The Essentials of Cooking

For Christmas, I received a wonderful cooking reference book: The Essentials of Cooking by James Peterson. The contents of the book are exactly as advertised in the title. This book provides all the essentials you’ll need to start cooking, with step-by-step instructions and many, many helpful tips, all illustrated by gorgeous color photographs. Armed with [...]

Eating in Las Vegas

I took a slightly longer break from blogging than I intended. Vacation can be wonderfully relaxing, but why does returning from vacation have to be so stressful? But you don’t want to hear about that. Let’s get to the good stuff — the food.
This was my first visit to Las Vegas. I have to say [...]

Review: An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, Elizabeth David (1952)
Elizabeth David is one of the pioneers of food writing, and even 50 years later, her ascerbic, witty style still holds up, as do, surprisingly, some of her pet subjects. She rails against processed foods, decries the commercialization and dumbing down of great traditional recipes, and [...]

French Onion Soup (Bistro Cooking)

Patricia Wells is my new best friend. I have had her cookbook, Bistro Cooking, for a while but only recently began cooking out of it. The recipes are simple but hearty French bistro fare that rely on the best ingredients for flavor, and each one I have attempted has been delicious. Her Marinated Goat Cheese, [...]

Some Thoughts on Gourmet’s Recipes

I love cookbooks. I have a carefully crafted library of them, and I have to constantly resist the urge to buy one more. Even foregoing beef, lamb and pork as I do, and eschewing the regular preparation of desserts and complicated breads at home, I doubt I’ll ever be able to cook my way through [...]

Review: Garlic and Sapphires

Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl (2005)
This memoir covers Reichl’s tenure as restaurant critic for the New York Times and includes some of her favorite retaurant reviews and recipes. But what I found even more fascinating were Reichl’s accounts of a critic’s life. To avoid being recognized, she donned a variety of disguises and found [...]

Review: Pot on the Fire

Pot on the Fire: Further Confessions of a Renegade Cook, John Thorne (2000)
Pot on the Fire is a collection of essays about food and cooking, each one exploring a particular dish or ingredient or meal, with recipes. It is all fascinating and eminently readable, and reading it I learned quite a lot about such diverse [...]

Review: How I Learned to Cook

How I Learned to Cook, edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Peter Meehan (2006)
How I Learned to Cook is a collection of 40 essays by well-known chefs and food writers, describing early pivotal incidents in their culinary careers. The title might be a bit misleading; the stories aren’t generally about learning how to cook, but [...]

Review: How to Cook Everything

Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything taught me how to cook. I don’t mean the type of cooking where you slavishly follow a recipe step-by-step without much thought to what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. I mean the type of cooking where you look at what’s in the fridge or in the market [...]

Review: The Soul of a Chef

The Soul of a Chef, Michael Ruhlman (2001)
This book contains three “backstage” views on cooking in contemporary America. My favorite two pieces were the opener, describing the excruciating Certified Master Chef exam at the Culinary Institute of America, and the closer, spent in the kitchen of French Laundry — reportedly America’s best restaurant. Both [...]