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Giorgio Locatelli
The Observer, Sunday 24 September 2006

It took Giorgio Locatelli five years to put together his definitive, 600-page Italian recipe book and memoir, Made in Italy. Full of mouth-watering dishes from his home country, it’s got everything from delicious pasta and fish, to amazing risottos and meat.

My first feelings for cooking came from my grandmother, Vincenzina. But my first understanding of the relationship between food, sex, wine and the excitement of life came together for me very early on. I grew up in the village of Corgeno on the shores of Lake Comabbio in the north of Italy. My uncle and auntie, with the help of my granddad, built our hotel and restaurant, La Cinzianella, in the village in 1963. I helped out in the restaurant from the age of five until I got my first proper job in a kitchen when I turned 16. In Corgeno, there were eight founding families. The Caletti family, on my mother’s side, was one of them; and on my grandmother’s side, the Tamborini family, along with my cousins, the Gnocchi family, who have a pastry shop in Gallarate, near Milan – the speciality is gorgeous soft amaretti biscuits. It was in this shop that I got my first taste of an industrial kitchen – the ovens were so big that you could walk into them. I loved it.

“Made in Italy” is quite simply the perfect book. So many books are rattled off to accompany television series that when you come across the real thing, written in its own time and to its own agenda, it really hits you between the eyes! Buy this and you’ll never want to look at another Italian cookbook again.’ Gordon Ramsay, Times

‘This book is nothing short of a masterpiece.’ Nigel Slater

‘Packed with delicious recipes, many from his restaurant, and the reminiscences from his life, it is the ultimate gift for anyone interested in Italian food.’ Telegraph ‘

(Locatelli’s) “Made in Italy”, is my Book of the Year and puts everything else I have on my Italian shelf in the shade.’ Nigel Slater, Observer Food Monthly

‘”Made in Italy” by the flamboyant Italian chef Giorgio Locatelli is such a fashionable combination of charming anecdotes and stories about his family that could double as recipes.’ Saturday Telegraph Magazine

‘Giorgio Locatelli’s “Made in Italy” is a beautiful, evocative book, looking not just at traditional Italian ingredients and local recipes but also at local traditions and the memories! deserves to become a classic.’ Waterstones Books Quarterly

If you love having friends and family round for dinner or simply rustling up fresh, fast food, Mexican cooking is fun, fantastic and full of flavour. One of its brightest stars, Wahaca chef and food writer Thomasina Miers shares the recipes she has gathered since she first fell in love with the country aged 18, reinventing the classics with accessible ingredients to demonstrate how exciting and delicious traditional Mexican food can be.

Whether you’re looking for street snacks full of punch, rich, hearty stews, or sensational, spicy wraps, Thomasina’s Mexican Food Made Simple is bursting with recipes you’ll want to eat and share: soft corn tacos and tostados; little cheesy things (Quesadillas); a great Mexican chille con carne; Grilled Seabass or succulent Lamb Chops with homemade salsas and tortilla chips; and to finish churros with chocolate sauce.

The book features vibrant food photography throughout, and step-by-step guides to folding the perfect burrito, eating a taco (no knives and forks allowed), making a sizzling table salsa, and much more. And with Thomasina’s guide to the world’s hottest Chillis, ingenious cheats, and helpful menu planner, Mexican Food Made Simple has everything you need to put together a fantastic Mexican feast at home.

Reviews:

‘Mexican food is one of the world’s great cuisines and there is no one I’d rather read on the subject than Tommi. I love her writing and the recipes in this book are wonderful too’

(Tom Parker Bowles, Market Kitchen )

‘When I read this book I wanted to cook from it immediately … then jump on a plane to Oaxhaca. Colourful and inviting, full of scrummy-looking and achievable recipes, it’s for anyone who likes their food vibrant, healthy and ballsy…just like the author!’

(Allegra McEvedy )

‘A world away from Tex-Mex sizzling fajitas with cheesy nachos, Thomasina Miers, former MasterChef champ and Wahaca restaurant founder, is bringing a large slice of genuine Mexico to the mainstream’

(Delicious )

‘Perfect for summer, this book from the MasterChef 2005 winner is full of easy flavourful recipes.’ (BBC Good Food Magazine )

‘A great introduction to the breadth of real Mexican cooking, which goes way beyond the Tex-Mex cliches.’ (Delicious )

Simon Hopkinson loves food and he knows how to cook it. The Good Cook is the result of over 40 years’ experience and is based on Simon’s belief that a good cook loves eating as much as cooking.

How the ingredients you choose and the way you cook them will turn a good recipe into a great dish. That a cheap cut of meat cooked with care can taste as nice as a choice cut prepared by indifferent hands.

Structured around Simon’s passion for good ingredients (Anchovy and Aubergine, Cheese and Wine, Smoked and Salted Fish, Ham, Bacon and A Little Pig) and written with Simon’s trademark perfectionism and precision, this is the book that you will cherish for life.

Driving his chum’s rather clapped out camper van, which he describes as his Rocinante, Rick Stein embarks on a culinary journey laced with history, literature and stunning photography through Spain.

I’ve wanted to make a series in Spain for a long time. I love Spanish food, I’ve been going there since I was a young boy – but until quite recently I don’t think people really took the food seriously. French and Italian cooking was felt to have more finesse. Thanks to a handful of really dedicated Spanish chefs and a growing enthusiasm for its rugged flavours, that has all begun to change. No one cooks fish with more respect or grills meat better.

To me the underlying point of journeying to Spain would be to discover the ‘duende’ in the cooking. By that I mean a sense of soul, of authenticity. The word is normally used for the soul of flamenco but I think it could be equally applied to the art of Spanish cooking because to my mind, in really good food, there is a communication between the cook and diner that amounts to art.” Rick Stein

Programme 1 – Galicia, Andalusia, Asturias, Gijon and Basque
Programme 2 – Rioja, Navarra, Catalonia, the Mediterranean and Lleida
Programme 3 – Catalonia, Valencia, Sueca and La Mancha
Programme 4 – Extremadura, Guadalupe, Seville and Granada

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For photos and links to further reviews click on link below

Sautéed Monkfish with Rose Petal Salt

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Pink Grapefruit, Avocado and Pomegranate Salad with Nasturtium Flowers

This season, the 1,000-plus recipe category also includes books of French and Italian cuisine. I KNOW HOW TO COOK (Je Sais Cuisiner) (Phaidon, $45) was written in the early 1930s by the Sorbonne home-economics teacher Ginette Mathiot, who was tapped to compile a comprehensive collection of recipes for young brides. The resulting 1,400 recettes tick through the French repertoire, from abricots à l’anglaise to zephyr veal scallops, and are written in a brisk, authoritative manner that assumes the reader does indeed know how to cook. As Mathiot wrote in the original introduction, “A good cookbook must only offer useful information.”

With up to six recipes per page, this translation by Imogen Forster is more “Joy of Cooking” than “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” Like “Joy,” Mathiot’s book has been updated through the years. Considerable visual charm aside, it earns its chunk of shelf space with unfamiliar vintage dishes like potage à l’aurore, sauce bâtarde and sheep’s foot rémoulade. You’ll have to make them on faith, like the chocolate cake that requires grating rather than melting chocolate. It wasn’t the chocolate cake I had envisioned (i.e., a brown one), but given the mystery factor and brisk instructions, it was a pleasant surprise nonetheless. Under Mathiot’s guidance, the vanilla soufflé did exactly as told, which is really all you can ask.

Molecular gastronomy didn’t kill Gourmet magazine. The dump-and-stirrers did. Still, the timing of GOURMET TODAY: More Than 1,000 All-New Recipes for the Contemporary Kitchen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40), compiled by the magazine’s editor, the former New York Times food critic Ruth Reichl, is tragicomic: the book was published two weeks before the magazine was shuttered, its staffers given 48 hours to clean out their desks; a sticker on the cover offers a free subscription with purchase. But what a great final act. “Gourmet Today” offers a thoughtful, thorough portrait of the way Americans are eating, documenting a cuisine that seamlessly incorporates ethnic ingredients, farmers’ market produce, vegetarian entrées and quick-cook staples — plus plenty of cocktails. This big green book isn’t the big yellow one you bought your mom for Christmas ’04. Not with recipes like Korean bulgogi, farro risotto with cauliflower or Afghani dumplings. Your mother might not make the recipe for David Chang’s Momofuku pork belly buns, but chances are she’d try the pork chops with fennel-pomegranate salsa, and you should, too. Like many of the dishes in the book, it’s simple, satisfying and pretty au courant. Thank you, Ruth Reichl. Come back soon.

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Heston Blumenthal, the chef of the three-Michelin-starred Fat Duck in Bray, England, is a brilliant obsessive of another school. Not afraid to geek out, he’s just as curious about how sound affects taste (diners who order a dish called Sound of the Sea listen to an iPod playing waves) as he is about 17th-century English cuisine. Last year, he oversaw the publication of “The Big Fat Duck Cookbook,” written with Pascal Cariss — 11.6 pounds and $250 worth of engagingly written personal history, scientific research and recipes from his lab. . . . I mean kitchen. Republished as the somewhat more portable and accessible FAT DUCK COOKBOOK (Bloomsbury, $50), it now weighs in at just under six pounds. A lavish extravaganza larded with cartoons and Ralph Steadman-esque illustrations by Dave McKean, the book downloads everything in Blumenthal’s head (which is a lot), including recipes for already legendary dishes like snail porridge as well as ­nitro-scrambled egg and bacon ice cream. If your dream cuisine involves liquid nitrogen and a rotary evaporator, Blumenthal’s your bloke.

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From New York Times, December 6, 2009

One of the most talked-about restaurant books of the season is David Chang’s MOMOFUKU (Clarkson Potter, $40). In five years, this 32-year-old New York chef has built an empire on inspired, porky excess. Chang’s Virginia upbringing, upscale restaurant experience and love of certain Korean and Japanese flavors result in the kind of dishes that will jam your eyeballs into the back of your head, like brussels sprouts with bacon and kimchi puree. This fawningly produced book, written with the former New York Times “$25 and Under” reviewer Peter Meehan (who contributes the Grass Fed column to the blog of T: The New York Times Style Magazine), is fueled by Chang’s hard-core attitude and punctuated with a “Hell’s Kitchen” season’s worth of unprintable words. The dude’s intense, and he wants you to know it. The food is intense, too, especially as the recipes increase in difficulty as the chapters move up the Momofuku restaurant scale, from Noodle Bar to Ssam Bar to Ko.

It’s exciting to think that thousands of American kitchens will soon be stocked with dashi, kochukaru and fish sauce. It’s even more exciting to think that some people will confit chicken wings in five cups of pork fat and attempt the cassoulet-level marathon that is Momofuku ramen. For those just in it for the coolness (or without access to an Asian market), you don’t need to make tare or ramen broth: the easy ginger-scallion sauce and ­miso butter are keepers. In both food and tone, “Momofuku” encapsulates an exciting moment in New York dining. In 20 years, when we’re all eating McKimchi burgers and drinking cereal milk, we’ll look back fondly on the time when neurotic indie stoners and their love of Benton’s bacon changed the culinary landscape.

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From New York Times, December 6, 2009

Gordon Ramsay has also set out to prove he can cook like the little people, via a book of homey recipes that can actually be cooked at home. By you. Because when he’s not humiliating the BLEEP out of the BLEEPing contestants of “Hell’s Kitchen” before eight million viewers, he’s apparently eating “posh kedgeree” and fish curry with his friends and BLEEPing family. Seeing Ramsay’s jack-o’-lantern maw and reading the words Gordon Ramsay and COOKING FOR FRIENDS (Morrow/HarperCollins, $35) elicits a nervous titter. Gordon, you’ve built a career out of being a first-class . . . chef. Now you want us to believe you still have friends? To judge by the (lovely) pictures inside, he has six: they appear throughout in almost identical shots, as does Ramsay, who apparently didn’t have more than an afternoon to pose for the camera.

But the food! It’s nice! Stuff you’d like to make — and actually can in a reasonable amount of time — from an international menu of comfort foods and slightly more ambitious fare: Thai-style fish cakes with sweet chili sauce, wild mushroom tarts in a walnut-Parmesan crust, lamb shank cassoulet. The recipes, written with Mark Sargeant and Emily Quah, are clear and not scary in the least. Chef Ramsay, I stand corrected. You may step back in line.

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