Cooking with All Things Trader Joe’s (Hardcover)
June 6, 2009 by TheChef
Filed under Artistic Culinary Art Styles
Review
“Fans of Trader Joe’s have been waiting a long time for a book like this.” –Sacramento Bee
“Cooking With All Things Trader Joe’s provides fast and easy dinner solutions for neophytes and kitchen veterans alike” -San Diego Union-Tribune
“The ‘fusion cooking’ in this collection makes it much easier to create sophisticated, fun, eclectic yet accessible meals. This is a delightful cookbook…The bottom line is that this collection is perfect for cooks who are short on time but want healthful meals that are long on taste” -Tucson Citizen
“Authors Deana Gunn and Wona Miniati deliver the goods — in this case, all from Trader Joe’s…The recipes are modern and sensible and include lots of substitution ideas, in case an item is no longer in stock or you simply feel like experimenting. I’ve already made three dishes, and they were all winners.” -The Pioneer Press
“This cookbook is genius!” Sam Zien, TV host and author of Sam the Cooking Guy: Just a Bunch of Recipes (Back Cover)
Product Description
Love Trader Joe’s? This new independent cookbook features recipes that use ingredients all from Trader Joe’s. By combining Trader Joe’s unique products with fresh ingredients, Deana and Wona create clever shortcuts to quick and easy gourmet meals that are delicious and exciting. The recipes in this book treat Trader Joe’s like a “prep kitchen”–using the great selection of unique sauces, mixtures, and prepped items to make flavorful, natural, homemade food in a snap.
Many of the recipes are vegetarian or can easily be made vegetarian. Ethnic dishes like Saag Paneer Lasagna are scattered throughout, as well as classic comfort foods like Comfy Chicken Pot Pie. Crowd-pleasing recipes include Peanutty Sesame Noodles, Black Bean Soup, Macho Nacho, Seafood Paella, Curried Chicken Pitas, Wilted Spinach with Attitude, Honey I Ate the Chocolate Bread Pudding, and All Mixed Up Margaritas.
People who don’t know how to cook or don’t want to cook will appreciate the Bachelor Quickies section, featuring frozen and ready-to-heat selections that are matched to create complete and impressive menus.
With full-color photographs for every recipe, wine suggestions, humorous personal stories, and cooking tips sprinkled throughout, this collection is a must for any Trader Joe’s fan.
Buy Cooking with All Things Trader Joe’s (Hardcover) at Amazon
The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen (Hardcover)
May 31, 2009 by TheChef
Filed under Artistic Culinary Art Styles
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month November 2007: Inspired by the Strunk and White classic, Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking will quickly prove to be an essential culinary reference for both seasoned cooks and novices who might not know gravlax from gremolata. After a thorough “Notes on Cooking,” Ruhlman, a prolific cookbook author and popular blogger, settles in for an opinionated and informative A-Z roundup (from Acid to Zester) of cooking terms, lessons, and techniques reduced to their essential essence. Even with only one recipe (for veal stock), it’s a must-have for every kitchen library–a book that will help you re-think your approach to food. –Brad Thomas Parsons
From Publishers Weekly
Ruhlman’s slim 12th book, inspired by Strunk and White’s classic The Elements of Style, would more accurately have been titled Selected Elements of French Cooking. Organized in dictionary format, the book offers short definitions of culinary terms most likely to be encountered in a Continental restaurant kitchen: à la ficelle, jus lie, lardo, mise en place, oblique cut, oignon pique, rondeau, roulade. Entries for ladle, rolling pin and other common implements seem almost superfluous, while international items such as wok, tandoor, udon and cardamom are nowhere to be found (though to be fair, nam pla, kimchi and umami are included). An opening eight-page section announces, with finger wagging, that veal stock is the essential and discourses on eggs, salt and kitchen tools. Ruhlman (The Soul of a Chef) is an elegant writer and the entries he does include can be useful and sometimes entertaining. The real problem is the idiosyncratic, highly personal approach: you just don’t know what you’ll find in this book and what you won’t. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Buy The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen (Hardcover) at Amazon
Cooking Light Annual Recipes 2009: Every Recipe…A Year’s Worth of Cooking Light Magazine (Hardcover)
May 25, 2009 by TheChef
Filed under Artistic Culinary Art Styles
Product Description
About the Author
Cooking Light, America’s leading epicurean magazine and authority on healthy cooking, is dedicated to helping its more than 12 million readers eat smart, be fit, and live well. With a staff of registered dietitians and culinary professionals-and over 20 years of experience-Cooking Light is unrivaled in identifying emerging food trends and providing flavorful and healthful recipes as well as detailed information about healthy cooking techniques and tips.
Cooking for Two: 2009,The Year’s Best Recipes Cut Down to Size (Hardcover)
May 10, 2009 by TheChef
Filed under Artistic Culinary Art Styles
Product Description
Frustrated by wasting food you just can’t eat or ingredients you can’t use up? Tired of trying to figure out how to scale down a recipe so it doesn’t serve an army?
For this innovative cookbook, the editors and cooks at America’s Test Kitchen thought big but cooked small. We revamped our best recipes from the year to serve two. You’ll find everything from simple weeknight fare to special occasion dinners to salads, soups, sides and desserts. Birthday cake for two? We’ve got you covered!
A great gift for empty nesters, newlyweds, single people, young families (because new moms & dads are sick of eating mac-n-cheese) and more. Cooking for Two includes our guaranteed and much-loved equipment recommendations, Notes from the Test Kitchen feature, and ingredient ratings. The Smart Shopper’s Guide in the front of the book instructs your grocery shopping and meal planning by helping you make the most of ingredients.
Buy Cooking for Two: 2009,The Year’s Best Recipes Cut Down to Size (Hardcover) at Amazon
Artistic Fruit Designs Culinary Style
April 28, 2009 by TheChef
Filed under Artistic Culinary Art Styles
Maybe you are a self-confessed artist with a sharp mind for detail and beauty, but do you consider food preparation an art? Culinary art and skills is not just about making wonderful tasting meals, it also includes the service that is provided by restaurants or possibly if the horrible hospital food we never like to eat. Creating chocolate carvings and ice sculptures is all part of culinary arts.
However it doesn’t stop with just those things. Fruit designs are also part of culinary arts. They have been around for a few centuries and have become famous over the past few years. The use of culinary art in fruit design all started in Thailand and the carvings were limited to just the royal family. It was the chef’s responsibility to make sure that all meals prepared were not just pleasing to the palate, but also to the eye. Fruit and vegetable carvings, the art which is known as “kae-sa-lak” has become popular world over today. Thailand still holds the best of the culinary arts when it comes to fruit designs or so it is believed.
Known world over for its rich culture and arts, Thailand boasts many crafts which include the art of fruit and vegetable carvings. Once restricted solely in the preparation of the royal families meals, it is now used for food offerings to the monks, special occasions like weddings and even for ordinary every day people, and impacting the dining scene all over the world.
The culinary art of fruit designs can be broken into two categories. The categories consisted of working with hard fruits and the second is soft fruits. Hard fruits are used for the intricate design of flowers and animal designs and allows for great detail. Soft fruits are used in the culinary art for fruit designs that do not require a lot of detail, and these fruits are the banana, mangoes, and the papaya. Even though these fruits are used to form less detailed designs, they are more difficult to carve due to their consistency. They tend to get soft or mushy and lose their juices before a shape can be formed and they should require less time for carving into culinary arts of design, but because they require more skill, they cannot be done as fast as the harder fruits. So when it comes to the categories of soft and hard fruits, it takes a more skilled carver to form a fruit design from a soft fruit and make an art form of culinary excellence.
Experts in the culinary art of fruit and vegetable design do not just use the inside to create their design for presentation purposes. The whole vegetable and fruit are used including the peeling or skin. It is used to garnish the dishes and can be just as much an artistic design as the fruit or vegetable itself. Culinary professionals and most of the inhabitants of Thailand don’t require a box full of tools. As a matter of fact, most only need a sharp carving knife to create a life like masterpiece made solely from fruit and vegetables. It is amazing how some people are born with the talent for creating true culinary works of art out of simple fruit. Some attend school to learn how to achieve this talent. What about you?
