We Have a Winner!–”Like Water for Chocolate”

It proved to be a difficult but fun decision to select a winner from all the wonderful dishes inspired by “Like Water for Chocolate” by Laura Esquivel, for our judge–cook, blogger and photographer extraordinaire, Ben Herrera from What’s Cooking?. A fan of the book and of the magical realism genre,  Ben left us this comment on the round-up post that I thought was great so I am reprinting it here in case you missed it.

Ben says:  “OMG What an amazing array of recipes you guys cooked! Here’s my take on the book. The genre is known as magical realism, probably best known in the novels of Garcia Marquez, and it can be difficult to adopt if you are not very familiar with it or don’t like books with a lot of “fantasy” embedded in the story. I personally love this book because 1) it portrays the real Mexican food that is rarely seen outside Mexico. The food my grandmother and mom made in their kitchen and restaurant in which they poured countless hours and parts of their soul preparing it. 2) I love history, and thought this book is not a history book or necessarily historically accurate, it takes place during one of the most difficult times in Mexican history, La Revolucion. 3) I just love magical realism. Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Juan Rulfo, Borges, are some of my favorite writers and their books make me believe that magic is everywhere, we just need to look a little closer. Again, great work everybody I am really, really enjoying this post!”

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And now on to our winner!

From Ben’s email:

“Here I am finally! OK after reading all the posts several times I have come to a final decision… not easy at all because I think they all did a great job! And the winner is:

Foodycat and her Mexican chorizo.

I loved all the recipes, especially the mole ones and the Aztec Chili Truffles, they are all great accomplishments, but I went with the homemade chorizo because that is one of my favorite Mexican ingredients, and not so easy to make I must say, and because she used it in one of my favorite breakfasts, huevos con chorizo.

I really enjoyed doing this and reading all the recipes and book reviews. Thanks a lot for giving me this opportunity.

Cheers!”

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Congratulations to Foodycat who becomes our first three-time winner of Cook the Books! We may have to get a special badge made!  Congrats and thanks to everyone who participated, as you made Ben’s decision a challenge. And of course many thanks and much appreciation to Ben for being such a great judge!

I am now officially handing the hosting torch over to Johanna of Food Junkie Not Junk Food for her pick, “Eating for England” by chef and author Nigel Slater.

BTW: Just in case you missed the last post announcing our next three books after “Eating for England” you can find it here.

Happy reading, cooking, eating!

Deb