Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally


Alisa Smith - 2007
    Stranded in their off-the-grid summer cottage in the Canadian wilderness with unexpected guests, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon turned to the land around them. They caught a trout, picked mushrooms, and mulled apples from an abandoned orchard with rose hips in wine. The meal was truly satisfying; every ingredient had a story, a direct line they could trace from the soil to their forks. The experience raised a question: Was it possible to eat this way in their everyday lives?Back in the city, they began to research the origins of the items that stocked the shelves of their local supermarket. They were shocked to discover that a typical ingredient in a North American meal travels roughly the distance between Boulder, Colorado, and New York City before it reaches the plate. Like so many people, Smith and MacKinnon were trying to live more lightly on the planet; meanwhile, their “SUV diet” was producing greenhouse gases and smog at an unparalleled rate. So they decided on an experiment: For one year they would eat only food produced within 100 miles of their Vancouver home.It wouldn’t be easy. Stepping outside the industrial food system, Smith and MacKinnon found themselves relying on World War II–era cookbooks and maverick farmers who refused to play by the rules of a global economy. What began as a struggle slowly transformed into one of the deepest pleasures of their lives. For the first time they felt connected to the people and the places that sustain them.For Smith and MacKinnon, the 100-mile diet became a journey whose destination was, simply, home. From the satisfaction of pulling their own crop of garlic out of the earth to pitched battles over canning tomatoes, Plenty is about eating locally and thinking globally. The authors’ food-focused experiment questions globalization, monoculture, the oil economy, environmental collapse, and the tattering threads of community. Thought-provoking and inspiring, Plenty offers more than a way of eating. In the end, it’s a new way of looking at the world.From the Hardcover edition.

French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork, and Corkscrew


Peter Mayle - 2001
    We visit the Foire aux Escargots. We attend a truly French marathon, where the beverage of choice is Ch�teau Lafite-Rothschild rather than Gatorade. We search out the most pungent cheese in France, and eavesdrop on a heated debate on the perfect way to prepare an omelet. We even attend a Catholic mass in the village of Richerenches, a sacred event at which thanks are given for the aromatic, mysterious, and breathtakingly expensive black truffle. With Mayle as our charming guide, we come away satisfied (if a little hungry), and with a sudden desire to book a flight to France at once.

Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Cooks, and Good Food


Jeff Potter - 2007
    Author and cooking geek Jeff Potter helps you apply curiosity, inspiration, and invention to the food you prepare. Why do we bake some things at 350°F / 175°C and others at 375°F / 190°C? Why is medium-rare steak so popular? And just how quickly does a pizza cook if you “overclock” an oven to 1,000°F / 540°C? This expanded new edition provides in-depth answers, and lets you experiment with several labs and more than 100 recipes— from the sweet (a patent-violating chocolate chip cookie) to the savory (pulled pork under pressure).When you step into the kitchen, you’re unwittingly turned into a physicist and a chemist. This excellent and intriguing resource is for inquisitive people who want to increase their knowledge and ability to cook.• Discover what type of cook you are and learn how to think about flavor• Understand how protein denaturation, Maillard reactions, caramelization, and otherreactions impact the foods we cook• Gain firsthand insights from interviews with researchers, food scientists, knife experts, chefs, and writers—including science enthusiast Adam Savage, chef Jaques Pépin, and chemist Hervé This

Clementine in the Kitchen


Samuel V. Chamberlain - 1943
    Collects French recipes for everyday dishes and gourmet meals prepared by Clementine, a Burgundian cook for the Chamberlain family living first in post-World War II France, then in Massachusetts.

Chocolate and Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen


Clotilde Dusoulier - 2007
    But her infatuation with food was born not in her mother’s Parisian kitchen, but in San Francisco, where she moved after college and discovered a new world of tastes. When she returned to her beloved France, her culinary exploits inspired her popular and critically acclaimed blog, ChocolateandZucchini.com.In her first book, Dusoulier provides a glimpse into the life of a young Parisian as she savors all that the city has to offer and shares her cooking philosophy in the form of more than 75 recipes that call for healthy ingredients (such as zucchini) and more indulgent tastes (such as chocolate). The Los Angeles Times calls her recipes "simple, charming, and fun." Appetizers such as Cumin Cheese Puffs, sandwiches and tarts like Tomato Tatin, soups like Chestnut and Mushroom, main dishes including Mustard Chicken Stew, and desserts like Chocolate and Caramel Tart can all be found alongside menus for entertaining, as well as tips for throwing cocktail or dinner parties with French flair. Chocolate & Zucchini is the book for anyone who has journeyed to Paris and can still recall the delicious flavors and aromas—or for those of us who only dream about them.

The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs


Karen Page - 2008
    Drawing on dozens of leading chefs' combined experience in top restaurants across the country, Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg present the definitive guide to creating "deliciousness" in any dish. Thousands of ingredient entries, organized alphabetically and cross-referenced, provide a treasure trove of spectacular flavor combinations. Readers will learn to work more intuitively and effectively with ingredients; experiment with temperature and texture; excite the nose and palate with herbs, spices, and other seasonings; and balance the sensual, emotional, and spiritual elements of an extraordinary meal.Seasoned with tips, anecdotes, and signature dishes from America's most imaginative chefs, THE FLAVOR BIBLE is an essential reference for every kitchen.

How to Cook Without a Book: Recipes and Techniques Every Cook Should Know by Heart


Pam Anderson - 2000
    Times have changed. Today we have an overwhelming array of ingredients and a fraction of the cooking time, but Anderson believes the secret to getting dinner on the table lies in the past. After a long day, who has the energy to look up a recipe and search for the right ingredients before ever starting to cook? To make dinner night after night, Anderson believes the first two steps--looking for a recipe, then scrambling for the exact ingredients--must be eliminated.  Understanding that most recipes are simply "variations on a theme," she innovatively teaches technique, ultimately eliminating the need for recipes.Once the technique or formula is mastered, Anderson encourages inexperienced as well as veteran cooks to spread their culinary wings.  For example, after learning to sear a steak, it's understood that the same method works for scallops, tuna, hamburger, swordfish, salmon, pork tenderloin, and more. You never need to look at a recipe again. Vary the look and flavor of these dishes with interchangeable pan sauces, salsas, relishes, and butters.Best of all, these recipes rise above the mundane Monday-through-Friday fare.  Imagine homemade ravioli and lasagna for weeknight supper, or from-scratch tomato sauce before the pasta water has even boiled.  Last-minute guests? Dress up simple tomato sauce with capers and olives or shrimp and red pepper flakes. Drizzle sautéed chicken breasts with a balsamic vinegar pan sauce. Anderson teaches you how to do it--without a recipe. Don't buy exotic ingredients and follow tedious instructions for making hors d'oeuvres. Forage through the pantry and refrigerator for quick appetizers. The ingredients are all there; the method is in your head. Master four simple potato dishes--a bake, a cake, a mash, and a roast--compatible with many meals. Learn how to make the five-minute dinner salad, easily changing its look and flavor depending on the season and occasion. Tuck a few dessert techniques in your back pocket and effortlessly turn any meal into a special occasion.There's real rhyme and reason to Pam's method at the beginning of every chapter: To dress greens, "Drizzle salad with oil, salt, and pepper, then toss until just slick. Sprinkle in some vinegar to give it a little kick." To make a frittata, "Cook eggs without stirring until set around the edges. Bake until puffy, then cut it into wedges." Each chapter also contains a helpful at-a-glance chart that highlights the key points of every technique, and a master recipe with enough variations to keep you going until you've learned how to cook without a book.

Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef’s Journey to Discover America’s New Melting-Pot Cuisine


Edward Lee - 2018
    In a nation of immigrants who bring their own culinary backgrounds to this country, what happens one or even two generations later? What does their cuisine become? It turns into a cuisine uniquely its own and one that Lee argues makes America the most interesting place to eat on earth. Lee illustrates this through his own life story of being a Korean immigrant and a New Yorker and now a Southerner. In Off the Menu, he shows how we each have a unique food memoir that is worthy of exploration. To Lee, recipes are narratives and a conduit to learn about a person, a place, or a point in time. He says that the best way to get to know someone is to eat the food they eat. Each chapter shares a personal tale of growth and self-discovery through the foods Lee eats and the foods of the people he interacts with—whether it’s the Korean budae jjigae of his father or the mustard beer cheese he learns to make from his wife’s German-American family. Each chapter is written in narrative form and punctuated with two recipes to highlight the story, including Green Tea Beignets, Cornbread Pancakes with Rhubarb Jam, and Butternut Squash Schnitzel. Each recipe tells a story, but when taken together, they form the arc of the narrative and contribute to the story we call the new American food.

The Whole30: The 30-Day Guide to Total Health and Food Freedom


Melissa Hartwig Urban - 2014
    Get started on your Whole30 transformation with the #1 New York Times best-selling The Whole30. Since 2009, Melissa Hartwig Urban's critically-acclaimed Whole30 program has quietly led hundreds of thousands of people to effortless weight loss and better health—along with stunning improvements in sleep quality, energy levels, mood, and self-esteem. The program accomplishes all of this by specifically targeting people’s habits and emotional relationships with food. The Whole30 is designed to help break unhealthy patterns of behavior, stop stress-related comfort eating, and reduce cravings, particularly for sugar and carbohydrates. Many Whole30 participants have described achieving “food freedom”—in just thirty days.   Now, The Whole30 offers a stand-alone, step-by-step plan to break unhealthy habits, reduce cravings, improve digestion, and strengthen your immune system. The Whole30 prepares participants for the program in five easy steps, previews a typical thirty days, teaches the basic meal preparation and cooking skills needed to succeed, and provides a month’s worth of recipes designed to build confidence in the kitchen and inspire the taste buds. Motivating and inspiring with just the right amount of signature tough love, The Whole30 features real-life success stories, an extensive quick-reference FAQ, detailed elimination and reintroduction guidelines, and more than 100 recipes using familiar ingredients, from simple one-pot meals to complete dinner party menus.

The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science


J. Kenji López-Alt - 2015
    Kenji López-Alt has pondered all these questions and more. In The Food Lab, Kenji focuses on the science behind beloved American dishes, delving into the interactions between heat, energy, and molecules that create great food. Kenji shows that often, conventional methods don’t work that well, and home cooks can achieve far better results using new—but simple—techniques. In hundreds of easy-to-make recipes with over 1,000 full-color images, you will find out how to make foolproof Hollandaise sauce in just two minutes, how to transform one simple tomato sauce into a half dozen dishes, how to make the crispiest, creamiest potato casserole ever conceived, and much more.

Eating for Beginners: An Education in the Pleasures of Food from Chefs, Farmers, and One Picky Kid


Melanie Rehak - 2010
    Since reading the likes of Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and Wendell Berry, she’d tried to eat thoughtfully as well. But after the birth of her son, Jules, she wanted to know more: What mattered most, organic or local? Who were these local farmers? Was it possible to be an ethical consumer and still revel in the delights of food? And why wouldn’t Jules eat anything, organic or not?Eating for Beginners details the year she spent discovering how to be an eater and a parent in today’s increasingly complicated world. She joined the kitchen staff at Applewood, a small restaurant owned by a young couple committed to using locally grown food, and worked on some of the farms that supplied it. Between prepping the nightly menu, milking goats, and sorting beans, Rehak gained an understanding of her own about what to eat and why. (It didn’t hurt that, along the way, even the most dedicated organic farmers admitted that their children sometimes ate McDonald's.) And as we follow her on her quest to find the pleasure in doing the right thing—and become a better cook in the bargain—we too will make our peace with food.

Real Food: What to Eat and Why


Nina Planck - 2006
    The country's leading expert on farmers' markets and traditional foods tells the truth about the foods your grandmother praised but doctors call dangerous.Everyone loves real food, but they're afraid bacon and eggs will give them a heart attack--thus the culinary abomination known as the egg-white omelet. But it turns out that tossing out the yolk isn't smart. Real Food reveals why traditional foods are not only delicious--everyone knows that butter tastes better--but are actually good for you, making the nutritional case for egg, cream, butter, grass-fed beef, roast chicken with the skin, lard, cocoa butter, and more.In lively, personal chapters on produce, dairy, meat, fish, Nina explains how the foods we've eaten for thousands of years--pork, lamb, raw milk cheese, sea salt--have been falsely accused. Industrial foods like corn syrup, which lurks everywhere from fruit juice to chicken broth, are to blame for the triple epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, not real food.Nina Planck grew up on a vegetable farm in Virginia and learned to eat right from her no-nonsense parents: along with lots of local fruits and vegetables, the Plancks drank raw milk and ate meatloaf, bacon, and eggs with impunity. But the nutritional trends ran the other way--fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol were taboo--and in her teens and twenties, Nina tried vegan, vegetarian, low-fat, and low-cholesterol diets, with unhappy results.When she opened the first farmers' markets in London, Nina began to eat real food again--for pleasure, not health--and to her surprise she lost weight and felt great. She began to wonder about the farmhouse diet back home. Was it deadly, as the cardiologists say? Happily for people who love food, the answer is no.Real Food upends the conventional wisdom on diet and health. Prepare for pleasant surprises on whipped cream and other delights. The days of deprivation are over.(from the flap)

Antoni in the Kitchen


Antoni Porowski - 2019
    With appealing vulnerability, he shows cooks of all levels how to become more confident and casual in the kitchen. The verve and naturalness of his approach earned raves from Food & Wine and Bon Appétit to GQ and the New York Times, which noted his dishes prove that “sometimes simple is anything but simplistic.” Some of the recipes in this book are weeknight healthyish meals, while others are perfect for off-the-cuff entertaining. Visual stunners, they’re often composed of fewer than five ingredients. Whether Bastardized Easy Ramen; Malaysian Chili Shrimp; Roasted Carrots with Carrot-Top Pesto; or Salty Lemon Squares, all are visual stunners and can be carried off with panache, even by beginners.

French Kids Eat Everything: How Our Family Moved to France, Cured Picky Eating, Banned Snacking, and Discovered 10 Simple Rules for Raising Happy, Healthy Eaters


Karen Le Billon - 2012
    But she didn't expect to be lectured for slipping her fussing toddler a snack, or to be forbidden from packing her older daughter a school lunch. Karen is intrigued by the fact that French children happily eat everything—from beets to broccoli, from salad to spinach—while French obesity rates are a fraction of what they are in North America.Karen soon begins to see the wisdom in the "food rules" that the French use to foster healthy eating habits and good manners in babies and children. Some of the rules call into question both our eating habits and our parenting styles. Other rules evoke commonsense habits that we used to share but have somehow forgotten. Taken together, the rules suggest that we need to dramatically rethink the way we feed children, at home and at school.Combining personal anecdotes with practical tips and appetizing recipes—including Zucchini and Spinach Puree and Bouillabaisse (Fish Soup) for Babies—French Kids Eat Everything is a humorous, provocative look at families, food, and children that is filled with inspiration and advice that every parent can use.

Zaitoun: Recipes from the Palestinian Kitchen


Yasmin Khan - 2018
    It has evolved over several millennia through the influences of Arabic, Jewish, Armenian, Persian, Turkish, and Bedouin cultures and civilizations that have ruled over, or lived in, the area known as ancient Palestine.In each place she visits, Khan enters the kitchens of Palestinians of all ages and backgrounds, discovering the secrets of their cuisine and sharing heartlifting stories.