International Books - Page 13

Moro: The Cookbook

Samuel Clark, Samantha Clark

Amazon Price: $18.15 List Price: $27.50 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Ebury Press Amazon Marketplace: 34 new & used starting at $17.16

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Fabulous but not for first-timers 4 out of 5 stars.
8 of 9 people found this review helpful.

This is a fabulous book, with such depth and breadth each time you go back to flip it open something new catches your eye. That said, authenticity is prized over simplicity, and many of the dishes I enjoyed in Spain and wanted to recreate at home are surprisingly time-consuming if not complex to make - potatas bravas and potatas tortilla are 2 examples. However the rice dishes are outstanding and it's a wonderful education in using spices such as saffron and smoked paprika.

This isn't a book for mid-week suppers or beginning cooks looking for everything condensed into a 5 easy steps. But the food it helps you produce is outstanding and its a great couch read.

Editorial Review:

Samuel and Samantha Clark share a passion for the intense flavours of the food of Spain, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. The word “Moro”, meaning “Moor” in Spanish, encapsulates much of their style of cooking -- a heady blend of Arabic and Hispanic dishes that offer warm spices and fiery sauces, slow-cooked earthy stews and delicate flavourings.

Sam and Sam Clark are the chef-owners of Moro, one of London’s most talked-about restaurants. In Moro: The Cookbook, Sam and Sam have distilled the restaurant’s most accomplished and delicious recipes for home cooking. Authenticity is the key and their food remains true to the origins of each dish. Most of these recipes are very simple -- it is the resulting flavours that are wonderfully complex.

Around the World in 80 Dinners: The Ultimate Culinary Adventure

Bill Jamison, Cheryl Alters Jamison

Amazon Price: $17.72 List Price: $24.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: William Morrow Amazon Marketplace: 72 new & used starting at $6.80

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Join Cheryl and Bill Jamison, James Beard Award winners of The Big Book of Outdoor Cooking and Entertaining, on a gastronomic tour around the world

After years of writing award-winning cookbooks, renowned culinary experts Cheryl and Bill Jamison were ready to take a break. So in the fall of 2005 they packed their bags, locked up their house in Santa Fe, and set off on a three-month-long visit to ten countries—all on frequent-flier miles.

Among their stops were:

Bali
Where they celebrated a second honeymoon in Ubud and encountered a rogue monkey

Australia
Where they found the world's best breakfast sandwich and visited family-owned wineries

Thailand
Where they took a wild ride on an elephant in an enormous forest reserve

India
Where they found themselves in the midst of Diwali, the Festival of Lights

China
Where they attended a banquet of local Chiu Chow cuisine that required hours of preparation by the "Emeril of Chaozhou" and forty cooks

South Africa
Where they went on a safari among rhinos, giraffes, and very hungry lions

Brazil
Where they soaked in the sun and Creole flavors of the coastal town of Salvador

Combining the intelligence and humor of Anthony Bourdain with the charm and insight of Frances Mayes, Around the World in 80 Dinners transforms traveling into an unforgettable odyssey.

The Food of India

Priya Wickramasinghe, Carol Selva Rajah

List Price: $40.00 By: Whitecap Books Amazon Marketplace: 8 new & used starting at $15.00

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Delicious recipes and photography 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

When I decided to purchase an Indian cookbook, I looked extensively through the recipes in many different ones before buying this one. Yes, the pictures alone make this a coffee table book worth having, but the recipes were also very well laid out and looked acheivable.

For a point of reference, I am a fairly experienced home cook, but not a pro by any stretch (except possibly a pro at cookbook collecting). This past Saturday night, I had a few friends over and made the following recipes (making them for the first time, I might add) - Butter Chicken, Lamb Korma, Matar Paneer, Raita, Carrot Halva (plus some spiced basmati rice). It was unbelievably scrumptious - with the added bonus of very straightforward, foolproof recipes. I hope to make my way through some more of them very soon. :)

Ditto to several other reviewers' comments that you will need some special spices/ingredients if you don't already have a kitchen stocked for Indian cooking, but nothing that I was unable to find (in the Salt Lake City area). I highly recommend this cookbook.

Editorial Review:

This is the latest addition to our richly photographed series on the gastronomic delights of countries around the world. In India, even a short jaunt from one town to another yields different cooking styles, with even more radical and enticing variations between regions. From the Hindu- and Jain-influenced vegetarianism of the South to the exotic, Arabic-influenced Moghul cuisine in the North, this book allows you to explore the culinary wonders of this fascinating country. Curries, breads, succulent meat dishes, complex spice mixes, and sweets-it's all here, with brilliant color photographs to provide inspiration. Clear, step-by-step instructions help you master ancient preparation and cooking techniques for consistently delicious results.

The Artful Vegan: Fresh Flavors from the Millennium Restaurant

Eric Tucker, Bruce Enloe, Renee Comet, Amy Pearce

List Price: $35.00 By: Ten Speed Press Amazon Marketplace: 9 new & used starting at $25.48

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Either know how or learn fast! 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 21 people found this review helpful.

This is the book that answers all those redundant questions us vegans have to endure constantly! "So what do you eat? Don't you miss meat or cheeseburgers?" The general public has no idea how much money, effort and time THEY actually spend eating meat/dairy foods and/or how actually redundant THEIR diets really are. Not to mention the detriment to the health of not only their bodies, but our enviornment! I don't want to soap box here, but I see these same people make food such an occasion in every sence, but instead of shopping the farmers markets, hunting down the most exotic and freshest of produce... or hitting your local wholefoods market to experience a more fresh approach to groceries, I see these same people eating at every gas station, 7-11 or some curious looking stranger at a food cart! Either know or get passionate about knowing, it's going in your mouth, in your bloodstream and through every vital organ, intestine and exit pathway! Shouln't it be of the highest quality???

Editorial Review:

Anyone who says haute cuisine, big flavour and vegan cooking can't go together hasn't been to San Francisco's famed Millennium Restaurant. Now, Millennium chef Eric Tucker brings us another collection of his mind-blowing vegan fare in The Artful Vegan. Bringing the farmers' market to fine dining, these 140 new recipes are fresh, impassioned vegan interpretations of traditional and contemporary global cuisine - and they're nutritious, meat- and dairy-free, and all organic.

Some Like It Hot: Spicy Favorites from the World's Hot Zones

Clifford A. Wright

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Great Read and Hot Recipes. Buy It! 5 out of 5 stars.
20 of 20 people found this review helpful.

`Some Like It Hot' by noted culinary writer, Clifford A. Wright is a real gem. I was surprised to find such a book written by Wright, who is one of the leading scholarly experts on food of the Mediterranean, and, as he so elegantly illustrates himself, the Mediterranean is hot a hotbed of spicy foods.

Therefore, Wright's primary focus is on the various world spicy cuisines. He identifies the following centers of spicy food culture:

Western South America, primarily Peru and Bolivia.
Mexico and Southwestern U.S.
Cajun Cuisine
Jamaica
Western coast of Africa, primarily Senegal, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, and Nigeria
North Africa (the Madgreb) of Algeria and Tunesia
Eastern Africa, especially Ethopia
Yemen
India and Pakistan
Thailand
Sichuan and Hunan provinces in China
Korea

These cuisines are discussed in detail in sidebars scattered throughout the recipe chapters.

The very odd thing about this list is how widely separate these regions are, especially since the single plant genus, the chile, grows so easily in all sorts of tropical, subtropical, and temperate climates. I am quite happy to see Wright confirm a hunch I had about capsicum genus (composed of five different species from the very mild bell pepper to the thermonuclear Habanero) that it's arrival in Europe and Asia simply blew away all piquant competion by its being so much stronger and so cheap to grow.

The most important `academic' study Wright covers is why some groups of people like hot food. He reviews and dismisses fourteen different common and not so common hypotheses, reaching the one that simply says people like the way they taste. What Wright does not do is explain why these particular regions embraced hot food and so many other regions did not. Why, for example, is Spanish cuisine so in love with the sweet bell pepper (capsicum annuum) which came from Mexico (note all those red pimentos, which are pickled sweet peppers) yet they do not embrace the chiles with high heat. It is easy to understand South America, Mexico, and Jamaica, as genus capsicum is native to these lands. It is also easy to understand India and Pakistan and Sichuan and Hunan, as both cuisines have a history of creating spicy dishes based on the pre-chile spices of black pepper, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, galangal, and tamarind. But what about the west coast of Africa, Ethopia, and Yemen? Wright never gets around to answering this question, but we quickly loose interest in the academic questions when the Professor gets down to the recipes.

While Wright claims to not be a chile head, he cannot escape the fact that the capsicum chile is by far the strongest source of culinary heat. Therefore, virtually all recipes include one or more varieties of chile in the ingredients.

The recipes are all organized by type of dish, with chapters on:

Startling Starters
Sexy Salads
Searing Soups
Electrifying Eggs
Hot Chicks, Wicked Ducks, and One Killer Rabbit (with apologies to Monty Python)
Blazing Beef and Indendiary Lamb
Piquant Pork
Sassy Seafoof
Volatile Vegetables
Pizzazz Pasta, Napalm Noodles, and Fiery Rice
Hot Accompaniments
Cool Accompaniments
Basic Sauces, Pastes, and Seasonings

Within each chapter, recipes are organized by location, following the same geographical order laid out above, always beginning with the New World source of chiles. And, not all cuisines are represented in all chapters.

In these recipes, Wright has done some adaptation to American kitchens and markets, but not much. That means that like just about any good survey of a regional cuisine (other than one native to North America), you will have to do a little culinary spelunking to locate some of the more important ingredients. And, since the books covers many cuisines from around the world, this means you will be stocking up on a LOT of esoteric ingredients to do these recipes. This is not only various kinds of chile, but also special sausages, fats, pastes, and sauces. Wright suggests some substitutions, but also confesses that most substitutions simply cannot give you the flavor of the original. It also means you will be doing a lot of cooking with animal fats such as lard and duck fat.In addition to being very close to authentic, all recipes are described with exceptional care.

To handle this problem, Wright provides two very important tools. The first is his last chapter of recipes for `Basic Sauces, Pastes, and Seasonings'. The second is one of the longest listings of Internet sources I have yet seen, including the great section in Paula Wolfert's exceptional book on the cooking or southwestern France.

Like Wolfert's book, this book is worth it even if you do nothing more than read it and pick out just those few recipes for which you can find ingredients easily. But, if you love your heat, you will really want to explore some of the more esoteric dishes, simply to get the different flavors from the many different varieties of chiles and the sauces and pastes into which they are made.

If you like hot food, this book is a must. If you are simply a foodie, this book is a must read, as Wright rarely missteps in his analysis of culinary matters.

Editorial Review:

If you are one of those spicy-food lovers who constantly strives to test your heat capacity -- or if you're just one of those people who really appreciates the nuances of piquant cuisines, this fun and feisty collection of recipes is for you. Author Cliff Wright has followed the equator in search of authentically spicy dishes, and he recreates them here with Meat-Stuffed Chiles from Peru, Chile Verde from New Mexico, "Tablecloth Stainer" from Oaxaca, Egusi Soup from Nigeria, "Sauce that Dances" from Algeria, Hot and Sour Shrimp Soup from Thailand, "Ants Climbing a Tree" from China, and about 300 more deliciously fiery foods. Each recipe has a heat index, so you know what's going to be subtly spicy and what's truly incendiary. If you are looking for that next "hot" thing, this is where you'll find it.

The Best of Croatian Cooking

Liliana Pavicic, Gordana Pirker-Mosher

List Price: $24.95 By: Hippocrene Books Amazon Marketplace: 8 new & used starting at $29.98

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A varied cuisine seldom reflected in regional cookbooks 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 17 people found this review helpful.

Croatia's turbulent history has resulted in a varied cuisine seldom reflected in regional cookbooks, and The Best of Croatian Cooking provides an excellent selection of over 200 dishes from classic main courses to desserts. Recipes have been modified for easy preparation and American kitchens but are filled with appeal and retain their cultural authenticity.

Editorial Review:

Meat lovers and vegetarians alike will find favourites among these 200 easy-to-follow recipes -- from classic dishes like Strudel with Sauteed Cabbage, and Potatoes with Swiss Chard to the famous Dalmatian specialities Stewed Beef and Black Risotto, prepared with the ink from cuttlefish. Also included are 50 dessert recipes for all variety of strudels, fine tortes, and cookies. The authors' introduction to Croatia and its cuisine provides insight into the development of the culinary tradition through the centuries, as well as into the specialities of the various regions in Croatia. The addition of a chapter on Croatian wines completes the culinary tour offered through the pages of this book. Also included are time-saving tips and ideas for lightening recipes to accommodate modern tastes and healthy lifestyles.

Entertaining in the Raw

Matthew Kenney

Amazon Price: $19.80 List Price: $30.00 Not yet published By: Gibbs Smith, Publisher

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Editorial Review:

MATTHEW KENNEY'S ENTERTAINING IN THE RAW CHEF MATTHEW KENNEY TAKES THE RAW FOOD lifestyle to exquisite new heights in Entertaining in the Raw. He combines his love of art and philosophy on food to bring you recipes for outstanding raw food dishes that will titillate your guests' taste buds.
The recipes span many ethnicities, including Asian, Latin, French, and Indian, and feature appetizers, tapas, main dishes, breads, sauces, and decadent desserts. Matthew's focus is always on fresh fruits and vegetables, organic, and buying food locally and in season.

The Complete Book of Korean Cooking

Young Jin Song

Amazon Price: $23.10 List Price: $35.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Lorenz Books Amazon Marketplace: 45 new & used starting at $19.77

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Editorial Review:

Typical traditional Korean dishes are defined by healthy, home-produced ingredients, low in fat and high in fibre, and natural tastes that can be fresh and delicate as well as robust and spicy. The cooking relies heavily on seasonings and spices.

Complete Thai Cooking

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Fantastic and do-able Thai 5 out of 5 stars.
21 of 22 people found this review helpful.

First off, let me say that I am a "foodie". I search out prime ingredients. I fuss over my equipment like a mother hen. I read cookbooks in the bathtub.... You get the idea.

"Complete Thai Cooking" is a great cookbook with the following key attributes:
- dishes which are seriously tasty and "feel" Thai (see below)
- clear instuctions
- non-complicated prep work
- findable ingredients, with helpful substitutions
- excellent Thai spice/herb overview

I have the specific need of cooking Thai food in a location where I have limited ingredients and time. At the same time, I am unwilling to spend time cooking anything where the tastes are watered down, and the dishes uninspiring.

I have not been disappointed by anything I have made from the book.

Mild disclaimer:
I must admit that I am not qualified to speak about the authenticity/thru-Thai of the recipes. I do know that they taste wonderful, and I'd be happy to pay for them at a Thai resturant.

Editorial Review:

Authentic Thai cuisine has a rich, centuries-old tradition, and this authoritative handbook celebrates its many variations, with deft ideas for using many spices, sauces, flavorings, and styles. More than 100 recipes, most taking 15 minutes or less to prepare and cook, provide even gourmet cooks with a new range of delicious choices. The recipes start with snacks and starters, then introduce a host of multicourse meals featuring soups and salads, seafood, meat, and poultry main courses, as well as a range of vegetable side dishes and desserts. Even the names of the recipes are intriguing: Green Mango Salad, Son-in-Law Eggs, Jungle Curry Beef, Thai Fried Pie. Large full-color photos suggest mouth-watering presentations for all occasions.

The Opera Lover's Cookbook: Menus for Elegant Entertaining

Francine Segan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Great music and great food make an exhilarating duet. Taking her cues from the world’s most beloved operas, food diva Francine Segan has composed a cycle of menus that are sure to have your family and friends shouting, “Brava! Bravissima!”

Each chapter of Opera Lover’s Cookbook presents a culinary performance—an elegant five-course dinner, a brunch, a dessert party— scored to a particular operatic motif or keyed to the work of a renowned composer. Operas set in Spain—Carmen, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Don Giovanni—are the exotic backdrop for a tapas fiesta. The far-flung locales of Puccini’s La Bohème, Madama Butterfly, Tosca, and Turandot inspire an eclectic international buffet. A rustic Italian dinner is orchestrated to the strains of Verdi’s Traviata. And Gilbert and Sullivan, of course, provide the overture for an English-style pub supper.

Sumptuously illustrated with photographs of featured dishes and lavish productions mounted by New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company, Opera Lover’s Cookbook also dispenses advice on home entertaining and on setting the scene with stunning table decor. Its more than 125 recipes include appetizers and hors d’oeuvres; soup, salad, fish, and pasta courses; main dishes; sweets; and thematic aperitif, cocktail, and after-dinner drinks.