Simple Cake: All You Need to Keep Your Friends and Family in Cake [A Baking Book]


Odette Williams - 2019
    All of these recipes and more are within your reach in Simple Cake, a love letter from Brooklyn apron and bakeware designer Odette Williams to her favorite treat. With easy recipes and inventive decorating ideas, Williams gives you recipes for 10 base cakes, 15 toppings, and endless decorating ideas to yield a treat--such as Milk & Honey Cake, Coconut Cake, Summer Berry Pavlova, and Chocolatey Chocolate Cake--for any occasion. Williams also addresses the fundamentals for getting cakes just right, with foolproof recipes that can be cranked out whenever the urge strikes. Gorgeous photography, along with Williams's warm and heartfelt writing, elevate this book into something truly special.

Heart of the Artichoke: and Other Kitchen Journeys


David Tanis - 2010
    Nobody better embodies the present-day mantra "Eat real food in season" than David Tanis, one of the most original voices in American cooking. For more than a quarter-century, Tanis has been the chef at the groundbreaking Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California, where the menu consists solely of a single perfect meal that changes each evening. Tanis’s recipes are down-to-earth yet sophisticated, simple to prepare but impressive on the plate. Tanis opens this soulful, fun-to-read cookbook with his own private food rituals, those treats—jalapeño pancakes, beans on toast, pasta for one—for when you are on your own in the kitchen with no one else to satisfy. Then he follows with twenty incomparable menus (five per season) that serve four to six. Each transports the reader to places far and wide.  And for grand occasions, a time for the whole tribe to gather around the table, Tanis delivers festive menus for holiday feasts. So in one book, three kinds of cooking: small, medium, and large.

Twelve Recipes


Cal Peternell - 2014
    Based on the life-altering course of instruction he prepared and honed through many phone calls with his son, Twelve Recipes is the ultimate introduction to the kitchen. Peternell focuses on the core foods and dishes that comprise a successful home cook’s arsenal, each building skill upon skill—from toast, eggs, and beans, to vinaigrettes, pasta with tomato, and rice, to vegetables, soup, meats, and cake.Twelve Recipes will help home cooks develop a core repertoire of skills and increase their culinary confidence. Peternell tells you what basic ingredients and tools you need for a particular recipe, and then adds variations to expand your understanding. Each tip, instruction, and recipe connects with others to weave into a larger story that illuminates the connection between food and life. A deeply personal book, it was written by the chef alone and it glows with warmth and humor as he mulls over such mundane items as toast and rice to offer surprising new insights about foods that only seem exceedingly ordinary. It’s a book you’re as likely to keep by your bedside as your stovetop. With Peternell as your guide, the journey is pure pleasure and the destination is delicious.Twelve Recipes features gorgeous color photos and inset illustrations by Peternell’s wife and sons (all artists), and forewords by celebrated chef Alice Waters and New York Times columnist and bestselling author Michael Pollan.

See You on Sunday: A Cookbook for Family and Friends


Sam Sifton - 2020
    "They want to be part of something, even when they can't identify that longing as a need. They show up. Feed them. It isn't much more complicated than that." Regular dinners with family and friends, he argues, are a metaphor for connection, a space where memories can be shared as easily as salt or hot sauce, where deliciousness reigns. The point of Sunday supper is to gather around a table with good company and eat.From years spent talking to restaurant chefs, cookbook authors, and home cooks in connection with his daily work at The New York Times, Sam Sifton's See You on Sunday is a book to make those dinners possible. It is a guide to preparing meals for groups larger than the average American family (though everything here can be scaled down, or up). The 200 recipes are mostly simple and inexpensive ("You are not a feudal landowner entertaining the serfs"), and they derive from decades spent cooking for family and groups ranging from six to sixty.From big meats to big pots, with a few words on salad, and a diatribe on the needless complexity of desserts, See You on Sunday is an indispensable addition to any home cook's library. From how to shuck an oyster to the perfection of Mallomars with flutes of milk, from the joys of grilled eggplant to those of gumbo and bog, this book is devoted to the preparation of delicious proteins and grains, vegetables and desserts, taco nights and pizza parties.

Rachael Ray 365: No Repeats: A Year of Deliciously Different Dinners


Rachael Ray - 2005
    without a single repeat! Based on the original 30-Minute Meal cooking classes that started it all, these recipes prove that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every night. Rachael offers dozens of recipes that, once mastered, can become entirely new dishes with just a few ingredient swaps. Learn how to make a Southwestern Pasta Bake and you’ll be able to make a Smoky Chipotle Chili Con Queso Mac the next time. Try your hand at Spring Chicken with Leeks and Peas and you’re all set to turn out a rib-sticking Rice and Chicken Stoup that looks and tastes like an entirely different dish. As a best-selling cookbook author and host of three top-rated Food Network shows, Rachael Ray believes that both cooking and eating should be fun. Drawing from her own favorite dishes as well as those of her family, friends, and celebrities, she covers the flavor spectrum from Asian to Italian and dozens of delicious stops in between. Best of all, these flavor-packed dishes will satisfy your every craving and renew your taste for cooking. With so many delicious entrees to choose from you’ll never have an excuse for being in a cooking rut again.How about a brand-new 30-minute dinner every night for an entire year? Tired of making the same old same old, week after week after week? With Rachael’s most varied and comprehensive collection of 30-minute recipes ever, you’ll have everyone at your table saying “Yummo!” all year long. It’s amazing what a half hour can do for your tastebuds … 365 days a year!

The Bon Appetit Cookbook: Fast Easy Fresh


Barbara Fairchild - 2006
    These are not the old-fashioned, lackluster choices found in most 30-minute cookbooks and cooking shows. The Bon Appetit Fast Easy Fresh Cookbook is all about ease, speed—and taste. There are 1,100 exciting, flavorful recipes, with dishes that take a fun, modern spin like Arugula Salad with Olives, Pancetta, and Parmesan; Roasted Garlic Beef Stew; Linguine with Winter Pesto; Shrimp with Ginger-Herb Butter; Grilled Steak with Fresh Garden Herbs; and Peach Pie with Berry Jam. All of the recipes are simple enough for weeknights, but with their focus on fresh ingredients and vibrant flavors, they're really special enough for weekends, too.Illustrated throughout with handsome line drawings and 32 pages of beautiful new color photographs, this collection of favorite Bon Appetit recipes is sure to quickly become the go-to resource for home cooks everywhere, whether they're beginners or simply looking to stay on top of their game. For everyone who's eager to make truly satisfying and delicious meals—without spending a lot of time in the kitchen—this is the cookbook to reach for every night of the week.

How to Break an Egg: 1,453 Kitchen Tips, Food Fixes, Emergency Substitutions, and Handy Techniques


Fine Cooking Magazine - 2005
    "How to Break an Egg" is a one-of-a-kind resource of more than 1,400 kitchen-tested tips, shortcuts, and ingenious solutions to culinary emergencies, all organized in an easy-to-access format for quick reference or more leisurely reading. Look under Basil in the Ingredients chapter and you'll find tips for drying it, keeping its bright green color, and making your pesto go further. Look under Cookies in the Cooking chapter for clever ways to roll out cookie dough without it sticking, or to form perfectly shaped cookies, or to get just the right texture you want in your chocolate chip. You'll also discover tips on cookware and utensils, serving, storage, clean-up, and kitchen safety. If disaster strikes, flip immediately to When Things Go Wrong, an invaluable chapter of troubleshooting charts, whether your souffle is falling, your cheese sauce is curdling, or you've just discovered you don't have the right size pan for the cake you're in the middle of mixing up. In Handy Kitchen Techniques, you'll find 42 basic prep techniques, from trussing a chicken to clarifying butter, illustrated step-by-step in full color. The perfect reference for cooks at any level, "How to Break an Egg" will be your indispensable go-to kitchen resource. "In my cooking classes and on my radio show, I get those thorny questions regarding recipe disasters. Phew! Now I won't hve to make up 'creative answers' anymore. For the solution to every culinary dilemma, run out right now and pick up a copy of, "How to Break an Egg,"" --TomDouglas, restaurateur and author of "Tom's Big Dinners" "No kitchen is totally complete unless this book is on the shelf. It's a wealth of information, and I personally could not do without it!" --Paula Deen, author of "Paula Deen&Friends: Living it Up, Southern Style" "How do you create a warm place to proof bread or make a quick cup of buttermilk? Ever think of cutting cheesecake with a fishing line or defatting stock with ice cubes? The answers to these and hundreds of other practical questions rarely addressed in even the most sophisticated cookbooks are provided in this revolutionary new reference manual no serious cook can do without. I've waited a lifetime for an authoritative, sensible, reliable kitchen companion such as "How to Break an Egg" and cannot recommend the book highly enough. Just reading through it is an invaluable class in itself." --James Villas, author of "Crazy for Casseroles" and "Biscuit Bliss" "This is a terrific resource reference book and one that I think every cook, whether just beginning or old pro, will find helpful on a regular basis. "Fine Cooking" has been one of my favorite culinary magazines for a long time and "How to Break an Egg" reflects their friendly, researched, and illustrated approach that I look forward to reading every month." --John Ash, restaurateur and author of "John Ash Cooking One on One" "A good chef never serves his or her mistakes. Now you don't have to. Finally a fix-it manual for your kitchen." --Tom Colicchio, Chef/Owner of Craft restaurants and Gramercy Tavern

The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook: Old Fashioned Recipes From New York's Sweetest Bakery


Jennifer Appel - 1999
    This unassuming shop, where the smells of home-style baking weaken even the strongest will, has attracted a clientele that ranges from kids on their way home from school to celebrity glitterati. Cupcakes swirled with pastel frosting crowd the counter, and cakestands display Lemon Vanilla Bundt Cake, Apple Walnut Cake with Caramel Cream Cheese Icing, and Coconut Layer Cake, swathed in fluffy white frosting and covered in drifts of coconut. As Time Out New York says: "The secret to Magnolia's success is simple: Nobody knows how to bake like this anymore." Magnolia's owners Jennifer Appel and Allysa Torey know how, and in The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook they share their most mouth-watering recipes, from sweet breakfast treats like Dried-Cherry Crumb Buns to classic Iced Molasses Cookies, from decadently rich Caramel Pecan Brownies and Raspberry Marzipan Cheesecake to refreshing Lemon Icebox Pie. Their easy-to-follow recipes and invaluable baking hints mean that even the inexperienced baker will be able to frost the perfect layer cake, turn out the flakiest pie crust, and whip up the creamiest cheesecake. Illustrated with eight pages of glorious color photographs, The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook will inspire you to turn on the oven and create sweet memories for your family and friends.

Brunetti's Cookbook


Donna Leon - 2009
    Her books are infused with the sights and sounds, the arts, the culture, the family connections and loyalties, and the crime and corruption of a private world beyond the reach of the millions of tourists who visit the city each year. Perhaps most of all, Leon’s novels are known for their mouth-watering descriptions of food. Multicourse lunches and dinners at home with his wife, Paola, and his children, delectable snacks grabbed at a bar with a glass of wine or two, or a working meal at an unassuming neighborhood trattoria in the course of an investigation have all delighted Commissario Brunetti, as well as Leon’s countless fans. And then there’s the coffee, the pastries, the wine, and the grappa.In Brunetti’s Cookbook, Donna Leon’s best friend and favorite cook, Roberta Pianaro, brings to life those fabulous Venetian meals: orrechiette with asparagus; ravioli with squash, butter, and sage; artichokes stuffed with prosciutto; baked branzino; and pork stew with porcini and polenta —these are just a few of the nearly one hundred recipes for antipasti, pasta, fish, seafood, meat, and dessert in Brunetti’s Cookbook, ready for you to prepare and savor at home. The traditional Italian recipes are joined by excerpts from the critically acclaimed novels, four-color illustrations, and original essays by Donna Leon on food and life in Venice. Charming, insightful, and full of personality, they are the perfect addition to this delightful book.

The Geometry of Pasta


Caz Hildebrand - 2010
    For centuries these shapes have evolved alongside Italy’s cornucopia of local ingredients; if you know how the flavours relate to the forms, you hold the secret formula to good taste.  The Geometry of Pasta pairs over 100 authentic recipes from acclaimed chef Jacob Kenedy with award-winning designer Caz Hildebrand’s stunning black-and-white designs to reveal the science, culture, and philosophy behind spectacular pasta dishes from throughout Italian history.   A triumphant fusion of food and design, The Geometry of Pasta invites us to unlock the hidden properties of Italy’s most mathematically perfect deliciousness.