I was a vegetarian* for 16 years, which included the time when I learned to cook. So, I’ve never learned to cook meat and most of the meat I’ve cooked has been on a George Foreman grill. (It’s a supersized waffle iron on an angle, but the results are surprisingly good.)

Since I started eating meat again, though, I’ve loved short ribs, which I was introduced to at Charlie’s cafe. So tonight, we cooked the short ribs from Judy Rogers’s Zuni Cafe Cookbook. And, I have to say, I’m very pleased with how they came out: tender and savory.

The cookbook is different from most I’ve used. The prose sections are a lot of fun to read. As Deborah Madison says in her blurb, the introduction alone is worth the price of the book. The recipes are also more textual than algorithmic, if you will — prose descriptions of what to do, rather than more mechanical steps. And it seems to demand a little more from a cook; for example, you need to understand the adjectives she uses (“scant” appears a lot; how much do you cook something to brown it “gently?”). But at the same time, it’s actually a very easy recipe to execute and I felt confident that the dish would turn out well the whole time.

[* Actually, I was, as a friend describes, an ovo-lacto-pescatarian. That is, I still ate dairy, eggs, fish, and seafood. Within that, though, I was very strict.]