Stuffed: The Ultimate Comfort Food Cookbook

Whalen has discovered the secret to creating instant comfort food classics: just take one delicious ingredient and stuff it inside another. He’s been at it for years, with over 700 recipes (and six million page views), on his The Food in My Beard blog, and now the up-and-coming Page Street Publishing, out of Salem, Mass., brings a large variety pack of his concoctions to print, with chapters covering stuffed breads, pasta and rice, meats, veggies and fruits, and sweets. There is something primordially satisfying about filling a pocket of hamburger with mac and cheese, or the hollow of a jalapeno with a wiener. There is something wrongfully righteous about corn on the cob wrapped in meat, and shrimp wrapped in spaghetti. Each recipe provides proper stuffing techniques, as well as two separate scale-based measurements. The heat scale measures the dish’s level of spiciness (tamale ravioli rates an 8.6), and the pig-out scale attempts to rate each entry in terms of “overall gluttony.” Several of the full-page color photos verge on mouth-watering, though many look more like the scene of an accident: a pretzel torn open and leaking cheddar cheese, a baked onion slimed by lamb vindaloo paste. But nobody ever said that comfort has to be pretty. (Jan.)