This is the first book to examine the creative process of culinary composition as it explores the intersection of food, imagination, and taste. Through interviews with more than 30 of America's leading chefsa including Rick Bayless, Daniel Boulud, Gray Kunz, Jean-Louis Palladin, Jeremiah Tower, and Alice Watersa the authors reveal what defines culinary artists, how and where they find their inspiration, and how they translate that vision to the plate. Through recipes and reminiscences, chefs discuss how they select and pair ingredients, and how flavors are combined into dishes, dishes into menus, and menus into bodies of work that eventually comprise their cuisines.

    This indispensable and unique reference work teaches essential preparation and cooking skills and professional tricks-of-the-trade, with over 700 cooking techniques shown in more than 2,000 color images.Whatever the interest -- providing family-pleasing everyday fare or mastering a top chef's recipe, or even attempting to re-create a dish from a restaurant menu -- Le Cordon Bleu Complete Cooking Techniques will enable people to cook what they want with success. Its hundreds of illustrated techniques are invaluable kitchen aids, as are the many integral recipes.Cooks interested in ethnic cuisines, readers of chef inspired, ingredient-led, or occasion-oriented cookbooks, as well as devotees of simple home cooking will turn to this book again and again and wonder how they ever cooked without it. Le Cordon Bleu Complete Cooking Techniques is destined to become a classic kitchen reference.

    Each luxurious dish is pictured in the same lavish style that so distinguished Trotter's first book. Complemented by more than 25 evocative black-and-white duotones, this book is a visual feast unlike anything else on the market. Organized by month, each chapter offers four or five savory dishes and one sweet course highlighting seasonal ingredients at their peak of freshness. Each chapter also features extensive wine notes, so ambitious cooks can serve a gourmet multicourse vegetable meal, recreating the experience of dining at the acclaimed restaurant.

    Adapting these south Indian recipes for the average kitchen, the author familiarizes the home cook with this lesser-known cuisine.An abundance of coconut and seafood, along with a host of exotic fruits and vegetables, including fresh hot chilies, distinguishes the curries of south India from those of north India. The focus is the traditional southern fare-dishes such as Rava Masala Dosa (wheat crepes stuffed with potato curry), Sambar (spicy stew of legumes and vegetables), and fish Aviyal (chunks of fish in an aromatic sauce of coconut and tamarind)-which is harder to find in restaurants outside of India. North Indian classics, also family favorites, like Lamb Korma, Tandoori Chicken, and Spinach Paneer are included.With everything from appetizers to desserts, this is an excellent introduction to Indian cooking. The author has an extraordinary talent for explaining unfamiliar cooking techniques, and specially commissioned full-color photographs provide helpful visual cues for preparing a wide variety of dishes.The inspired recipes, purposeful photographs, extensive notes on ingredients, practical menu ideas, and useful source list make it a primer on Indian cooking as well as a significant exploration of regional specialties.

    Holding the prestigious rank of Master of Wine, Robinson lectures and judges all over the world, and recently hosted a ten-part PBS series Jancis Robinson's Wine Course. She also edited The Oxford Companion to Wine, which won every major wine book award in 1995--includingthe Julia Child Cookbook Award (Wine, Beer, or Spirits) and The James Beard Book Award--and which has been praised by Frank Prial in The New York Times as easily the most complete compendium of wine knowledge assembled in modern times, and by Anthony Dias Blue as one of the definitive referencebooks on the subject. Now, in Jancis Robinson's Guide to Wine Grapes, Robinson provides wine aficionados with a handy, on-the-spot guide to the most central aspect of wine making--the grapes themselves. Here are over 850 grapes, ranging from such widely acclaimed vines as Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Muscat, PinotNoir, Riesling, and Sauvignon Blanc, to economically important if less distinguished vines such as Airen, Grenache, Muller-Thurgau, Trebbiano, Syrah, and Rkatsiteli. Robinson offers a fact-filled introduction--discussing everything from rootstocks and wine blends, to vine pests and disease--andglossary of technical terms (from botrytis and carbonic maceration, to fanleaf and foxy, to skin, sugars, tannins, and yield). She then examines the world's grape varieties in alphabetical order, describing the basic characteristics of the wine produced by the grape (dry, sweet, high or low acidity, the bouquet), its likely quality, the regions that produce the best wine, and, if a blended wine, the blends that yield the best results. (As an added guide to the wine a grape might produce, the Guide includes an easy-to-use visual aid: a horizontal bar with a band which shows the range of quality, from ordinary to superb.) Robinson also shares much fascinating wine history, her deep insight into the wine industry, and more important, her own judgment on a wine. And Robinson does not hedge in judging a wine: discussing Carignan, France's most planted red wine, she comments Its wine is high ineverything--acidity, tannins, color, bitterness--but flavor and charm. This gives it the double inconvenience of being unsuitable for early consumption yet unworthy of maturation. And for Trebbiano, the most planted white grape in Italy (and with Ugni Blanc, which is the name of the grape inFrance, the second most planted white grape in the world), Robinson notes the word Trebbiano in a wine name almost invariably signals something light, white, crisp, and uninspiring. Perhaps most important, this portable book can be used in the store as a buying guide. With Robinson's Guide, simply find the grape variety on the label--or, if not listed, turn to Robinson's unique Grapes Behind the Names appendix in the back--look up the entry on that grape, and you willdiscover everything you need to know to make an informed decision to buy or pass. With Jancis Robinson by your side, you can evaluate a bottle of wine on the spot, no matter where, when, or by whom it has been produce

    Gathers recipes for antipasti, pasta, rice, soup, meat, fish, vegetables, and desserts.