Talk about your ultimate comfort food: a hearty bowl of steaming soup and plump muffins fresh from the oven. In these two delightfully handwritten, full-color cookbooks, readers can glorify this duo of soothing comestibles with recipes that emphasize friends, family, and home. In Is It Soup Yet? and Mad about Muffins, Dot Vartan and Shelly Reeves Smith have created appealing odes to the best of what can come from a loving kitchen.
It all started when the closing of a local bake shop inspired Dot Vartan to concoct her own homemade muffin recipes. In Mad about Muffins, the fruits of her labor range from breakfast muffins to chocolate muffins, from kids’ muffins to muffins from around the world. Garlic Corn or Double Date muffins will likely appeal to adults while Apple Cheesecake and Black Forest are Vartan’s yummy variations on cake.
Once Vartan had transformed her collection of scrumptious muffin recipes into an engaging cookbook – complete with colorfully delectable illustrations by Shelly Reeves Smith – the enterprising author turned her attention to soup. As she puts it, “I needed to round out the menu with something more hearty; soup was the perfect choice”. Is It Soup Yet? instructs cooks on how to make all kinds of tasty soups, from Chicken Noodle to Grilled Chicken with Artichoke and Sun Dried Tomato, from Green Bean Potato soup to Southern Short Rib soup. Like its muffin companion, Is It Soup Yet? features more than 100 recipes that range from the simple to the exotic.
