|
Online
News October 27, 2009
Table of Contents
Events
In addition to our events in store and off site we have included events that we are participating in either by speaking at them, or selling books for a visiting author, or events we feel are important, these come at the end of our events below.
Eating Words - The Art of Food Writing
Saturday, November 14th, 2 pm
A Highlight of the Stratford Chef School Gastronomic Writer in Residence Program
A Roundtable Discussion and Q & A
So you want to write about food. Start here with some of the best in the business. Blogs, essays, twitter, websites and oh, yes, books, where to begin! This is a unique opportunity to hear award winning writers from around the world, and here at home, discuss the art of food writing and the future of the craft. Bring your questions and see where the discussion leads us. Panelists:
- Corby Kummer, 2008-2009 Writer in Residence, senior editor at The Atlantic, author of The Pleasures of Slow Food
- Michael Symons from Australia and the 2009-2010 Writer in Residence, author of the books One Continuous Picnic: A History of Australian Eating and A History of Cooks and Cooking,
- Margaret Webb, author of Apples to Oysters, short listed for Cuisine Canada Book Award
- Ian Brown, Globe and Mail writer, award winning journalist and author of The Boy in the Moon.
Authors books will be available on the day for purchase.
Location: Heliconian Hall, 35 Hazelton Ave
Tickets $25/15 students. Available at The Cookbook Store
  Saturday, November 21st, 2 - 3 pm
Lucy Waverman
A Year in Lucy's Kitchen
You can now throw out some of those clippings from the Globe and Mail and Food & Drink. A not to be missed collection of recipes for use throughout the year. Hidden gems are the wine suggestions written in a very accessible style by Waverman's lawyer husband Bruce, whose love of wine is apparent but lacks any of the snobbery.
 Saturday, November 28th , 2 to 3 pm
Jeff Crump & Bettina Schormann
Earth to Table
Proponents of both the Slow Food movement and of local food, Jeff Crump and Bettina Schormann the executive chef and pastry chef, respectively, at the Ancaster Old Mill present both blueprint and inspiration for supporting local farmers. Arranged by season, the how-tos, international chef profiles, spotlights, and recipes all demonstrate the pleasures to be found in eating locally. Edward Pond’s spectacular photographs complete a beautiful “must-have” for farmer market enthusiasts. Hardcover, 362 pp. $45.00.
 Monday, November 30th
Thomas Keller
Ad Hoc at Home
This is Keller's first book tour to Toronto and we are delighted to host an on stage interview followed by Q & A. This Michelin Guide starred, much honoured chef has produced some of the most compelling books over the years, The French Laundry Cookbook in 1999, Bouchon in 2004 and Cooking Under Pressure last year. The new book Ad Hoc at Home showcases recipes from the casual family style restaurant in Yountville.
Format: On stage interview followed by Q & A
When: Monday November 30th, 7pm
Where: The Appel Salon at Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge Street, (just across from The Cookbook Store)
Tickets: $80 in advance available only at The Cookbook Store 416- 920-2665 or 1-800-268-6018.
Ticket price includes an autographed copy of the book Ad Hoc at Home
 Wednesday, December 2nd 6 to 7 pm
Anna Olson
Fresh with Anna Olson
From the TV screen right into your kitchen comes a new round of recipes from the popular Food Network host and her show Fresh with Anna Olson. Following up on her philosophy of fresh, seasonal and all in support of the local producers in the community.
 Saturday, December 5th, 2 to 3 pm
Elizabeth Baird
The Slow Cooker Collection
Crock pots for those of an age, but slow cookers to millions of users. This piece of equipment is a standby in the kitchen these days. and when the Canadian Living team tackles the slow cooker you can be sure the results will appeal and you'll wonder what took them so long!
New Books
 All the Best Recipes
Jane Rodmell
Just by reading the index we know we like this book because we see the recipes for our favorite cookies from the Toronto food shop/caterer, All the Best Fine Foods: maple shortbread and Norwegian lace cookies. Alas, even the good-natured Jane Rodmell does not give away all her recipes. There are no directions for cheese straws. What you will find are simple dishes with vibrant flavoring: green beans gremolata, Thai green curry chicken, and sweet potato samosas. Throughout there are dollops of information for everything from equipping your kitchen to creating a cheese board. Line drawings and colour photos. Softcover, 448 pp, $27.95.
The Slow Cooker Collection
Elizabeth Baird and the Canadian Living Test Kitchen
For those who swear by their slow cooker here are more recipes to keep the family fed; and those who still call it a crock pot time to get it out again. Whether it be weeknight meals or entertaining there's something for all occasions and in true Canadian Living fashion directions are easy to follow with minimal fuss. Softcover, 272 pp, $22.95.
 Clean Food
Terry Walters
Terry Walters vision of “clean” food is one in which the food source is close to the eater thus creating a low-carbon footprint. Although the word vegan does not appear, the recipes are egg-, dairy-, and meat-free. Even if you do not wish to live a totally vegetarian life, it is a great book for those who wish to have more grains in their diet, or who are trying to use up the produce that seduced them in a farmer’s market. Hardcover, 290 pp, $35.00.
 The Concise World Atlas of Wine
Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson
This smaller format edition of the essential wine atlas maintains the complete text and all 200 maps of the original. This edition reflects the ongoing evolution of the South African wine industry and the emergence of wine production in Asia. Colour maps and photos. Softcover, 352 pp, $37.99.
 The Deluxe Food Lover’s Companion
Sharon Tyler Herbst and Ron Herbst
The popular handbook for all things culinary is now glitzed up for gift-giving with hardcover and gold-tipped pages. In addition to the usual alphabetical listings, there are 40 glossaries for specific topicseg appetizers, apples, cocktails, potatoes, chiles. There are also “fast facts” scattered throughout with tips and extra information. Of course, there are also the excellent appendices at the back with weighs and measures conversion, English/American term translation, temperature guides and more. Limited illustrations. Hardcover, 794 pp, $35.99.
Fresh with Anna Olson
Anna Olson
The popular Food Network star shows how cooking evolves over the course of a year as different ingredients become available. From green bean griddle cakes to a warming potato soup with bacon and cheddar, Anna gives us a seasonal take on comfort food. Still, it is her love of baking that always draws us in with treats like mini cherry pies and butterscotch white chocolate brownie bites. Colour photos. Softcover, 199 pp, $29.95.
 Good Food for All
The Stop Community Food Centre
The Stop started as a food bank in the 1970's in downtown Toronto but has grown into so much more, their mission - to promote healthy food and universal access to it.
It has become a hub for initiatives such as community gardens and kitchens, cooking classes, outdoor bake ovens, food markets. The newly opened The Green Barn in Artscape Wychwood Barns includes a farmers' market, sustainable food production, green houses and after school programs all encompassing The Stop's view that food should be a basic human right. The recipes in this new cookbook are based on the seasons and are simple and flavourful. Portions of our book sales are donated to The Stop. Softcover, 160 pp $19.99.
 I Know How to Cook
Ginette Mathiot
What the Joy of Cooking is to Americans and The Silver Spoon is to Italians, this book is to French home cooks. Edited by Clotilde Dusoulier (Chocolate and Zucchini) working with a group of international culinary experts, this first English translation is updated to reflect contemporary tastes and methods while maintaining the essence of the original which has served three generations. The downside is that many recipes direct the cook to other pages for intermediate preparations. Colour photos and illustrations. Hardcover, 975 pp, $49.95.
Martha Stewart’s Dinner at Home
Martha Stewart
Martha’s quick seasonal menus, some from Martha Stewart Living, is the perfect book for the busy home cook. Based on fresh ingredients readily available from farmers’ markets or grocery stores, the dishes can be on the table in 30 minutes or less. For fast reference, starters, mains, sides, and desserts are listed by season at the back of the book so the user can create her/his own menus. As usual, there are wonderful colour photos. Hardcover, 272 pp, $43.00.
 My Bread
James Lahey with Rick Flaste
It was James Lahey’s unique technique for baking bread that was at the heart of the Mark Bittman article in the New York Times that has revolutionized making artisanal bread at home. This method of no-knead, long, slow rise, baked in a cast iron casserole at a high temperature is the focus of this book. The recipes here are the ones Lahey has made famous at New York’s Sullivan Street Bakery including pizza bianca. Colour photos. Hardcover, 222 pp, $37.95.
New American Table
Marcus Samuelsson
Born in Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, a UNICEF ambassador, and celebrated chef/co-owner of New York’s Aquavit, Marcus Samuelsson presents a collection of contemporary American dishes inspired by his travels across the United States and by the immigrants who populate the country. Turkey meat loaf with tomato spinach sauce, corn wild rice, almond chicken with avocado salsa and radish salad are typical of the simple by highly seasoned dishes. Colour photos.Hardcover, 356 pp, $48.00.
 Nutmeg & Custard
Marcus Wareing
A cook who reveres ingredients and the creative application of techniques to display coax out their maximum flavour and best texture. Unlike many contemporary cookbook authors who provide a mini essay with every recipe, Wareing confines his comments to the first few pages of the book. Then he leaves you alone to explore his version of contemporary home cooking and home versions of commercial hits such as Jaffa cakes. chorizo-stuffed French toast with manchego, tiramisu doughnuts, smoked paprika and sunblush tomato barley salad are a few of the tempting dishes.The sections include weekends, grill room, Orient, ice-cream parlour, and even one devoted to popcorn. Colour photos. Hardcover, 273 pp, $50.95.
The Pleasures of Cooking for One
Judith Jones
The legendary editor of some of the culinary world’s great writers - Julia Child, James Beard, Marcella Hazan - Judith Jones (The Tenth Muse, $29.95) proves once and for all that eating alone need never be viewed as a punishment. From eggs benedict to panna cotta with maple syrup, the recipes are truly enticing. Beyond that, she shows how to use leftovers creatively, and shares the wisdom garnered from her authors. Colour photos. Hardcover, 273 pp, $34.00.
 The River Café Classic Italian Cookbook
Rose Gray & Ruth Rogers
Since they opened the River Café more than 20 years ago, Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray have not only changed the face of Italian cooking in Britainand North America, they have shepherded a whole new generation of cooking stars including Arthur Potts Dawson, Sam and Sam Clark, Ben O’Donoghue, and most famously, Jamie Oliver. Here they share not only recipes from friends , restaurants, and wineries in Italy but the memories that make these dishes so special. As with their other books, rusticity rules with the freshest ingredients a key to success. Colour photos of finished dishes, local scenes, produce, and the authors themselves. Hardcover, 413 pp, $65.00.
A Year in Lucy’s Kitchen
Lucy Waverman
Taking inspiration from seasonal produce, Lucy Waverman serves up menus for each month of the year incorporating ingredients in their prime. This time her wine aficionado husband, Bruce MacDougall, selected wines to complement the menus. Some of the outstanding dishes: April’s rhubarb pistachio crisp; October’s beet greens soup with sour cream glaze; November’s Asian braised pork belly. To top it all off, food stylist Eshun Mott and photographers Rob Fiocca and Jim Norton have produced a visual feast. Colour photos. Softcover, 303 pp, $35.00.
 The Vegetarian Option
Simon Hopkinson
The well-known British cooking expert who made his reputation with Roast Chicken and Other Stories, $29.95, turns his creative eye to meatless cooking for the first time. The recipes are organized in sections vegetables, herbs, pasta, pulses and grains, rice, eggs, and fruit. This is very much in the style of older vegetarian books with more eggs and dairy, richer than usual in contemporary vegetarian cooking which is tending more to the vegan spectrum. But as Simon Hopkinson says, he does not expect to become vegetarian any time in the foreseeable future. Colour photos. Hardcover, 224 pp, $55.00.
Recipe: Harvest Corn Chowder with Bacon
Recipe from Gourmet Today edited by Ruth Reichl
Serves 8 as a first course (makes about 11 cups)
Active time: 40 minutes. Start to Finish: 1 1/4 hours
Brimming with fresh corn, sweet potato, red bell pepper, and carrots, this vibrant chowder has flavor to spare. We adapted the colorful recipe from one served at Suzanne Fine Regional Cuisine, a restaurant in Lodi, New York that overlooks Seneca Lake.
1/2 cup dice (1/4 inch) slab bacon (2 ounces; rind discarded if necessary)
2 cups diced (1/4 inch) sweet onion, such as Vidalia or Walla Walla
2 large carrots, cut into 1/4 inch dice
1 celery rib, cut into 1/4 inch dice
1 red bell pepper, cored, seeded, and cut into 1/4 inch dice
1/2 pound yellow-fleshed potatoes, such Yukon Gold (2 small), peeled and cut into 1/4 inch dice
1 medium sweet potato (8 ounces), peeled and cut into 1/4 inch dice
5 cups chicken stock
2 fresh thyme sprigs
3 cups corn
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Garnish: 2 plum tomatoes, seeded and diced; finely chopped fresh chives
Cook bacon in a 6- 8 quart wide heavy pot over moderate heat, stirring frequently, until crisp, about 5 minutes. Transfer with a slotted spoon to paper towels to drain.
Add onion, carrots, celery, and bell pepper to bacon fat remaining in pot and cook, stirring until onion is softened, 8 - 10 minutes. Add both potatoes, stock and thyme, bring to a simmer, and simmer, covered, until potatoes, are just tender, about 15 minutes.
Add corn and cream and simmer, uncovered, for 10 minutes. Add salt and pepper and stir in bacon.
Serve sprinkled with tomatoes and chives.
Cook's Note: The chowder can be made up to 3 days ahead. cook, uncovered, then refrigerate, covered.
 Gourmet Today
Edited by Ruth Reichl
Another door-stopper, the more than 1000 recipes in this collection represent the new face of Gourmet with hundreds of quickly prepared dishes redolent of international flavours. Fresh produce is the building block for many of the recipes which include many choices for vegetarians.To make the massive book easier to use, there are recipe indexes for each section along with the index at the end. There are loads of tips and suggested menus to ease both entertaining and weekday meals. Line drawings but no colour photos. Hardcover, 1008 pp. $49.95.
Remembering Gourmet Magazine by Jennifer Grange
I was a teenager and already interested in cooking when I first saw Gourmet. It was in my oldest sister's kitchen. She no longer remembers why she not only had a subscription for many years, but kept every issue in the blue binders which had to be ordered specially from the magazine.
The food in the magazines which came to my childhood home every month -- Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, McCalls - was all about speed. With a plethora of products from Kraft and General Mills along with your handy electric frying pan, dinner could be on the table in minutes. The advertising was as enticing as the editorial content.
Gourmet offered a whole different world in which time was definitely not of the essence. It seemed one often needed to know on Monday what one wanted to eat on Thursday given the shopping, marinating, and multiple preparations that one had to perform. The would-be cook really had to pay attention since the ingredients were not separated out from the body of the recipe. There were no miniature marshmallows to be seen. Like the New Yorker, the advertising was discrete. If I remember correctly, the photographs were all together in the centre of the magazine, proto gastroporn in all its glory.
At the time, Gourmet was as much about travel - Eurocentric travel - as food. In this alternate world, the chill of the Cold War, the Vietnam war, and racial upheaval had no place. Crisp linens and smiling service, perfect oeufs en gelee and iles flotante were, reassuringly, what counted. What I loved were the letters in which members of the new jet setter class begged the editors for the recipe of a dish they had sampled in some far off place, or, offered up their own recipes for admiration from the less affluent.
When I first started reading Gourmet, I did not dare try cooking anything. Many of the ingredients cited - clam juice, sweet butter - were not available in the grocery stores that served the rural community where I grew up. Instead, it showed me the possibilities of the world I might grow into, the world my sister, then a young faculty wife, already inhabited. Of course, she also never cooked anything from the magazine. I suspect just having it in the house gave her enough confidence to help survive the new milieu in which she found herself.
It was a whole decade later that I finally did start to cook from Gourmet's recipes. By that time, I had picked up enough skills from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French of French Cooking to get a job cooking. The first dish I made was a zucchini pie, sort of a savoury clafouti, which I still occasionally make.
Gourmet was a magazine that changed gradually, often almost imperceptibly. It was a real revolution when the ingredients were broken out from the body of the recipes. The travel articles began to include Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa, the world. It was where I first read Laurie Colwin. The editors recognized that their readers no longer had days to prepare a meal. Though recipes requiring painstaking preparation remained, there were many others that could be on the table within half an hour, without using convenience foods.
Hired as editor a decade ago, it was Ruth Reichl who really pulled Gourmet into the contemporary world with younger writers, more attention to issues affecting modern food production and consumption, and greater understanding to how her readers really live. The quality and the beautiful photographs were always the enduring elements.
With only four editors in its almost 70 years of operation, Gourmet was the voice of record in food matters, a New York Times for the culinary world. Conde Nast, in announcing the closure of the magazine vowed that the book publishing program and television series will continue. Yet, without Gourmet's monthly presence and without a successor of its stature, the culinary world seems suddenly and seriously adrift.
Back to top |
|
|
| Previously in Online... |
| September 1, 2009 |
| July 31, 2009 |
| July 3, 2009 |
| June 8, 2009 |
| May 22, 2009 |
| May 2, 2009 |
| April 18, 2009 |
| March 27, 2009 |
| February 14, 2009 |
| January 12, 2009 |
| |
| |
|
|
