California Books - Page 3

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

Janet Fletcher

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Customer Reviews:
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

Sierra Mar Cookbook

Craig Von Foester

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A Passion for Gourmet Cooking 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 8 people found this review helpful.

"You can learn so much about food just by listening to people from different cultural backgrounds talk about their food memories...what you hear is about the soul of their food, not its science." ~ Chef Craig von Foester

The Sierra Mar Cookbook features recipes from the #1 Hotel Restaurant in California. The ever-changing menu features a fusion of French, Mediterranean and Asian culinary influences. The pictures alone produce a sense of awe and are beyond inspirational.

The unique style of this cookbook displays six intriguing menu options that represent six evenings at Sierra Mar:

Local Farmers Markets & Perfect Timing
Monterey Bay Salmon, Taste Memory & Total Utilization
Tomatoes, Terroir & the Artistry They Inspire
Preserves, Marmalades & Capturing Flavors that Sustain Us
Black Truffles, Shellfish & Pondering the Soul of Food
Slow Braising of Flavors & Big Sur Chanterelles, a Rustic Spirit of Taste

It seems rare for a cookbook to have the variety of stunning scenic pictures and it leaves you longing to visit this restaurant. A slopping field of flowers melts into a perfectly pink sunset in one picture and in another waves dash against the rocks.

Recipes that looked especially tempting include:

Salad of Grilled Black Mission Figs, Bitter Greens and Bleu de Haut Jura Cheese with a Port Reduction

Pancetta-Wrapped Sika Venison Loin with Pistachio Puree, Huckleberry Sauce and Pumpkin Dumplings

Butternut Squash Ravioli with Sage-Pecan Brown Butter

Composed Main Lobster Salad with Satsuma Mandarins, Hearts of Palm and Basil Oil
(the colors are gorgeous and look very tropical)

Grilled Rib-Eye Steak with Crispy Potato Cake and Oyster Mushroom Cambazola Compote

Ceylon Tea - Glazed Salmon with Hoisin-Braised Bacon and Pea Tendril Salad

Throughout the book there are step-by-step technique pictures with descriptions so you can learn how to slice potato gaufrettes. A section of "basic recipes" introduces you to Brioche, Pate Brissee, Champagne Vinaigrette, Fig Jam, Red Wine Syrup and Fines Herbes.

If you are looking to impress someone with recipes that will create an intoxicating culinary experience, I can't think of any cookbook that compares to this one! The pictures are stunning and the flavors are complex and have comforting seasonal appeal.

100 Stars!

~The Rebecca Review
Author of Seasoned with Love: A collection of
best-loved recipes inspired by over 40 cultures

Editorial Review:

From the prestigious Sierra Mar Restaurant at the Post Ranch Inn comes an exquisite cookbook that captures the romance and mystique of this historic place. Flavorful California cuisine meets classic French and Mediterranean fare in the adventuresome kitchen of Executive Chef Craig vonFoerster. Sierra Mar shares unique and irresistible recipes for all seasons, with a focus on fresh ingredients and creativity, for appetizers, soups, salads, entrees, and desserts. Also included are personal notes and wine pairings from respected Sierra Mar sommelier Dominique DaCruz.

Boulevard: The Cookbook

Nancy Oakes, Pamela Mazzola, Lisa Weiss

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Nancy Oakes and Pamela Mazzola opened the doors of Boulevard in San Francisco in 1993, and fans have been waiting ever since for just this cookbook. A bigger and better payoff for all that patience is hard to imagine. Boulevard glows on a table top like burnished gold, and suggestions of epic meals seep out from beneath its covers. "We cook because we love to feed people and also because we love the process of cooking," the authors explain in their opening statement. "We don't think for a minute we've invented a new cuisine or discovered a new approach to cooking--only a never-ending quest for what's delicious."

The structure of the book is as classic as many of the underlying cooking techniques--Salads, Soups, and Starters give way to chapters on Fish, Poultry and Game, Meat, and Desserts. A central dish surrounded by its sides or segments renders several recipes per page, making this a book of careful perusal. Mediterranean Mussels with Panzanella and Arugula, for example, gives us recipes for panzanella, the Italian bread salad, for the mussels' poaching medium, a fennel confit, saffron sauce, and arugula salad. Among the soups you'll find White Corn, Roasted Ratatouille, Braised Chestnut, Provencal Fish, and Artichoke Soup as well as the dozen side recipes that help elevate each dish. Ingredients are carefully delineated, followed by chefs' notes, kitchen and shopping notes (how to buy the best scallops, for example), then the cooking method for each piece of the flavor puzzle. Some cooking experience is necessary. There are some challenging dishes between these pages. But new cooks should not shy away. Boulevards establishes a level of culinary rigor to which the best cooks can aspire.

If you can find the main ingredient, Glazed Veal Sweetbreads in Potato Crust with chanterelles and a red wine sauce is a standout appetizer. Pan Roasted Halibut Fillets and Cheeks takes full advantage of morel mushrooms and crisp spring vegetables. Don't miss the Buttermilk-brined Fried Little Chickens with cream biscuits, a trip South for Cornish game hens. Beef shortribs are elevated to new heights with "Steamship" Short Ribs Bourguignon. You might want to finish with Bittersweet Chocolate Cake with caramel corn ice cream and caramel sauce. In each and every case the main theme is flavor, the attack is simple, the effect totally satisfying and elegant.

Nancy Oakes and Pamela Mazzola have distilled between the covers of Boulevard their years of combined efforts in the commercial kitchen, translating for the home kitchen. Their friendship, good humor, and fierce determination to achieve the best flavors imaginable tumble out of these pages. --Schuyler Ingle

San Francisco A La Carte

Junior League San Francisco

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Years of never-fail, delicious-tasting food 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 15 people found this review helpful.

I've had this cookbook and SF Encore ever since they were first published and have made many recipes from both cookbooks. Not one has failed to meet expectations. One caveat, however. This cookbook is meant for people who know their way around a kitchen, not for beginniners. Since I've been cooking for a very long time, this was no problem. These two cookbooks are well worn and often-used. I recommend both very highly.

Wonderful food in every page! 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

If ever there is a "must have" cookbook, this one wins hands-down! I am usually pleased with a cookbook if there are 5 recipes that are savers---I have made over 50 from SF a la Carte and not been disappointed. Every page has scrumptious recipes whether a main course, hors d'oeuvre, or dessert. I own cookbooks from around the world, but this is my favorite and I am thrilled to see it once more in publication! Now I can treat my best friends to this treasure and they will no longer have to ask me for recipes.

Editorial Review:

This award-winning cookbook serves up San Francisco in all its gastronomical glory, with more than 500 easy yet innovative recipes from the multicultural, cosmopolitan city by the Bay.

California Dish: What I Saw (and Cooked) at the American Culinary Revolution

Jeremiah Tower

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Years back the standard Jeremiah Tower press kit claimed the master's hand in the development of everything to do with food just this side of the invention of fire. California cuisine? Café dining? Franco-Asian fusion food? All Jeremiah. Well, that was PR, a subject Tower addresses in his memoir of his life in food and the food business, California Dish: What I Saw (and Cooked) at the American Culinary Revolution. This isn't to say that Tower doesn't make his own argument for all his contributions, setting the record straight where he thinks the record has slipped into mythology. His contribution to the rise of Chez Panisse, for example. This is a man with an apparent lifelong habit of journal keeping. He isn't waiting for his own demise for the story to unfold. Rather, Tower tells all--his version of all--in the here and now, letting the chips fall where they may. The pleasure may be vicarious, but it-s a pleasure none the less.

In 50 years the organizing principle of this memoir, that the rise of California cuisine and who gets credit for what actually matters, may hold no water. But California Dish will remain invaluable as a memoir of the time by one of its more outlandish characters, a man who spent a good deal of his youth on ocean liners and in upscale hotel dining rooms. He shares all this in the spirit of James Beard's Delights and Prejudices, which documented an earlier time and way with food. Tower will be accused of cattiness, no doubt. And he is. He'll be accused of self-promotion. And he does. But he also lays on the praise where he believes it is due. When he admires other chefs and their work, he says so. In a series of scenes he returns to James Beard the dignity of his sexuality, like throwing the switch from two to three dimensions.

The first-person point-of-view often reveals much more about the writer than the writer ever intended. It's the nature of the beast. Tower may have been aiming at an improved press kit version of his life. But what press kit was ever poignant? For all the names of the famous, for all the celebrity happenings, the constant world travel, the designer labels, Jeremiah Tower seems a lonely man by book's end, a glass of fine champagne his best friend. --Schuyler Ingle

California Rancho Cooking: Mexican and Californian Recipes

Jacqueline Higuera McMahan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

California cuisine--with its goat cheese, arugula, and free-range chickens--took the culinary world by storm in the 1980s and '90s, but as Jacqueline Higuera McMahan shows us, "Rancho cooking" may be the original California cuisine. Descended from early Spanish settlers--known as the Californios--McMahan comes from a culinary tradition that spans backward through the gold rush and the missions to Mexico and Spain. In Rancho Cooking she tells the tale of the Californios' cuisine, and of her own family, through stories and recipes handed down for generations.

"Chiles are in our blood, my grandmother told me," McMahan writes, "I pictured rivers of dark chile flowing in our veins." That river of chiles flows not only in the veins of the Higueras, but throughout the history of cooking in California. Beginning with the Spaniards who, by necessity, borrowed culinary traditions from everyone from the Moors to the Indians, and merging with Mexican food drawn from Aztec and other Indian culinary traditions, Rancho cooking evolved as it was carried north through the Spanish territories in California. The Spanish brought with them their favorite foods--tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, corn, and of course chiles, to name a few--and the settlers perfected the art of barbecuing, which was so well suited to their outdoor lifestyle.

What will strike readers first about this book is that the cooking represented is a far cry from the typical Mexican fare we're used to. This food has a sophistication far beyond smashed beans and rice. Olives, figs, fresh herbs, squash blossoms, and pumpkins appear with surprising regularity, and olive oil, not lard, is the fat of choice for cooking. Of course you'll also find many of the dishes that we think of as standard Mexican fare--enchiladas, tamales, quesadillas--but all have a distinctly Rancho touch. Enchiladas are filled with seafood and napped with a velvety tomato-chipotle sauce, quesadillas are stuffed with squash blossoms and epazote leaves, and tamale dough gets extra flavor from olive oil in addition to the usual lard.

As much a history book as a cookbook, Rancho Cooking belongs on the shelf of anyone who calls him- or herself a connoisseur of California cuisine. --Robin Donovan

Esalen Cookbook

Charlie Cascio

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

Healthy Comfort Food with Gourmet Appeal 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful.

"At anytime of the night or day you may find small groups of people in deep conversation, someone writing a letter or reading a book, or two people who have just met and are starting up a lifelong friendship." ~ pg. 17

Esalen is located on a place that was once sacred to the Esselen Indians. This Institute is known as an organization devoted to personal growth and they offer over five hundred workshops and seminars ranging in interests including: massage, yoga, ecology, spirituality, art, music and psychology.

Charlie Cascio worked as the head chef and kitchen manager for the Esalen Institute and still lives on an organic farm that produces delicious cheese and olive oil. His life experiences have taken him to many countries where he has worked as a chef and has taught seminars to health professionals.

Here people come for the food as much as they beautiful location and healing spirit of the land. The book begins with a guided tour and notes on cooking. Right from the start, you know you will be learning a great deal about healthy cooking and the first issue is of course sugar and how you can substitute "sucanat" for sugar. Since trying the sugar, I know it is true, but I didn't know why it was as healthy as it is. This book explains the difference between various types of sugar and then goes on to a discussion of cooking oils where we learn about "expeller pressed."

Then there is page after page of tempting recipes like Orange-Essence Raisin Bread, Irish Soda Bread and Semolina Sourdough. If you are looking for delicious hearty breads, the Honey Whole Wheat Bread is made with all whole wheat flour, sea salt and honey.

For Breakfast you can choose from Pancakes to Muesli and Granola. Bee Pollen and flax seed oil make the Muesli even healthier. These are recipes you can easily make at home.

Lunches include Chinese Omelets made with shiitake mushrooms and snow peas with a Tamari Gravy and then there are delicious Provencal Veggie Turnovers with flavors of sun-dried tomatoes and fresh basil, thyme, rosemary, oregano and sage.

The Dinners are warm and comforting and at times elegant, like the Chicken in a Basket or Asparagus & Shitake Mushroom Strudel. The Green Tea & Miso-glazed Tempeh looks very tempting and has the flavor of chicken with a hint of jasmine.

The Salads range from familiar to exotic with Curried Tofu Salad and Oriental Buckwheat Noodle Salad. There are nine salad dressings to choose from including a Apple-Dijon and Lite Asian Dressing.

The soups focus on vegetarian selections and include: Hearty Minestrone, Fresh Corn Chowder and Roasted Butternut & Curry Soup. A recipe for Ayurvedic Dal is much appreciated and this recipe includes delicious ingredients like coconut milk.

So what is for dessert? Yes, lots of delicious chocolate temptations. Imagine Coconut Macaroons dipped in chocolate or a Lemon Poppy Seed Cake with lemon glaze. They even have a vegan Chocolate cake and a Chocolate Tantric Pie.

The Esalen Cookbook is one of those cookbooks that is as fun to read as it is to use in the kitchen. You can dream about all the recipes you want to try and for some reason there is a sense of nostalgia throughout, even if you have yet to visit Esalen. You can just tell from the recipes that the people who work in the kitchen are happy, creative and appreciated! The recipes in this book not only satisfy - they warm the soul.

~The Rebecca Review

Editorial Review:

The world-renowned Esalen Institute, located on the sacred cliffs above the ocean in Big Sur, California, is a place of peace and beauty, a place where people can contemplate, think, and discover. At the heart of Esalen is its kitchen, where food is made daily from the organic farm on its grounds.

California Sizzles

Junior League of Pasadena, Inc.

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Reach for this book first 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Collecting and using new cookbooks has been a thiry-five year hobby. "Sizzles" is truly the book that I consult first whether I'm planning an event or a family meal. At least one half of the recipes have been tried and have become favorites at our house. I am ordering another copy of this today as a gift for a friend....this makes four that I've purchased.

Easy does it. 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

California Sizzles provides excellent recipes that are devoid of the blood-sweat-and tears with which many of us are too familiar.
I learned of this book at a lunch where one of the cookbook's praiseworthy recipes was served. There was almost a stunned silence when the group learned I didn't have it on my bookshelf. Well, I do now and don't regret it for a minute. American cuisine has long been extremely underrated.

excellent 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Love the balboa broccoli salad and carrot cake made with baby food! great if you don't like shredding carrots! Lots of great recipes

Favorite- my husband's as well as mine! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

My husband and I both like to cook. We have quite a varied collection of cookbooks, and this is still the best all around source for reliable, tasty meals. We make notes on the pages, recording dates we tried things, and ways we may have tweaked something. Now when I give a copy to anyone (I think I am on #10), I add my own notes of favorites. Recipes are not complicated, but sure to impress. From appetizers to desserts, you will not be disappointed.

The Cheese Board: Collective Works: Bread, Pastry, Cheese, Pizza

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

When a tiny cheese shop opened for business on a quaint Berkeley street in 1967, there was little hint of what the shop—and the neighborhood—would grow into over the next 30 years. The Cheese Board became a collective a few years later, and Chez Panisse opened across the street, giving birth to one of the country's most vibrant food neighborhoods, the epicenter of California's culinary revolution. Known and loved by locals and travelers alike, the Cheese Board is equal parts bakery, cheese store, pizzeria, and gathering place—a patchwork of the local community, where a passion for good food runs deep. For the first time ever, THE CHEESE BOARD presents the classic recipes that have made the store one of the San Francisco Bay Area's most acclaimed gourmet destinations. Complete with a history of the shop and neighborhood, a cheese primer, and all the classic recipes—including the corn-cherry scones, cheese rolls, and zampanos, all of which have a cult following—THE CHEESE BOARD is as rich and varied as the institution that inspired it.

Southern California Cooking from the Cottage: Casual Cuisine from Old La Jolla's Favorite Beachside Bungalow

Jane Stern, Michael Stern

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"The Cottage exudes the upmarket serenity of old LaJolla. Sunlight streaming in teh windows makes pale yellows glow; mellow jazz recordings waft through the dining room and into the palm-shaded patio; pretty waitresses in short shorts carry fruit-garnished dinners of salubrious California food," says author Michael Stern.

Southern California Cooking from The Cottage captures the romance, the relaxation, and the good life of The Cottage itself. Included are the recipes that have made The Cottage one of Southern California's most beloved restaurants with breakfast items such as muffins, coffee cakes, Greek, Italian, and seafood omelets, Belgian waffles, and oatmeal pancakes. From the lunch and dinner menu there are light Southern California seafood and pasta dishes, signature soups and salads, as well as traditional American classics. The book includes an eight-page color insert.

The Cottage is the ninth restaurant to be chosen by Jane and Michael Stern for their Roadfood cookbook series, which celebrates the finest regional restaurants in the United States.