Her recipes, which are broken down into simple steps, teach readers how to cook, highlighting key tools and basic techniques everyone should know. And yet her flavors are anything but basic; Kelsey gives everyone the confidence to start with the 2.0 version of a recipe instead of the boring standards. For example, she makes her house pilaf with quinoa instead of rice, and her addictive fruit salad is a savory first course instead of a lackluster dessert.      With 100 recipes and 60 color photographs, Kitchen Confidence brings home all of the energy and spirit of the Cooking Channel show of the same name, making it an excellent handbook for newlyweds, recent college graduates, and those discovering their kitchens for the first time.

    This is what Thomas McNamee does most handily in his Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, a chronicle that begins with the seat-of-the-pants opening night of the "counterculture" venture in 1971, and ends 35 years later with Waters's restaurant an American institution--one credited with birthing California Cuisine, a style devoted to simplicity, freshness and seasonality. The book also limns, with tasty gossip, the ever-evolving Chez Panisse family, including the cook-artisans uniquely responsible for dish creation; follows the attempts, mostly failed, to put the restaurant on sound financial footing; shows how dishes and menus get made; and of course pursues Waters as she broadens her commitment to "virtuous agriculture" by establishing ventures like The Edible Schoolyard and The Yale Sustainable Food Project. The success of Chez Panisse--Gourmet magazine named it the best American restaurant in 2002--has everything to do with Waters, yet she remains an elusive protagonist. Sophisticated yet naive, professional and amateur, hard-driving but emotionally blurry, she invites reader interest but doesn't always satisfy it, as least as presented here. If McNamee cannot quite bring her to life, and if his tale lacks an insider's full conversance with his subject, he still engages readers in the considerable drama of people finding their way--blunderingly, with talented intent--to something new. With menus, narrated recipes, and photographs throughout, the book is vital reading for anyone interested in food, period. --Arthur Boehm

    But do we know where these everyday recipes came from, who invented them, and using what techniques? This book provides a colourful and entertaining journey through the history of cuisine, celebrating the world's greatest dishes.

    Brillat-Savarin (1783-1833) made famous the aphorism, "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are." He believed that food defines a nation.

    If you've ever fantasized about feasting on Frank Sinatra's Barbecued Lamb, lunching on Lucille Ball's "Chinese-y Thing," diving ever-so-neatly into Joan Crawford's Poached Salmon, or wrapping your lips around Rock Hudson's cannoli – and really, who hasn't? – hold on to your oven mitts!     In The Dead Celebrity Cookbook: A Resurrection of Recipes by 150 Stars of Stage and Screen, Frank DeCaro—the flamboyantly funny Sirius XM radio personality best known for his six-and-a-half-year stint as the movie critic on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart—collects hundreds of recipes passed on from legendary stars of stage and screen, proving that before there were celebrity chefs, there were celebrities who fancied themselves chefs.   Their all-but-forgotten recipes—rescued from out-of-print cookbooks, musty biographies, vintage magazines, and dusty pamphlets—suggest a style of home entertaining ripe for reexamination if not revival, while reminding intrepid gourmands that, for better or worse, Hollywood doesn't make celebrities (or cooks) like it used to. Starring Elizabeth Taylor's Chicken with Avocado and MushroomsFarrah Fawcett's Sausage and PeppersLiberace's Sticky Buns Bette Davis's Red Flannel Hash Bea Arthur's Good Morning Mushroom Tomato Toast Dudley Moore's Crème BrûléeGypsy Rose Lee's Portuguese Fish ChowderJohn Ritter's Famous Fudge Andy Warhol's Ghoulish Goulash Vincent Price's Pepper SteakJohnny Cash's Old Iron Pot Family-Style Chili Vivian Vance's Chicken Kiev Sebastian Cabot's Avocado Surprise Lawrence Welk's Vegetable Croquettes Ann Miller's Cheese SouffléJerry Orbach's TrifleTotie Fields's Fruit MellowIrene Ryan's Tipsy Basingstoke Klaus Nomi's Key Lime TartRichard Deacon's Bitter and BoozeSonny Bono's Spaghetti with Fresh Tomato Sauce And many others from breakfast to dessert.

    In this memoir, he shares the remarkable story of his culinary coming-of-age. Growing up in the Bronx and Nigeria (where he was sent by his mother to "learn respect"), food was Onwuachi's great love. He launched his own catering company with twenty thousand dollars he made selling candy on the subway, and trained in the kitchens of some of the most acclaimed restaurants in the country. But the road to success is riddled with potholes. As a young chef, Onwuachi was forced to grapple with just how unwelcoming the world of fine dining can be for people of color, and his first restaurant, the culmination of years of planning, shuttered just months after opening. -Notes from a Young Black Chef is one man's pursuit of his passions, despite the odds.

    Whether charting the rise of our love affair with Chinese food through San Francisco’s fabled The Mandarin, evoking the richness of Italian food through Mamma Leone’s, or chronicling the rise and fall of French haute cuisine through Henri Soulé’s Le Pavillon, food historian Paul Freedman uses each restaurant to tell a wider story of race and class, immigration and assimilation. Freedman also treats us to a scintillating history of the then-revolutionary Schrafft’s, a chain of convivial lunch spots that catered to women, and that bygone favorite, Howard Johnson’s, which pioneered midcentury, on-the-road dining, only to be swept aside by McDonald's. Lavishly designed with more than 100 photographs and images, including original menus, Ten Restaurants That Changed America is a significant and highly entertaining social history.

    Shuttling between continents as a child, she lived a life of dislocation that would become habit as an adult, never quite at home in the world. And yet, through all her travels, her favorite food remained the simple rice she first ate sitting on the cool floor of her grandmother’s kitchen in South India.Poignant and surprising, Love, Loss, and What We Ate is Lakshmi’s extraordinary account of her journey from that humble kitchen, ruled by ferocious and unforgettable women, to the judges’ table of Top Chef and beyond. It chronicles the fierce devotion of the remarkable people who shaped her along the way, from her headstrong mother who flouted conservative Indian convention to make a life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfather—a brilliant engineer with an irrepressible sweet tooth—to the man seemingly wrong for her in every way who proved to be her truest ally. A memoir rich with sensual prose and punctuated with evocative recipes, it is alive with the scents, tastes, and textures of a life that spans complex geographies both internal and external.Love, Loss, and What We Ate is an intimate and unexpected story of food and family—both the ones we are born to and the ones we create—and their enduring legacies.

    Originally published in 1982, the book's elegant, innovative recipes and emphasis on pure, fresh, ingredients ushered a new passion for food and hospitality into the American consciousness. The lively collection of clear, step-by-step recipes ranges from sublimely refined traditions-Pesto, Manhattan Clam Chowder, and Stuffed Artichokes-to original creations certain to become the topic of conversation at any dinner party. There's PatS de Campagne with Walnuts and Juniper Berries. Fruit-Stuffed Cornish Hens. Caviar Eclairs. Blueberry Bisque. Plus over 300 more recipes for hors d'oeuvres, dips and sauces, picnic fare, entrSes, salads, soups, breads, desserts. Throughout the book are valuable menu and serving suggestions, literary quotes, food guides, food lore, and whimsical illustrations. Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Quality Paperback Book Club, Book-of-the-Month Club's HomeStyle Books, Better Homes & Gardens Family Book Service, and the ABA Basic Booklist. A James Beard Book Awards inductee into the cookbook Hall of Fame.

    The daughter of a chef and a gourmet, this talented young cartoonist comes by her obsession honestly. In her forthright, thoughtful, and funny memoir, Lucy traces key episodes in her life thus far, framed by what she was eating at the time and lessons learned about food, cooking, and life. Each chapter is bookended with an illustrated recipe—many of them treasured family dishes, and a few of them Lucy's original inventions.A welcome read for anyone who ever felt more passion for a sandwich than is strictly speaking proper, Relish is a book for our time: it invites the reader to celebrate food as a connection to our bodies and a connection to the earth, rather than an enemy, a compulsion, or a consumer product.

    Now, in a charmingly illustrated tribute to the capital of sweets, Greenspan presents a splendid assortment of recipes from Paris’s foremost pastry chefs in a book that is as transporting to read as it is easy to use. From classic recipes, some centuries old, to updated innovations, Paris Sweets provides a sumptuous guide to creating cookies, from the fabled madeleine to simple, ultra-buttery sables; tarts, from the famous Tatin, which began its life as an upside-down error, to a delightful strawberry tart embellished with homemade strawberry marshmallows; and a glorious range of cakes–lemon-drenched "weekend cake," fudge cake, and the show-stopping Opera. Paris Sweets brims with assorted temptations that even a novice can prepare, such as coffee éclairs, rum-soaked babas, and meringue puffs. Evocative portraits of the pastry shops and chefs, as well as information on authentic French ingredients, make this a truly comprehensive tour. An elegant gift for Francophiles, armchair travelers, bakers of all skill levels, and certainly for oneself, Paris Sweets brings home a taste of enchantment.

    With more than half a million copies of their books in print, Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois have proven that people want to bake their own bread, so long as they can do it easily and quickly.Crusty baguettes, mouth-watering pizzas, hearty sandwich loaves, and even buttery pastries can easily become part of your own personal menu, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day will teach you everything you need to know, opening the eyes of any potential baker."

    And from then on, Tupelo's food has been consistently fresh, made from scratch, sassy, and scrumptious.Heralding in its own unique style of cuisine representative of the New South, the Tupelo Honey Cafe salutes the love of Southern traditions at the table, but like the people of Asheville, marches to its own drum. The result is a cookbook collection of more than 125 innovative riffs on Southern favorites, illustrated with four-color photographs of the food, restaurant, locals, farmers' markets, and farms, in addition to black-and-white archival photography of Asheville. At Tupelo, grits become Goat Cheese Grits, fried chicken becomes Nutty Fried Chicken with Mashed Sweet Potatoes, and poached eggs become Eggs with Homemade Crab Cakes and Lemon Hollandaise Sauce.Capturing the independent and creative spirit of Asheville, Tupelo has garnered praise from the New York Times, Southern Living, and the Food Network, just to name a few.

    Harris has spent much of her life researching the food and foodways of the African Diaspora. High on the Hog is the culmination of years of her work, and the result is a most engaging history of African American cuisine. Harris takes the reader on a harrowing journey from Africa across the Atlantic to America, tracking the trials that the people and the food have undergone along the way. From chitlins and ham hocks to fried chicken and vegan soul, Harris celebrates the delicious and restorative foods of the African American experience and details how each came to form such an important part of African American culture, history, and identity. Although the story of African cuisine in America begins with slavery, High on the Hog ultimately chronicles a thrilling history of triumph and survival. The work of a masterful storyteller and an acclaimed scholar, Jessica B. Harris's High on the Hog fills an important gap in our culinary history. Praise for Jessica B. Harris: "Jessica Harris masters the ability to both educate and inspire the reader in a fascinating new way." -Marcus Samuelsson, chef owner of Restaurant Aquavit

    Includes more than fifty essays that recount extraordinary meals and little-known facts, of some of the world's most excellent foods - from the origin of an ingredient in a dish, to its history, to the vivid personalities - including the author's wife - who cook, serve and eat those dishes.