Recipes, lessons, and inspirations from an adventurous Jewish girl who lived in Italy and returned to California to transform her community into a bunch of badass cooks.
Brown Sugar Kitchen is more than a restaurant. This soul-food outpost is a community gathering spot, a place to fill the belly, and the beating heart of West Oakland, a storied postindustrial neighborhood across the bay from San Francisco. The restaurant is a friendly beacon on a tree-lined parkway, nestled low and snug next to a scrap-metal yard in this Bay Area rust belt. Out front, customers congregate on long benches and sprawl in the grass, soaking up the sunshine, sipping at steaming mugs of Oakland-roasted coffee, waiting to snag one of the tables they glimpse through the swinging doors. Deals are done, friends are made; this is a community in action. In short order, they'll get their table, their pecan-studded sticky buns, their meaty hash topped with a quivering poached egg. Later in the day, the line grows, and the orders for chef-owner Tanya Holland's famous chicken and waffles or oyster po'boy fly. This is when satisfaction arrives. Brown Sugar Kitchen, the cookbook, stars 86 recipes for re-creating the restaurant's favorites at home, from a thick Shrimp Gumbo to celebrated Macaroni & Cheese to a show-stopping Caramel Layer Cake with Brown Butter–Caramel Frosting. And these aren't all stick-to-your-ribs recipes: Tanya's interpretations of soul food star locally grown, seasonal produce, too, in crisp, creative salads such as Romaine with Spring Vegetables & Cucumber-Buttermilk Dressing and Summer Squash Succotash. Soul-food classics get a modern spin in the case of B-Side BBQ Braised Smoked Tofu with Roasted Eggplant and a side of Roasted Green Beans with Sesame-Seed Dressing. Straight-forward, unfussy but inspired, these are recipes you'll turn to again and again. Rich visual storytelling reveals the food and the people that made and make West Oakland what it is today. Brown Sugar Kitchen truly captures the sense—and flavor—of this richly textured and delicious place.
If you love to eat Thai food, but don’t know how to cook it, Kris Yenbamroong wants to solve your problems. His brash style of spicy, sharp Thai party food is created, in part, by stripping down traditional recipes to wring maximum flavor out of minimum hassle. Whether it’s a scorching hot crispy rice salad, lush coconut curries, or a wok-seared pad Thai, it’s all about demystifying the universe of Thai flavors to make them work in your life. Kris is the chef of Night + Market, and this cookbook is the story of his journey from the Thai-American restaurant classics he grew eating at his family’s restaurant, to the rural cooking of Northern Thailand he fell for traveling the countryside. But it’s also a story about how he came to question what authenticity really means, and how his passion for grilled meats, fried chicken, tacos, sushi, wine and good living morphed into an L.A. Thai restaurant with a style all its own.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A thoroughly modern guide to becoming a better, faster, more creative cook, featuring fun, flavorful recipes anyone can make. ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, Food52, Taste of Home “Surprising no one, Molly has written a book as smart, stylish, and entertaining as she is.”—Carla Lalli Music, author of Where Cooking Begins If you seek out, celebrate, and obsess over good food but lack the skills and confidence necessary to make it at home, you’ve just won a ticket to a life filled with supreme deliciousness. Cook This Book is a new kind of foundational cookbook from Molly Baz, who’s here to teach you absolutely everything she knows and equip you with the tools to become a better, more efficient cook. Molly breaks the essentials of cooking down to clear and uncomplicated recipes that deliver big flavor with little effort and a side of education, including dishes like Pastrami Roast Chicken with Schmaltzy Onions and Dill, Chorizo and Chickpea Carbonara, and of course, her signature Cae Sal. But this is not your average cookbook. More than a collection of recipes, Cook This Book teaches you the invaluable superpower of improvisation though visually compelling lessons on such topics as the importance of salt and how to balance flavor, giving you all the tools necessary to make food taste great every time. Throughout, you’ll encounter dozens of QR codes, accessed through the camera app on your smartphone, that link to short technique-driven videos hosted by Molly to help illuminate some of the trickier skills. As Molly says, “Cooking is really fun, I swear. You simply need to set yourself up for success to truly enjoy it.” Cook This Book will help you do just that, inspiring a new generation to find joy in the kitchen and take pride in putting a home-cooked meal on the table, all with the unbridled fun and spirit that only Molly could inspire.
New York Times best seller Winner, James Beard Award for Best Book in American Cooking Winner, IACP Julia Child First Book Award Named a Best Cookbook of the Season by Amazon, Food & Wine, Harper’s Bazaar, Houston Chronicle, Huffington Post, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Vanity Fair, Washington Post, and more Sean Brock is the chef behind the game-changing restaurants Husk and McCrady’s, and his first book offers all of his inspired recipes. With a drive to preserve the heritage foods of the South, Brock cooks dishes that are ingredient-driven and reinterpret the flavors of his youth in Appalachia and his adopted hometown of Charleston. The recipes include all the comfort food (think food to eat at home) and high-end restaurant food (fancier dishes when there’s more time to cook) for which he has become so well-known. Brock’s interpretation of Southern favorites like Pickled Shrimp, Hoppin’ John, and Chocolate Alabama Stack Cake sit alongside recipes for Crispy Pig Ear Lettuce Wraps, Slow-Cooked Pork Shoulder with Tomato Gravy, and Baked Sea Island Red Peas. This is a very personal book, with headnotes that explain Brock’s background and give context to his food and essays in which he shares his admiration for the purveyors and ingredients he cherishes.
Hamilton, one of America's most recognized chefs, serves up a sharply crafted and unflinchingly honest memoir about the search for meaning and purpose and the people and places that shaped her journey. A "New York Times" bestseller.
“Dominique Crenn is a hero to so many of us, both inside and out of the restaurant industry. She has unlimited courage to always follow her own path, to carve her own way in the world. This book, and Dominique’s whole life, show that everything and anything is possible if you believe in yourself and you keep pushing forward, always forward.” —José Andrés The inspiring and deeply personal memoir from highly acclaimed chef Dominique Crenn When Dominique Crenn decided to become a chef, she knew it was a near impossible dream in France where almost all restaurant kitchens were run by men. She left her home and everything she knew to move to San Francisco, and almost thirty years later was awarded three Michelin stars in 2018 for her influential restaurant Atelier Crenn, the first female chef in the United States to receive this honor—no small feat for someone who hadn’t been formally trained. In Rebel Chef, Crenn tells of her untraditional coming-of-age as a chef. Adopted as a toddler, she didn’t resemble her parents, and was haunted by a past she knew nothing about. But after years of working to fill this blank space, Crenn embraced the power her history gave her to be whoever she wants to be. In this disarmingly honest look at one woman’s evolution from a daring young chef to a respected activist, Crenn reflects on the years she spent working in the male-centric world of professional kitchens and tracks her career from struggling cook to running one of the world’s most celebrated restaurants. At once a tale of personal discovery and a tribute to unrelenting determination, Rebel Chef is the story of one woman making a place for herself in the kitchen, and in the world.
When Zia Donatella comes to live with the Bertolizzi family, little do Alfie and his older sister Emilia know what's in store for them. Zia Donatella is determined to show the kids how a home-cooked meal is better than even the best take-out pizza or burrito. And when Zia's plan actually transports Alfie and Emilia to famous food cities around the world, they learn first-hand how food cannot only take you places but can also bring you back home. In the fourth book in the series, Zia's secret ingredient takes Alfie and Emilia to New Orleans. There they meet the members of a kids’ jazz band and are soon helping save the band’s performance venue, as well as tracking down a long-lost cookbook, which just might hold some very special secrets. From beignets and gumbo, to jazz and zydeco, Alfie and Emilia experience everything New Orleans has to offer, all while trying to find their way home.
Named a Favorite Book for Southerners in 2020 by Garden & Gun "Donovan is such a vivid writer—smart, raunchy, vulnerable and funny— that if her vaunted caramel cakes and sugar pies are half as good as her prose, well, I'd be open to even giving that signature buttermilk whipped cream she tops her desserts with a try.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR Noted chef and James Beard Award-winning essayist Lisa Donovan helped establish some of the South's most important kitchens, and her pastry work is at the forefront of a resurgence in traditional desserts. Yet Donovan struggled to make a living in an industry where male chefs built successful careers on the stories, recipes, and culinary heritage passed down from generations of female cooks and cooks of color. At one of her career peaks, she made the perfect dessert at a celebration for food-world goddess Diana Kennedy. When Kennedy asked why she had not heard of her, Donovan said she did not know. "I do," Kennedy said, "Stop letting men tell your story." OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL HUNGER is Donovan's searing, beautiful, and searching chronicle of reclaiming her own story and the narrative of the women who came before her. Her family's matriarchs found strength and passion through food, and they inspired Donovan's accomplished career. Donovan's love language is hospitality, and she wants to welcome everyone to the table of good food and fairness. Donovan herself had been told at every juncture that she wasn't enough: she came from a struggling southern family that felt ashamed of its own mixed race heritage and whose elders diminished their women. She survived abuse and assault as a young mother. But Donovan's salvations were food, self-reliance, and the network of women in food who stood by her. In the school of the late John Egerton, OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL HUNGER is an unforgettable Southern journey of class, gender, and race as told at table.
A memoir and cookbook from the creator of the gourmet Korean-Mexican taco truck Kogi and the star of Netflix’s The Chef Show. “Roy Choi sits at the crossroads of just about every important issue involving food in the twenty-first century. As he goes, many will follow.” —Anthony Bourdain Los Angeles: A patchwork megalopolis defined by its unlikely cultural collisions; the city that raised and shaped Roy Choi, the boundary-breaking chef who decided to leave behind fine dining to feed the city he loved—and, with the creation of the Korean taco, reinvented street food along the way. Abounding with both the food and the stories that gave rise to Choi’s inspired cooking, L.A. Son takes us through the neighborhoods and streets most tourists never see, from the hidden casinos where gamblers slurp fragrant bowls of pho to Downtown’s Jewelry District, where a ten-year-old Choi wolfed down Jewish deli classics between diamond deliveries; from the kitchen of his parents’ Korean restaurant and his mother’s pungent kimchi to the boulevards of East L.A. and the best taquerias in the country, to, at last, the curbside view from one of his emblematic Kogi taco trucks, where people from all walks of life line up for a revolutionary meal. Filled with over eighty-five inspired recipes that meld the overlapping traditions and flavors of L.A.—including Korean fried chicken, tempura potato pancakes, homemade chorizo, and Kimchi and Pork Belly Stuffed Pupusas—L.A. Son embodies the sense of invention, resourcefulness, and hybrid attitude of the city from which it takes its name, as it tells the transporting, unlikely story of how a Korean American kid went from lowriding in the streets of L.A. to becoming an acclaimed chef.