Jack Daniel's: the Spirit of Tennessee Cookbook

I received a complimentary copy of this book from Thomas Nelson. I'm not much of a cook. I like to grill but anytime I have tried something fancy in the oven, things have not gone well. But I found this book intriguing. I like things cooked in alcoholic beverages. I like to use beer or wine for marinating meat but I had never cooked with Jack Daniels before. I was missing out.

The book is attractive and filled with nice pictures. It has some nice, short articles about people of Tennessee. Not all of the recipes contain Jack Daniels but many of them do. There are recipes scattered throughout such as "Possum and Sweet 'Taters" that seem to be intended as something fun to read than actually do. It includes directions on how to capture the possum, prepare him, and kill him. I would consider trying this but would probably fail.

So far I've made five of the recipes and have succeeded at four of them. I made the banana pancakes but failed miserably because of my own poor pancake making skills. There was lots of burning despite the fact that this was the one thing I didn't light on fire. My wife was able to successfully cook the second half of the batch. They were pretty good but I'm not a huge pancake fan. I successfully made the spiked pancake syrup. I'm not big on pancake syrup either but it was pretty good. The intoxicated chicken turned out well and was very good (which involved whiskey and the igniting of it during the cooking process). Better yet was the corn chowder (which also involved the igniting of whiskey during the cooking process. It was delicious. But the best recipe of all was the Flaming Tennessee Tenderloin. It was the best pork I've ever had and was impressive from the presentation point of view as well. My wife arranged the sliced pork in a heart shape and I poured the ignited whiskey on top of it to create a flaming heart.