California Books

Cooking with All Things Trader Joe's

Deana Gunn, Wona Miniati

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Great Cookbook for Trader Joe's Fans 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful.

This cookbook does so many things right -- the photos are beautiful, the recipes easy to follow, the dishes delicious! What I like most are the variety of meals and how quickly and easily they can be prepared (a great way to get the kids involved). This cookbook incorporates many different flavors -- whether you enjoy Italian, Asian, or Latin inspired dishes, there's something here for everyone. A great guide for eating well!

Trader Joe's turns over too many items for this book to be useful 2 out of 5 stars.
5 of 11 people found this review helpful.

I'm just home from my first shopping trip with the book. It took as long to shop as it would have to cut up veggies and make sauces myself. The problem is that my TJs didn't have essential ingredients (e.g frozen green garbanzos for the green garbanzo salad; refrigerated Balsamic Vinaigrette for the Balsamic Green Bean dish.) So I would be all over the store gathering the other ingredients, then look for the missing ingredient only to find they didn't have it, so then I was all over the store replacing the ingredients I couldn't use after all. I had read that the authors would update the book online, but I've googled and can't find any update that would have warned me of missing ingredients or suggested alternatives.

The French Laundry Cookbook

Thomas Keller

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 104 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

To eat at Thomas Keller's Napa Valley restaurant, The French Laundry, is to experience a peak culinary experience. In The French Laundry Cookbook, Keller articulates his passions and offers home cooks a means to duplicate the level of perfection that makes him one of the best chefs in the U.S. and, arguably, the world.

This cookbook provides 150 recipes exactly as they are used at Keller's restaurant. It is also his culinary manifesto, in which he shares the unique creative processes that led him to invent Peas and Carrots--a succulent pillow of a lobster paired with pea shoots and creamy ginger-carrot sauce--and other high-wire culinary acts. It offers unimagined experiences, from extracting chlorophyll to use in coloring sauces to a recipe for chocolate cake accompanied by red beet ice cream and a walnut sauce. You are urged to follow Keller's recipes precisely and also to view them as blueprints. To keep them alive, they must be infused with your own commitment to perfection and pleasure, as you define those terms.

Keller's story, shared through the writing of Michael Ruhlman, shows how this chef was both born and made. After winning rave reviews when he was still in his 20s, it took a more experienced chef throwing a knife at him because he did not know how to truss a chicken to open his eyes to the importance of the discipline and techniques of classical French cooking. To acquire these fundamental skills, he apprenticed at eight of the finest restaurants in France.

Grounded in classic technique, Keller's cooking is characterized by traditional marriages of ingredients, assembled in breathtakingly daring new ways, such as Pearls and Oyster, glistening caviar and oysters served on a bed of creamy pearl tapioca. Continually piquing the palate, his meals are a procession of 5 to 10 dishes, all small portions vibrantly composed. For example, Pan Roasted Breast of Squab with Swiss Chard, Seared Foie Gras, and Oven-Dried Black Figs require just three birds to serve six. The result: you are never sated, always stimulated.

The 200 photographs by Deborah Jones include more than just beauty shots: they show how to prepare various dishes; how Keller, shown stroking a whole salmon, respects his ingredients; and how the perfection of baby fava beans still nestled in the downy lining of their succulent pod, or the seduction of an abundance of fresh caviar, calls out the best from the chef. --Dana Jacobi

Chez Panisse Vegetables

Alice Waters

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

More for the market than the kitchen 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Alice Waters made her mark on the culinary world more for her pioneering efforts in sourcing and championing high quality local and organic ingredients than for her culinary skill and imagination, and that's reflected in this book. It's really helped me pick out the best vegetables at the local grocery store or farmers market, and has encouraged me to try new vegetable with sometimes delicious results. Thanks to her, I appreciate the wonders of braised chard or baby garlic soup, things I never expected to explore.

While this book has helped me find the right vegetables at the market, it's had less of a positive effect in the kitchen. The recipes are simple, largely French and Italian inspired, and to my palate, a little too restrained. I prefer a little more lively seasoning or creative flavor combinations in my food. Water's doesn't provide a lot insight on how to use vegetables in cooking, or provide any insights as to the best way to prepare them. That's what I was hoping for here, and often get in other cook books. There's a solid group of recipes here, but I never found any great recipes in those I tried. I rate cook books by how they improve my cooking and this book has encouraged me to experiment with new vegetables and be a better vegetable shopper. Once I got back to the kitchen, it wasn't as helpful.

Editorial Review:

By now just about everybody whose interest in eating runs deeper than fast food knows about Alice Waters. The creator of Chez Panisse, the legendary restaurant in Berkeley, California, that helped create a modern American cuisine based on fresh ingredients, she is also equally well-known as a teacher and cookbook author. Chez Panisse Vegetables is one of the best new cookbooks of the season; it's as useful for its information about vegetables and how to use and handle them as it is for its irresistible recipes, which lead to complex and interesting dishes built from simple ingredients and simple techniques.

The Zuni Cafe Cookbook: A Compendium of Recipes and Cooking Lessons from San Francisco's Beloved Restaurant

Judy Rodgers, Gerald Asher

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Judy Rodgers, chef-owner of San Francisco's Zuni Cafe, has produced a true classic with The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. This book gives the cook and the reader two accessible temptations: to read from cover to cover, and to cook from cover to cover. One of the great voices in food writing today, Judy Rodgers truly stands shoulder-to-shoulder with any of the master food writers who have preceded and influenced her. Her writing is as delicious as the famous Zuni Roast Chicken with Bread Salad, as simple and elegant as the Zuni Cafe Caesar Salad.

While firmly anchored in the food sentiments of California, Rodgers explores the honest cuisine généreuse of France, Tuscany, Umbria, Sicily, Catalonia, and Greece. Her chapter "Small Dishes to Start a Meal" runs to 65 pages! Look for her Lentil-Sweet Red Pepper Soup with Cumin and Black Pepper, her Citrus Risotto, and her Tomato Summer Pudding. Be sure to try Short Ribs Braised in Chimay Ale, and Rabbit with Marsala and Prune-Plums. Chapters are devoted to eggs, starchy dishes, sausage and charcuterie, and the cheese course; you'll also find all the basic chapters one might expect. Throughout, Gerald Asher provides insight into matching wines with foods.

Rodgers's natural instinct is to share and to teach, and the instructional material in The Zuni Cafe Cookbook is like a deep-tissue massage, improving any cook's posture and performance. Rodgers's fine book invites both the novice and the experienced cook to delve deep into the heart of real food and real cooking. --Schuyler Ingle

Chez Panisse Café Cookbook

Alice L. Waters

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the 1970s, Alice Waters helped launch the revolution in American cuisine. She inspired a generation of food lovers with her passion for freshness and the best ingredients. Her influence helped infuse menus all over the U.S. with dishes rooted in Mediterranean cooking, often with a sunny, California twist. Dishes at the casual café, located upstairs in the same enchanting house as Chez Panisse, her more formal restaurant in Berkeley, California, include Wood Oven Baked Porcini Mushrooms, Tuna Confit, and Meyer Lemon Éclairs. Waters suggests making the mushrooms in your fireplace if you can, although recipe directions are for a conventional oven. Typical of the ingredient-driven cooking Waters encourages, the stunning tang of the éclairs requires Meyer lemons: a cross between a lemon and an orange, which are now exported beyond their native California. But the fresh tuna steak gently simmered in olive oil with garlic, fresh thyme, and fennel seeds and served with barely cooked green beans and aïoli, a pungent garlic mayonnaise, is sublime even made in an apartment kitchen. Her point is that you should use her recipes as guides, letting them inspire you to make the most of locally produced, seasonal foods in your area.

Alice Waters is an enchanting raconteur and an activist as well as a chef. In The Chez Panisse CaféCookbook, she weaves her beliefs about food as pleasure, sustenance, art, and politics in with over 200 recipes. Bringing you into the community she has been instrumental in creating to preserve the earth's resources as well as to provide great ingredients, Waters tells about the producers who share her passions. They respect the environment, using only sustainable production methods while delivering the freshest possible product, be it free-range poultry and eggs, acorn-fed pigs, impeccable oysters, or organically grown fruits and vegetables.

Jewel-colored Art Nouveau-style illustrations by David Goines give this book the same distinctive look as earlier Chez Panisse cookbooks, including those devoted solely to pasta, vegetables and desserts. --Dana Jacobi

The California Pizza Kitchen Cookbook

Larry Flax, Rick Rosenfield

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Love this book 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I love this cookbook. As far as the dough recipes go, I have no idea if they turn out well because I use a Boboli pizza crust. If your a Rachael Ray fan, you'll figure out how to make most of these pizzas with the quickness. My favorite CPK pizza is the peking duck pizza, since my grocery store doesn't carry duck and I'm not going out of my way to find it(I want what I want when I want it) I buy precooked Tyson chicken and mix it with a lil hoisin sauce and proceed with the recipe. And it is sooo delicious-same flavour components, and I don't miss the dough. If I'm not starving I'll cook up some chicken breasts. Honestly, if you just use a pre-made pizza dough and a lil creativity you can get most of these pizzas in the oven in less than 15 minutes. When I make these pizzas, everyone loves them. And my friends that eat at CPK say they taste just like it. Buy the book, you will not regret it!!! If you do live near a CPK call them and ask if you can buy the dough from them, many pizza joints sell their dough.

Editorial Review:

The California Pizza Kitchen Cookbook BBQ Chicken Pizza, Mixed Grill Vegetarian Pizza, Tandoori Chicken Pizza, Thai Chicken Pizza. These are just a few of the delicious pizzas, baked fresh in wood-burning ovens, that have helped to make California Pizza Kitchen into one of America's hottest and most successful restaurant chains. Founders Larry Flax and Rick Rosenfield "put the world on a pizza" and the results are fantastic. Now, for the first time, here are the recipes that have made CPK restaurants so popular, with step-by-step directions to make pizza cooking easy and fun, even for beginners. In addition to the pizzas and calzones, Rick and Larry include recipes for creative pastas, salads, soups and appetizers, not to mention the tempting dessert pizzas. Whether CPK is already your favorite place to dine with family and friends or you're a creative cook with a taste for bold, fun, international flavors, The California Pizza Kitchen Cookbook is the cookbook for you.

Mustards Grill Napa Valley Cookbook

Cindy Pawlcyn, Brigid Callinan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"I have always thought of Mustards as a cross between a roadside rib joint and a French country restaurant," writes chef-owner Cindy Pawlcyn, neatly characterizing the culinary pedigree of her famed Napa Valley, California, dining spot. Pawlcyn's Mustards Grill Napa Valley Cookbook, written with Brigid Callinan, offers 150 popular recipes from the restaurant, treats like Slow-Smoked BBQ Pork Sandwiches with Ooo-Eee! Sauce, Wild Mushroom "Burgers" with Apple-Jicama Slaw, and Artichokes with James Beard's Beer Batter and Tarragon Aioli. The recipes can entail a kitchen workout, but they are easy enough to do once the commitment is made. Readers wanting to treat family or guests to sophisticated down-home eating will welcome Pawlcyn's unique repertoire.

In chapters that cover appetizers, soups, and salads, Pawlcyn presents standout recipes like Crab Cakes with Red Beet and Horseradish Rémoulade; Tomato, Basil, and Tortilla Soup; and Chinese Chicken Salad with Sesame Noodles and Rice Vinegar Cucumbers. Smoker- and grill-derived specialties, including Half-Slab BBQ Baby Back Ribs with Crispy Yams and Coleslaw and Tea-Smoked Duck with 100-Almond Sauce and Ginger Pickled Mango, receive their own seductive space, as do pan and sandwich delights like Louise's Bouillabaisse with Rouille and Ahi Tuna and Shiitake Mini Burgers. Desserts such as Lemon-Lime Meringue Pie and Red Raspberry, White Peach, and Blueberry Cobbler follow in the deluxe-diner spirit of the place and should prove an irresistible finale to any meal. They're further tribute to Pawlcyn's one-of-a kind restaurant and its instantly seductive cooking. --Arthur Boehm

The Tra Vigne Cookbook: Seasons in the California Wine Country

Michael Chiarello, Penelope Wisner

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"The closer your cooking stays to the seasons, the simpler--and better--your cooking will be." Michael Chiarello's mom told him that as he stood beside her at the stove, learning what a real Italian tomato sauce looks, smells, and sounds like as it cooks. Those lessons led him into the chef's life and his own restaurant in the heart of California's wine country, Tra Vigne. So it should come as no surprise that the subtitle of his lush cookbook, The Tra Vigne Cookbook is Seasons in the California Wine Country. And such is the organizing principle. Not only are the sections of the book divided into the four seasons, but the subsets include four ingredients key to each season: asparagus or garlic in spring, for example, or mushrooms and eggplant in fall.

Chiarello describes his own cooking style as "combining spectacular ingredients, professional technique, and imaginative presentations." He shows how to take this into your own home kitchen, in word and technique. A lot of the exceptional flavors he is able to muster come from the flavor enhancers he has put up in his pantry through the seasons--the flavored olives, the dried figs. To read his section on the pantry is to yearn for a dark, cool basement. "Take the time when you have it in order to reap the rewards later when you don't," Chiarello encourages.

The Tra Vigne Cookbook is a carefully layered dish of family reminiscence, tech tips, master recipes, and heartfelt yearnings for the seasons and the way they pass outside the windows of a country restaurant, the way they feel on the skin, the way they taste and smell. It's about attitude. Chiarello grabs it all and makes it accessible. The Tra Vigne Cookbook is a large-format, elegant book you will want to leave open on the table to flip through. Let your attention get caught up in it and carried away. Chiarello stays with the seasons, and his accomplishment is simpler and better as a result. And therein lies a world of glorious, flavorful complexity. --Schuyler Ingle

Wine Country Cooking

Joanne Weir

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Editorial Review:

Acclaimed chef Joanne Weir captures the fresh flavors of Napa and Sonoma in this lushly photographed cookbook. With 150 recipes for Mediterranean-inspired bites and meals plus world-class wine pairings, WINE COUNTRY COOKING presents a lifestyle of casual yet gracious eating, drinking, and entertaining.

California Pizza Kitchen Pasta, Salads, Soups, And Sides

Larry Flax, Rick Rosenfield

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

At California Pizza Kitchen restaurants across the country, many of the favorite dishes (and most-requested recipes) are not the pizzas! Customers keep coming back for the boldly flavored pastas, soups, salads, and side dishes. The follow-up to the bestselling California Pizza Kitchen Cookbook, this new cookbook serves CPK customers just what they ordered -- secret restaurant recipes, never available before. With gorgeous color photographs of the finished dishes throughout the book, CPK fans will be tempted by recipes for Oriental Chicken Salad, Spinach Artichoke Dip, and Kung Pao Spaghetti, to name just a few.

The new cookbook will include stories and anecdotes from CPK employees from around the country about favorite recipes, customers, and more. In the generous spirit they're best known for, CPK owners Larry Flax and Rick Rosenfield will donate all royalties and proceeds from sales of the book in the restaurants to children's charities.

Just like the first CPK cookbook, expect Pasta, Salads, Soups, and Sides to be one of the hottest cookbooks of the year. The CPK chain of restaurants is bigger than ever, and thi5 new hook will be published in the cool California style that has made the first book and the restaurants themselves so popular.