San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The Last O.G. Cookbook
Cookbooks inspired by television shows and movies tend to be underwhelming — or a little too weird. Are you ever going to cook the Darth Malt from the “Star Wars” cookbook? Has anyone actually bought “Cooking With ‘Days of Our Lives’ ” for non-joke reasons? So “The Last O.G. Cookbook,” inspired by the Tracy Morgan-led television show of the same name, doesn’t have to be anything better than a simple cash grab, but somehow, despite it all, it’s a damn good set of recipes.
With recipes written by Nicole Taylor, author of “The UpSouth Cookbook”; playlists; vignettes on topics like proper lovemaking and life after incarceration; and gorgeous, high-saturation photos by Noah Fecks, the book is a charming ode to black Brooklyn. The tone throughout is fun to read, especially when the book takes potshots at gentrification, prison food and Sammy Sosa.
It’s packed with easy-to-follow recipes inspired by the show’s characters and focuses on ingredients and flavors that will be familiar to most people who’ve done their grocery shopping at the corner store: fried shrimp battered with Red Stripe beer; mac and cheese topped with crushed CheezIts; and an intriguing dessert loaf made of “every delicious snack and candy from the commissary.” I love it — and I haven’t even seen the show.
“The Last O.G. Cookbook: How to Get Mad Culinary Skills,” written in the voice of Tray Barker, with introduction by Tracy Morgan (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 224 pages; $27).