Thomas Keller
Under Pressure
Under Pressure : Cooking Sous Vide by Thomas Keller (of French Laundry and Ratatouille (the movie) fame) and compatriots from his restaurants’ kitchens is a glossy coffee table book with information for the kitchen… if you like to invest in the latest kitchen gadgets, cook for dozens or hundreds of gourmands every night, and are constrained by food safety handling regulations. The photographs range from the practical (technique illustrations) to the intimate (shots of Keller in the kitchen before the evening rush) to the beautiful (food-as-art still lifes). The recipes offer lots of food for thought – new combinations, old-new preparations, and some new ingredients. As a vegetarian home chef in the San Francisco area (i.e. with access to a wide array of ingredients) while I could scale down and pick apart the recipes and while I was interested in the science behind sous vide, what I found particularly valuable was the presentation of the benefits of vacuum-packing and compressing certain fruits and vegetables.
David Lebovitz
My Paris Kitchen
My Paris Kitchen by David Lebovitz is much more of a cookbook than his previous Paris-based, recipe-accented memoir The Sweet Life in Paris (see the Travel Books post). While instructive and evocative of contemporary Parisian cuisine, I found his memoir much more entertaining and useful – though I am biased as a vegetarian who eats little dairy and white flour and as someone who already cooks mostly based on what’s in season in the local farmers’ market.
Sierra Club
Simple Foods for the Pack
Surprisingly current given the book’s 1986 copyright date – the list of pack staples includes quinoa, chia, wakame, and flaxseed. The authors were Claudia Axcell, Diana Cooke, and Vikki Kinmont.
Miscellaneous
Picnics : Easy recipes for the best alfresco foods by Robin Vitetta-Miller, copyright 2005. Cute end papers and the subtle recurring ant motif is a nice touch. The recipes are meat-heavy and just okay – though they do cover a nice variety of ethnicities. The introduction section is useful for the picnic novice.
501 Bento Box Lunches by Amorette Dye is more a book about food decoration than food preparation and the Japanese flavors are more in the cute presentations than in the food itself. The color photos are helpful but the small font size make the book pretty unusable in the kitchen. I wonder if finicky American schoolchildren will more readily eat bologna sandwiches when they (the sandwiches) have funny faces looking up out of the bento boxes.
xx by yy.