Delish Cooking School: Know Your Beans, Peas, and Grains

With triple-tested recipes, easy-to-follow instructions on how to handle ingredients, clearly explained cooking methods, and step-by-step images to guide you through the cooking process, Delish Cooking School helps home cooks at every level prepare delicious dishes with ease.

Scroll through the slideshow to get an exclusive sneak peek at some of the great content in the book.

Buy the Book Now!

Small russet beans with a cream stripe. Thin-skinned and sweet, they are used in Japan in a paste for desserts and cakes, and are also good in stews and for sprouting.

Also called turtle beans. Their big, savory flavor makes them the stars of Caribbean and Latin-American cooking, famously for black-bean soup. Not the same as Chinese black beans, which are salted, fermented soy beans.

Also called black-eyed peas or cow peas. Mild-flavored and thin-skinned, so they cook faster than most other beans. Often served in the south with pork and corn bread.

The haricot bean family includes navy beans for Boston baked beans and Great Northern for French cassoulet as well as cannellini. All are mild-flavored white beans which can be interchanged with each other.

Best-known in the refreshing Middle Eastern salad, tabbouleh, bulgur is hulled, steamed, or par-boiled and dried cracked wheat ground to various degrees of fineness. Before use, it is soaked briefly in water to soften and swell the grains, then squeezed dry.

From the Le Puy district in southern France, these tiny dark gray-green lentils are delicious and very expensive. Local versions are available, sold under the name of French green or bondi lentils.

Also called fava beans. Large and mealy-textured, found fresh and dried. Used with chickpeas for falafel. Fresh broad beans are labor-intensive, but well worth it; they must be boiled briefly to remove the waxy peel.

Yellow or green varieties, both with a sweet, strong pea flavor. Best known for pea and ham soup and for traditional pease pudding (mashed with butter, mint, parsley, and eggs, then steamed) to serve with corned beef.

Also called garbanzos, channa, or hummus, and prized for their full, nutty flavor and crisp texture. Essential for the Italian soup pasta e ceci, and for the Middle Eastern hummus bi tahini.

Also known as cornmeal, made from dried corn ground to various degrees of fineness. It is boiled with water to a porridge (soft polenta), which may also be chilled, cut into shapes, oiled, and grilled.

The staple cereal of North Africa, made from fine semolina. It is steamed over the pot in which the meat and vegetables are cooking, or, for sweet couscous, over water, then mixed with sugar, nuts, and fruits.

Small, white Italian members of the haricot bean family. Used in minestrone and other soups and in Tuscan dishes such as beans baked with pancetta and garlic or chilled beans with tuna.

Cooking isn't the only way to impress your family and friends. Delish Cupcakes by Color will show you how to expertly decorate cupcakes in more than 100 styles.

Buy the Book Now!