this one was like the perfect setting up. Absolutely loved it. It was a favorite. I will continue to make this recipe over and over again. I am looking forward to a few different recipes as well. There is a cheesy everything bagel biscuit, so it's basically like a cheese biscuit with some everything bagel seasoning in with it. That sounds delicious. There's also some squash tacos with cilantro lime slaw that look very good. The Vietnamese chicken curry looks really tasty with the um curry style chicken and sauce with potatoes and carrots. I did already mention the honey soy glazed ribs that I want to try. And then she also has a banana cake that I believe was her wedding cake that I am excited to try as well. Yeah, Zung and Nate's favorite banana cake. So those are the recipes I loved, some of the recipes I did not care for. As you can see, it truly was a hit or miss. There are definitely some keeper recipes in here that I loved. There were some that I will never make again. I was slightly mixed on this cookbook, but it definitely is one that I'm going to keep on my bookshelf because I do have some recipes I want to continue to try. And for the most part, I enjoyed it and my family enjoyed it as well, and we're willing to give it another try. Make sure to head over to my Instagram. You'll see some pictures there of some of the recipes that I have made. And let me know if you've ever cooked from this cookbook what your thoughts were as well. And have a wonderful day.