The Art Of Simple Food

An indispensable resource for home cooks from the woman who changed the way Americans think about food. Perhaps more responsible than anyone for the revolution in the way we eat, cook, and think about food, Alice Waters has “single-handedly chang[ed] the American palate” according to the New York Times. Her simple but inventive dishes focus on a passion for flavor and a reverence for locally produced, seasonal foods. With an essential repertoire of timeless, approachable recipes chosen to enhance and showcase great ingredients, The Art of Simple Food is an indispensable resource for home cooks. Here you will find Alice’s philosophy on everything from stocking your kitchen, to mastering fundamentals and preparing delicious, seasonal inspired meals all year long. Always true to her philosophy that a perfect meal is one that’s balanced in texture, color, and flavor, Waters helps us embrace the seasons’ bounty and make the best choices when selecting ingredients. Fill your market basket with pristine produce, healthful grains, and responsibly raised meat, poultry, and seafood, then embark on a voyage of culinary rediscovery that reminds us that the most gratifying dish is often the least complex.

Alice Waters, the iconic food luminary, presents 200 new recipes that share her passion for the many delicious varieties of vegetables, fruits, and herbs that you can cultivate in your own kitchen garden or find at your local farmers’ market. A beautiful vegetable-focused book, The Art of Simple Food II showcases flavor as inspiration and embodies Alice’s vision for eating what grows in the earth all year long. She shares her understanding of the whole plant, demystifying the process of growing and cooking your own food, and reveals the vital links between taste, cooking, gardening, and taking care of the land. Along the way, she inspires you to feed yourself deliciously through the seasons. From Rocket Salad with Babcock Peaches and Basil to Moroccan Asparagus and Spring Vegetable Ragout to Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic, Alice shares recipes that celebrate the ingredients she loves: tender leaf lettuces, fresh green beans, stone fruits in the height of summer, and so much more. Advice for growing your own fruits and vegetables abounds in the book—whether you are planting a garden in your backyard or on your front porch or fire escape. It is gleaned from her close relationships with local, sustainable farmers.

Raw food is for everyone, say the authors of one of Denmark’s best-selling cookbooks, and they make a compelling case for that claim. Equally at home on the coffee table or in the kitchen, The Art of Raw Food features gorgeous four-color photography and delicious yet simple raw food recipes as well as a background on the benefits of a raw food diet. Jens Casupei and Vibeke Kaupert, raw food enthusiasts with a flair for style as well as a passion for healthy living, introduce readers to the good (raw food), the bad (processed food), and the ugly (how processed food can make you feel). Sixty pages of information on health and diet are followed by 260 pages of mouth-watering recipes. In 140 recipes, the authors cover breakfast (Delicious Buckwheat Porridge); shakes and smoothies (Orange and Blackcurrant Shake); soups (Light and Fluffy Pepper Bisque); main dishes (Chili Sin Carne); soups, dips, and patés (Olive Tapenade); desserts (Pineapple Carpaccio with Berry Coulis); snacks (Quetzalcoatl Chocolate); and sauces and dressings (Sunflower and Beetroot Sauce). A terrific introduction to the world of raw foods for any newcomer, Raw Food offers plenty of diverse and unique recipes for every occasion. The Art of Raw Food official website: http://theartofrawfood.com/

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The definitive cookbook on French cuisine for American readers: "What a cookbook should be: packed with sumptuous recipes, detailed instructions, and precise line drawings. Some of the instructions look daunting, but as Child herself says in the introduction, 'If you can read, you can cook.'" —Entertainment Weekly “I only wish that I had written it myself.” —James Beard Featuring 524 delicious recipes and over 100 instructive illustrations to guide readers every step of the way, Mastering the Art of French Cooking offers something for everyone, from seasoned experts to beginners who love good food and long to reproduce the savory delights of French cuisine. Julia Child, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle break down the classic foods of France into a logical sequence of themes and variations rather than presenting an endless and diffuse catalogue of dishes—from historic Gallic masterpieces to the seemingly artless perfection of a dish of spring-green peas. Throughout, the focus is on key recipes that form the backbone of French cookery and lend themselves to an infinite number of elaborations—bound to increase anyone’s culinary repertoire. “Julia has slowly but surely altered our way of thinking about food. She has taken the fear out of the term ‘haute cuisine.’ She has increased gastronomic awareness a thousandfold by stressing the importance of good foundation and technique, and she has elevated our consciousness to the refined pleasures of dining." —Thomas Keller, The French Laundry

Small bites and treats to share The best gatherings are simple, yet somehow special. They might begin with an impromptu picnic after shopping at the farmer’s market or a late lunch with neighbors that stretches into cocktails under the stars. Whatever the occasion, this picture-perfect cookbook shows how to turn any meal into a delectable affair. These effortless recipes for brunch, teatime, happy hours, picnics, potlucks, and dessert all include a whimsical twist: a few slices of French toast doused in lavender syrup, rainbow chard empanadas served with pistachio crema, or a vibrant purple cauliflower hummus. With tips on creating an inviting table, stocking a pantry to make last-minute nibbles, and packing delicious parting gifts for guests, Food with Friends will inspire any get-together, however large or small.

In this collection of essays and recipes, Alice Waters showcases the simple building-block ingredients she uses to create gratifying, impromptu meals all year long. In her most intimate and compelling cookbook yet, Alice invites readers to step not into the kitchen at Chez Panisse, but into her own, sharing how she shops, stores, and prepares the pantry staples and preserves that form the core of her daily meals. Ranging from essentials like homemade chicken stock, red wine vinegar, and tomato sauce to the unique artisanal provisions that embody Alice’s unadorned yet delightful cooking style, she shows how she injects even simple meals with nuanced flavor and seasonal touches year-round. From fresh cheeses to quick pickles to sweets and spirits, these often-used ingredients are, as she explains, the key to kitchen spontaneity when combined with simple grains, vegetables, and other staple items. With charming pen-and-ink illustrations by her daughter, Fanny and Alice’s warm, inviting tone, the latest book from our most influential proponent of simple, organic cooking ensures a gracious, healthy meal is always within reach.

We hung the walls with old French movie posters advertising the films of Marcel Pagnol, films that had already provided us with both a name and an ideal: to create a community of friends, lovers, and relatives that span generations and is in tune with the seasons, the land, and human appetites. So writes Alice Waters of the opening of Berkeley's Chez Panisse Café on April Fool's Day, 1980. Located above the more formal Chez Panisse Restaurant, the Café is a bustling neighborhood bistro where guests needn't reserve far in advance and can choose from the ever-changing à la carte menu. It's the place where Alice Waters's inventive chefs cook in a more impromptu and earthy vein, drawing on the healthful, low-tech traditions of the cuisines of such Mediterranean regions as Catalonia, Campania, and Provence, while improvising and experimenting with the best products of Chez Panisse's own regional network of small farms and producers. In the Chez Panisse Café Cookbook, the follow-up to the award-winning Chez Panisse Vegetables, Alice Waters and her team of talented cooks offer more than 140 of the café's best-recipes--some that have been on the menu since the day café opened and others freshly reinvented with the honesty and ingenuity that have made Chez Panisse so famous. In addition to irresistible recipes, the Chez Panisse Café Cookbook is filled with chapter-opening essays on the relationships Alice has cultivated with the farmers, foragers and purveyors--most of them within an hour's drive of Berkeley--who make it possible for Chez Panisse to boast that nearly all food is locally grown, certifiably organic, and sustainably grown and harvested. Alice encourages her chefs and cookbook readers alike to decide what to cook only after visiting the farmer's market or produce stand. Then we can all fully appreciate the advantages of eating according to season--fresh spring lamb in late March, ripe tomato salads in late summer, Comice pear crisps in autumn. This book begins with a chapter of inspired vegetable recipes, from a vivid salad of avocados and beets to elegant Morel Mushroom Toasts to straightforward side dishes of Spicy Broccoli Raab and Garlicky Kale. The Chapter on eggs and cheese includes two of the café's most famous dishes, a garden lettuce salad with baked goat cheese and the Crostata di Perrella, the café's version of a calzone. Later chapters focus on fish and shellfish, beef, pork, lamb, and poultry, each offering its share of delightful dishes. You'll find recipes for curing your own pancetta, for simple grills and succulent braises, and for the definitive simple roast chicken--as well as sumptuous truffed chicken breasts. Finally the pastry cooks of Chez Panisse serve forth a chapter of uncomplicated sweets, including Apricot Bread Pudding, Chocolate Almond Cookies, and Wood Oven-baked Figs with Raspberries. Gorgeously designed and illustrated throughout with colored block prints by David Lance Goines, who has eaten at the café since the day it opened, Chez Panisse Café Cookbook is destined to become an indispensable classic. Fans of Alice Waters's restaurant and café will be thrilled to discover the recipes that keep them coming back for more. Loyal readers of her earlier cookbooks will delight in this latest collection of time-tested, deceptively simple recipes. And anyone who loves pure, vibrant, delicious fare made from the finest ingredients will be honored to add these new recipes to his or her repertoire.

“Chez Panisse is an extraordinary dining experience. . . . It is Alice Waters's brilliant gastronomic mind, her flair for cooking, and her almost revolutionary concept of menu planning that make Chez Panisse so exciting.”—James Beard Justly famed for the originality of its ever-changing menu and the range and virtuosity of its chef and owner, Alice Waters, Chez Panisse is known throughout the world as one of America's greatest restaurants. Dinner there is always an adventure—a different five-course meal is offered every night, and the restaurant has seldom repeated a meal since its opening in 1971. Alice Waters is a brilliant pioneer of a wholly original cuisine, at once elegant and earthy, classical and experimental, joyous in its celebration of the very finest and freshest ingredients. In this spectacular book, Alice Waters collects 120 of Chez Panisse's best menus, its most inspired transformations of classic French dishes. The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook is filled with dishes redolent of the savory bouquet of teh garden, the appealing aromas and roasty flavors of food cooked over the charcoal grill, and the delicate sweetness of fish fresh from the sea. There are menus here for different seasons of the year, for picnics and outdoor barbecues and other great occasions. Handsomely designed and illustrated by David Lance Goines, this is an indispensable addition to the shelf of every great cook and cookbook readers. “A lovely book, wonderfully inventive, and the food is very pure.”—Richard Olney