Let’s get cooking—with a veteran

This book is loaded with great recipes, colorful images, and fun and interesting tips, tricks, and information. As a foodie and at-home-cook mom of three, I fully intend on whipping this book out at every opportunity, not only to remake favorites, but to explore different dishes when the home-cooked weeknight meals inevitably become mundane.

Included in the book are some of author and veteran Dave Rogers’s fan favorites, including lobster mac and cheese, chicken potpie, southern-fried tacos, Irish soda bread and corned beef and cabbage, and even ramen. Also included are cast-iron tips—and anyone who knows Rogers knows he wouldn’t be caught dead cooking without one—as well as tips for cooking the perfect steak and making a pie crust.

As part of the review, my family and I utilized the long Labor Day weekend to get cooking. We couldn’t resist trying the seafood boil—an admittedly labor-intensive feat for a weekend reserved for resting.

The meal included lemons, Old Bay seasoning, garlic, onions, potatoes, corn, lobster, clams, sausage, shrimp, and, of course, butter! He also informed us that boils are a Creole dish and typically include two to three kinds of seafood. Something I would not have done if it weren’t for his recipe was brine the seafood and the veggies first—which was the secret to the flavor.

We never had done a seafood boil before, and I was nervous. But! Rogers really took the guesswork out of it. Usually, when we follow recipes, we fail the first time and make notes to make it better the next. However, he provides those tips beforehand because he has already been there and done that.

His book is not just packed with flavorful dishes, but it’s also packed with really good and honest information. I am certain he can turn even the worst cooks into the best.

The meal was downright delicious, and surprisingly easy to follow. My favorite part of the book is Rogers’s little anecdotes spread throughout. I thoroughly enjoyed “Cooking with a Veteran”; the only thing that could have made it better was if Rogers were there to cook it himself!

The 120-page, full-color, 8.5x11 book covers 66 of Rogers’s most-watched recipes on the Cooking with a Veteran Facebook page. The book also includes tips and tricks to cooking, some stories of where Rogers learned some of these dishes, images of him and grunts around the VFW world, and images of his incredible paintings.

I would scream it from a rooftop: Go support Rogers and his mission to help veterans by buying this book! If that doesn’t make you feel good, this surely will: 30 percent of proceeds from each book goes to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Unmet Needs Program. For a digital version of the book, you can also download it on Amazon for Kindle.

Rogers also plans to release an audio version as well as his second cookbook late this fall, “Cooking with a Veteran II, Making it Last,” which will talk about making great meals on a budget. Part of the proceeds from the second book will go to the VFW National Home. 

Go buy the book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B8BDFCDR?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dave Rogers is a 14-year Army veteran who served in Desert Storm, Bosnia and Korea, as well as the World Trade Center. He left the Army in 2005 due to a neck injury he suffered while serving at the World Trade Center. He credits the VFW for helping him continue on after his service. He still serves by running a weekly Coffee with a Veteran on Zoom to check in with veterans across the country, as well as his famous Cooking with a Veteran YouTube show. He started cooking, and it eventually turned into his show.

“When I talk about my love of cooking, I like to tell how my mother (God rest her soul) was such a bad cook, she could burn water,” he joked. “My fondest memories of my childhood were walking to my grandmother’s house after school; you could smell food cooking all over the block.”

After joining the Army and traveling to various countries, his love for food grew. As he traveled, he learned new secrets and cultures. He calls his approach to cooking “grunt style”—easy recipes for veterans. Flavorful food, he said, is not a lot of seasoning or adding a lot of salt, but rather allowing the flavors of the food to stand out. Besides his love of cooking, Rogers is also an artist who loves to create and experiment with art.