California Books - Page 2

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 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

the girl & the fig cookbook: More than 100 Recipes from the Acclaimed California Wine Country Restaurant

Sondra Bernstein

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

Editorial Review:

You have to admire a cookbook that opens with recipes for martinis. These are fig-accented for the most part, in keeping with the theme chef-owner Sondra Bernstein has laid down for her restaurants and cookbook, all called the girl & the fig. It's about attitude, about fun, about good things in store. "Country food with a French passion" is what she calls her theme. And she paints it with the bright colors of California. Bernstein actually takes something as stale as fresh, local, and seasonal ingredients spliced to an ersatz French country cuisine overlaid with Northern California wine country easy living, and makes it work to her advantage.

Once past the pantry ingredients and the martinis, you are invited to consider the many taste treats in "A Small Bite," the likes of herb-marinated olives, apricot-cured salmon, and crispy sweetbreads. "From the Garden to the Stockpot" encourages the making of soup--cauliflower-Gruyere, perhaps, or carrot-ginger. "In the Salad Bowl" has nice touches like the grilled asparagus salad with lemon-thyme vinaigrette. "Large Plates" covers ground from wild mushroom risotto to pan-roasted halibut with spring vegetable ragout, to braised chicken with prunes, olives and capers. The braised beef short ribs are worth a second glance. Sondra Bernstein also treats us to vegetable side dishes, to a separate chapter on the cheese plate, to the sweets that end a meal, and to a consideration of the wines that round out the entire experience. In fact nearly all of the 100-plus recipes are matched with the kind of wine that would be served at the girl & the fig in California's wine country.

This is a spirited cookbook, with challenges for the new cook and happy reminders for the experienced cook. Sip that martini and turn the pages. --Schuyler Ingle

Isabel's Cantina: Bold Latin Flavors from the New California Kitchen

Isabel Cruz

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

When Isabel Cruz opened her first small restaurant in San Diego, she cooked what she loved to eat: simple Latin comfort food spiced with the Pacific Rim flavors she knew from her old Los Angeles neighborhood. Her trademark blend of Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican, Japanese, and Thai cooking allowed her to cut some of the calories and fat so often found in Latin food without ever sacrificing taste. Soon, the nutritious, flavorful, easy-to-prepare meals Isabel had cooked every night for her family took California by storm.

In Isabel’s Cantina, she shares the deceptively simple recipes that make her five West Coast restaurants so popular, as well as many of her own personal favorites. By relying on the boldly flavored ingredients common to both Latin and Asian cuisines—like mangoes, limes, chiles, mint, ginger, coconut, and cilantro—Isabel’s healthful dishes are never bland. She gets things going with starters such as Grilled Vegetable Salad with Sofrito Vinaigrette and Shrimp Bites Wrapped in Greens. There’s Grilled Mahi-Mahi with Jalapeño-Ponzu Sauce, Green Chile Posole with Pork, and New York Strip Steak with Baked Plantain Fries. Gone are heavy refried beans and white rice, replaced by Chipotle White Beans and whole-grain Power Rice. In an invaluable chapter, Isabel reveals how to dress up any meal with healthy sauces and salsas, such as Papaya-Mango-Mint Salsa and Avocado Salsa Cruda. Desserts, drinks, and even brunch dishes round out her collection of recipes for every part of the day.

Blending fresh flavors with an eye for health, Isabel’s signature Latin food with Asian accents is not only good for you but—most important—it’s delicious.

The Artful Vegan: Fresh Flavors from the Millennium Restaurant

Eric Tucker, Bruce Enloe, Renee Comet, Amy Pearce

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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 flavor, and vegan cooking can't go together hasn't been to San Francisco's famed Millennium Restaurant. Since 1994, Millennium has created a sumptuous vegan experience, which was first made available to home cooks in the revolutionary MILLENNIUM COOKBOOK. Now, 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 to boot. Spanning influences from the Pacific Rim to the Deep South, THE ARTFUL VEGAN showcases an expanded repertoire of flavors, methods, and ingredients that are on the cutting edge of healthful taste and nutrition.

Chez Panisse Cooking

Paul Bertolli, Alice Waters

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Great foodie read for understanding cooking and ingredients 5 out of 5 stars.
25 of 30 people found this review helpful.

`Chez Panisse Cooking' by Paul Bertolli, with Alice Waters, is a reminder of the kinds of things we miss in the downpour of fast cooking and low carb cooking books with which we have been showered in the last few years. Like most celebrity cookbooks, this can be seen as a very chatty book, with lots of headnotes and essays on various subjects such as wild mushrooms and risotto techniques. So, if all you want is a simple statement of recipes, you may be much happier with a Rachael Ray book or `1000 Italian Recipes' by Michele Scicolone, although even Scicolone's very heavily recipe oriented book has its share of commentary and notes on regional origins.

Paul Bertolli is Alice Waters' second major chef at Chez Panisse, after Jeremiah Tower went off to create Stars and claim ownership of the invention of `California Cuisine'. While Tower (and Waters) are both heavily influenced by leading English writer on French cuisine, Richard Olney, Bertolli's center is clearly in Italy, with several homages to Provence and other French influences. One important foodie note is that Bertolli cites the Pellegrino Artusi's 100 year old `L'Arte di mangiar bene' (`Art of Eating Well'). I think this is notable because I have taken a quick look at a recent translation of this work and was not very impressed with the material. It may have been a very good book 100 years ago, but I did not immediately see how it stood up to the great wealth of Italian cuisine books we have today in English. But what do I know. I obviously must go back and reconsider my opinion.

What Bertolli attends to better than practically every other cookbook author I can think of (except for the very high-end restaurant chefs such as Thomas Keller and Rick Tramonto) is taste and the nature of his ingredients. In giving instructions for a broccoli dish, I can think of very few other chefs who would take the care to suggest that you buy older broccoli for the long braise, as this will stand up better to the heat over a longer time. This is not to say that Bertolli goes as far into essays on major ingredients in the style of his later, excellent `Cooking By Hand' book. This later book goes so far as to leave the world of cookbooks and enter the world of culinary essays you typically find from John Thorne, with the difference that Bertolli is a professional cook and amateur writer, while Thorne is a professional writer and amateur cook. I did, however, find the essay on yeast bread baking to be as good as anything I have seen elsewhere for the length.

Note that the reference to sources of materials is not in an appendix at the end of the book, but placed at the end of the relevant essay on technique. So, names and addresses of sources for bread flour and home flourmills can be found at the end of the essay on bread baking.

This probably explains why Bertolli succeeds in committing two of the prime fallacies exposed in a recent `Good Eats' episode by Alton Brown. Bertolli rolls out the old chestnuts about searing being a means of sealing in moisture into meat and not washing mushrooms with any water to prevent adding any more to the liberal amount of moisture in mushrooms already. I give Alton Brown great credit for shining light on these myths, but I am quite at ease with forgiving Bertolli his repeating this conventional wisdom, especially since Harold McGee's article on the searing / moisture myth came out about the same time this book was published.

Oddly enough, the focus on works by McGee, Brown, and Shirley Corriher may be partly due to the rarity of works with Bertolli's form of culinary phenomenology. What I mean here is that Bertolli shows that there is a lot to know about good and interesting cooking which has nothing to do with science, but just simple observation and experience.

Chez Panisse cookbooks have been published by Random House and by Harper Collins, and they are uniformly attractive to the eye, as they are entertaining and informative to the mind. While both of these publishing houses have great reputations for putting out good books, I have to congratulate Ms. Waters for her stylish work in print. I miss the great woodcuts which appear only on the cover of this volume and not throughout, but Bertolli's text needs all the space it can get. Another item which may seem small to some, but which always boost's my opinion of a book is the fact that the Table of Contents lists every single recipe by name and by page number. I am also very happy that this book divides dishes by more by principle ingredient than by course.

One of my routine checks on the quality of a cookbook is an examination of the recipes for stocks. And, I am quite pleased that Bertolli has given me another important rule of thumb on stock making, something I have never read elsewhere (or, just as important, if I did read it, it did not stick in my memory). The point is that all things being equal, meat stocks are better if you go light on the vegetables. Vegetable flavors can always be added in when the dish is made, but the whole story about a chicken stock should be the chicken.

If I were not an incurable cookbook collector, this book would be high on my list of sources for my daily cooking, right behind Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, and Jamie Oliver (yes, that Jamie Oliver).

A truly excellent book and cookbook!

Editorial Review:

Alice Waters's Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, sparked a movement toward simple, elegant cooking using fresh, seasonal, regional ingredients. In Chez Panisse Cooking, Chef Paul Bertolli collaborates with Waters to adapt many of the restaurant's trademark recipes for home cooking. Look here for fresh, innovative salads, soothing soups, and delightful desserts. Waters's fondness for exotic vegetables and greens may have you searching a little harder in the grocery store, but the results will make your efforts worthwhile.

Slow Food Nation's Come to the Table: The Slow Food Way of Living

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Firehouse Food: Cooking with San Francisco's Firefighters

George Dolese, Steve Siegelman

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Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Firefighters are famous for their food and it s no wonder since they cook their own meals seven days a week. All that practice, not to mention the peer pressure, makes for some of the best recipes in town, especially when that town is a culinary mecca like San Francisco. Firehouse Food introduces firehouse life, its brave denizens, and more than 100 of their best recipes. We meet greenhorns and veterans, retirees and local characters, all the while enjoying terrific meals designed to cook up easy and satisfy the whole crew. The recipes reflect the diversity of the San Francisco Fire Department personnel themselves-Latin-American, Asian, African, Italian, Irish, Eastern European-with a melting pot of delectable flavors. From barbecue by the experts to a Pineapple Upside Down Cake just like mom s, these dishes are forgiving enough for anyone to try, and generous enough for everyone to enjoy. With color photographs of meals, downtime, cookery in action, and of course the food itself, Firehouse Food illustrates the daily routine that turns a firehouse into a family.

Terra: Cooking from the Heart of Napa Valley

Hiro Sone, Lissa Doumani

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Restaurant Terra provides fine dining in a century-old former foundry. The very personal creation of husband-and-wife chefs Hiro Sone and Lissa Doumani, the Napa Valley dining spot is noted for its relaxed yet sophisticated cuisine--French- and Italian-influenced cooking that also reflects Sone's Japanese culinary heritage. Terra tells the restaurant's story and offers over 175 of its recipes, from appetizers such as Goat Cheese and Artichoke Spring Rolls with Arugula and Tomato Salad to desserts such as Chocolate Mousseline on Pecan Sablé with Coffee Granité. The authors are unapologetic about the work required to prepare many of the recipes, but they've also made them models of clarity and, better still, instruction. Readers who like to cook and those who enjoy armchair restaurant touring will welcome the book.

Beginning with a day-in-the-life restaurant diary--work starts at 4:30 a.m. and ends some 20 hours later--the book then offers recipes organized by course or food type. Standouts include Mussel Seafood Soup with Caramelized Onions, Bone Marrow Risotto with Braised Veal Shanks, and Chinese Egg Noodles with Gulf Shrimp, Shiitake Mushrooms, and Pea Tendrils. Desserts, which should bring any meal to a delirious close, include Fig Fritters with Ginger Ice Cream and Feuilleté of Caramelized Bananas with Chocolate Fudge Sauce. Present also is a particularly useful chapter on basic techniques--photos depicting various vegetable cuts are a valuable bonus--as well as basic and pantry recipes. Illustrated with color photos throughout, the book provides a sense of a restaurant performing at the top of its game, plus a blueprint for preparing its most delicious fare. --Arthur Boehm

Williams-Sonoma San Francisco: Authentic Recipes Celebrating the Foods of the World (Williams-Sonoma Foods of the World)

Janet Fletcher

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

An insider's guide to the recipes, ingredients, and traditions that define international city cuisine, the Foods of the World series is the definitive cookbook collection for anyone passionate about food and travel. Richly photographed, with over 45 authentic recipes and in-depth culinary features, each book brings readers closer to the best eating experiences each city has to offer from a culinary authority Americans trust.

From artisan sourdough bread to seasonal produce and seafood, San Francisco is a serious food town. The city's distinctive cuisine is highlighted in dishes like Grilled Asparagus with Parmesan, Cioppino, and Plum and Blackberry Sorbet.

Key Features:

* Add simple, fresh recipes such as Beet, Fennel, and Avocado Salad with Ricotta Salata or Meyer Lemon Pots de Crème with Raspberry Sauce to your culinary repertoire

* Discover the roots of an ever-growing culinary trend toward artisan-made foods and organic seasonal produce

* Read about how chefs combine innovation and simplicity at some of the most notable restaurants in the United States