The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution
Where to buy The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Tasty Revolution books online?
- ISBN13: 9780307336798
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Perhaps more reliable than anyone for the revolution in the way we eat, cook, and reflect about food, Alice Waters has “single-handedly chang[ed] the American palate” according to the New York Times. Her simple but inventive dishes focus on a passion for flavor and a reverence for locally produced, seasonal foods.
With an essential repertoire of timeless, approachable recipes chosen to enhance and showcase fantastic ingredients, The Art of Simple Food is an indispensable resource for home cooks. Here you will find Alice’s philosophy on everything from stocking your kitchen, to mastering fundamentals and preparing tasty, seasonal inspired meals all year long. Permanently right to her philosophy that a perfect meal is one that’s balanced in texture, color, and flavor, Waters helps us embrace the seasons’ gift and make the best choices when selecting ingredients. Fill your market basket with pristine produce, healthful grains, and responsibly raised meat, poultry, and seafood, then embark on a voyage of culinary rediscovery that reminds us that the most gratifying dish is regularly the least complex.Amazon.com Review
Do we really need more recipes for beef stew, polenta, and ratatouille? If they’re the work of famed restaurateur and “food liberal” Alice Waters, undoubtedly. In The Art of Simple Food, Waters offers 200-plus recipes for these and additional simple but savory dishes, like Spicy Cauliflower Soup, Fava Bean Purée, and Braised Chicken Legs, as well as dessert formulas for the likes of Nectarine and Blueberry Crisp and Tangerine Ice. In addition, readers learn (or become reacquainted with) the Waters mantra: eat locally and sustainably; eat seasonally; shop at farmers markets. These are the rules by which she approaches food and cooking, and hopes we will too. Organized largely by techniques, the book is a kind of primer, designed to free readers from recipe reliance.
Some readers may look askance at advice that they search out sources for locally produced food, for example, agreed the everyday exigencies of shopping and getting meals on the table. Yet it is precisely the need to “re-establish” our relationship to food that, Waters contends, determines the essential success of all our cooking and dining, not to mention our health and that of the planet. This relatively tiny book has a large message, and excellent everyday recipes to back it up. –Arthur Boehm
Buy Cheap The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Tasty Revolution Online
Related posts:
- More of America’s Most Wanted Recipes: More Than 200 Simple and Delicious Secret Restaurant Recipes–All for $10 or Less!
- Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food
- How To Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food
- How to Cook Everything : 2,000 Simple Recipes for Great Food
- Everyday Food: Fresh Flavor Fast: 250 Easy, Delicious Recipes for Any Time of Day
Having been a fan of food and cook books for some years I was disappointed in the newest book from Alice Waters, The Art of Simple Food. My disappointment comes mainly from the fact that cookbooks should have covers and spines that can be kept clean or cleaned off with a damp cloth or sponge. A dust jacket would be helpful, too, in preserving a book that was meant to be used in a kitchen. But, this book has a cloth bound spine and no dust jacket and that means it will be prey to dust, dirt and grease and the covers and spine will have a fleeting shelf life in a effective kitchen. Catherine Pannell
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I bought this book to add to my collection of additional Chez Panisse books. It’s very well written and has some excellent thoughts for both the novice and the veteran cook. The only main gripe that I had with the book is that all of the recipes are scaled to feed 4 persons — not a problem in itself but if one doesn’t pay attention one could accidently double or triple a recipe and end up with an obscene amount of food. It appears as though the quantities were not completely well thought out or Ms. Waters is advocating that we eat larger parts of protein than one really needs to.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
This book is very basic and uninspiring. There were only one or two recipes that seemed appealing. This book would be excellent if your are new to thinking about meals and cooking food and sharing it with others. An ancient Joy of Cooking would do as well, if not better. I am disappointed.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Alice Waters book is both wonderful and problematic at the same time. Ms. Waters restaurant is justly legendary for its high quality and also for being located in Berkeley, the bluest patch of the bluest region of the bluest state in the United States. She has taken what in France would be just unadorned common sense – go to market filled with the week’s fresh produce, recently caught fish, just butchered meats and artisanal wines, cheeses and breads and take it home and make something excellent to eat with it – and has, in the context of both her local Berkeley environment and the industrialized, dumbed down, pre packaged American food system, converted common sense into a typically Californian food ideology. The first part of her book is suffused with odes to and politically right suggestions for doing excellent in the world, supporting alternative farmers, being a force for change, and suggestions for how you ought to tell to and occupy additional people in your cooking. She is, in fleeting, a classic Berkeley type.
The fact that her land in Berkeley has both nurtured her and made her thoughts seem reasonable, and that the San Francisco Bay Area is both economically and logistically perfect for supporting the thoughts that she promotes, while many additional places, where many of her readers live for example, would be much less perfect, seems of no importance to her. Although her thoughts are, once again, just unadorned common sense, and have risen to the level of faith and ideology only in the context of the dreadful food culture that most Americans live in, they are open as pseudo political imperatives. The fact that a reader in any of the hundreds of drab towns across America that depend on Wal-Mart for food supplies would be hard pushed to follow any of her advice on sourcing ingredients is, evidently, unimportant. Julia Child, for example, in her first book on French Cooking, did everything possible to somehow convert her knowledge of French cooking into terms and ingredients that an American housewife of the day could have really bought close to home lacking apt a food liberal and all-purpose pain in the rear.
All that said, once you get past the introductory sections, what you have is a lovely, wonderful cookbook. Whatever Ms. Water believes in, it doesn’t matter as long as that belief and mission have caused her to become such a excellent cook, make such wonderful meals and share such fantastic insights and recipes in this otherwise marvelous cookbook. She could judge n Batman and tiny elves living in her light sockets who give her secret instructions about butterfat for all I care. If the end result was this kind of cooking that would be fine with me. I just wish she could of spared us the side trip to the East Bay outlook and suggestions for socially reliable participation in society.
I am sure there are many people who LOVE this kind of stuff, and have been very reassured in their local hamlets to know that Ms. Waters is on their side, thinking right, doing excellent, wanting a better world, believing in justice, having a tiny trace, and involving people in your reliable lifestyle and your caring relationships to nurture a better world. That’s just fine. But cooking is ultimately about building something excellent with what you have at hand. And although it’s vital for people to both know and permanently seek the best ingredients, it is more vital that they know what to do with ingredients once they have them.
I firmly judge that this is such a excellent cookbook that you could have the carbon foot print of Godzilla, personally emit an entire cow herds worth of methane gas every day, drive a SUV gas guzzler, never recycle and be politically incorrect from cradle to grave and still be able to go to Wal-Mart, or even worse, and still make lovely, tasty dishes with this book. The take away here is that you don’t have to own a Prius to like Alice Water’s Cookbook, although I am sure that’s her target audience. It’s a fantastic cookbook, assuming she will place you alone to work in a guilt free kitchen, doing, eating and acting as you please.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
I bought Alice Waters’ seminal Simple Food hoping to find fantastic, smart, creative recipes. I didn’t find any of that. I establish lots of preachy chats about food, and self absorbed blather about stuff I already knew. If you are 16 and just starting to cook and wanting a guru to look up to, this is a fantastic book and you might treasure it. If you are 50 and have been cooking all your life, you have heard all of this before. In fleeting, if “California Cuisine” holds charm for you, you may like “Simple Food”. If you are past that, head elsewhere. There are tons of fantastic cookbooks which are creative, entertaining, and healthy. Try Vegetarian Times Low Stout and Quick, or even Hungry Girl. Cooking should be fun, not like an afternoon with Cotton Mather.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5