Buy Adam

I love to cook, but when it comes to speed… that’s not really my thing.

I actually looked at this book in the store, and wasn’t going to get it, but we attended a demonstration lecture in which he cooked five or so of the recipes from the book, and I was impressed with the overall approach. Jacques Pepin is a man who knows food - he’s nearly legendary for his mastery of technique and his knowledge of classical cuisine. This book is a totally different beast. It’s all about what he cooks on an everyday basis… when he’s tired at the end of the day and doesn’t feel like cooking, but still needs to eat and doesn’t want to order in… when unexpected guests arrive and he doesn’t have time to prepare a full meal. Obviously, there’s a strong French base, and while I wouldn’t call it fusion, there are noticeable influences from other cultures as well (his wife is Puerto Rican). One of the dishes from the demo was sauteed asparagus with croutons, almonds, and chorizo - delicious.

Some of the recipes are simply fast and simple preparations, some use canned and frozen ingredients, some can be made quickly with a little bit of planning ahead, and some use special techniques to speed traditional methods (like braising in a pressure cooker) - the common thread is a focus on getting you out of the kitchen quickly so you can concentrate on eating. Like many of my favorite cookbooks, the focus is more about explaining what’s going on rather than specific recipes - a number of them say things like “just do this with whatever vegetables you have handy”.

I bought the book recently, so I’ve only had a chance to make a few of the recipes - the first one is an immediate favorite and I’ll definitely make it again.

Instant vegetable soup (paraphrased):

Bring a few cups of water or canned stock/broth (I like Pacific Organic Chicken Broth) to a boil. While it’s boiling, shred a few cups of assorted vegetables (carrots, mushrooms, onions, broccoli, potatoes - whatever) with a box grater. Add the vegetables to the broth with a few handfuls of leftover wilted salad greens. Boil for a few minutes, then add some diced scallions. Boil a bit more, then sprinkle in a few tablespoons of cream of wheat, farina, or grits, and simmer for a few more minutes - this will thicken the soup. Grate a generous portion of gruyere or other cheese into soup bowls, and ladle the soup on top of the cheese. Finish each bowl with a pat of butter and a splash of extra virgin olive oil and serve with some crusty bread. Very simple and unexpected, but it was delicious and hearty.

Jacques is amazing to watch - there’s a companion series on PBS in which he demonstrates many of the dishes from the book. His technique is just impressive, he’s charming and relaxing, and the camera work is very very good so you can actually see what he’s doing.

Second Opinion

Mayur says:

I bought the Pepin book in SF on a trip, and like it quite a lot. What I find the Pepin book most useful for, actually, is as a study on how an expert chef might use packaged supermarket ingredients and stuff you’d have lying around the kitchen anyway. I must confess that I don’t actually find it so useful for whipping up exceptional meals in a hurry; for that, I find that certain other books (From Simple to Spectacular, How to Cook Everything, Elements of Taste, even Think Like a Chef) have a broader range of techniques and effectively incorporate a wider array of possible recipes via adaptation of the ones included. The problem with the Pepin cookbook is that I actually think that too few of the recipes are particularly widely adaptable; the bean dip or potato salad recipes, for instance, are recipes for just that. It’s not really worth adapting them to other ingredients, and in any case, one can make bean dip or potato salad without recourse to a chef of Pepin’s talents.

Buy Fast Food My Way from Amazon.

While I normally advocate reading the book before seeing the movie, in the case of Sin City, I’m not sure it matters much. The two are so closely intertwined that rather than being a reinterpretation of the book, the movie is a retelling in a different medium. I think this has never been done before, but there’s now Sin City (the book) and Sin City (the movie), and the experience isn’t complete without both of them.

Sin City itself played with interpretation of time - the stories are reasonably timeless in themselves, but also disjoint in time with respect to the other stories. As the movie depicts very well, characters, and sometimes dead characters, from one act are always sitting in the background of (or sometimes narrating) the chapter you’re experiencing now. In a similar vein, scenes from the stories in the books show up in the stories in the movies. Maybe you’ve read it before or seen it before, but that doesn’t matter, because there’s more to tell.

It’s an interesting experiment, and it really works for me.

There’s plenty to say about the books themselves, but I really think they need to be experienced firsthand. They’re violent, brutal, beautiful, stark, and unquestionably unlike anything else. If nothing else, they won’t bore you.

There are seven books total - the link is to the first one.

Buy Sin City - The Hard Goodbye from Amazon.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a special place in my heart. It is certainly one of my favorite five books of all time, and was particularly influential in forming my twisted sense of humor and the world.

It chronicles the adventures of Arthur Dent, normal human, who is catapulted into a weirder universe than he could possibly have imagined, guided by his friend Ford Prefect (a perfectly normal name) who turned out to be not from Guildford after all but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, upon the untimely destruction of the Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

The movie is coming out, which looks good, but this is your last chance to read the books uncolored by the vision of a Hitchhiker’s Guide produced by someone other than Douglas Adams.

And that’s all I’m going to tell you. The plans are on display in the filing department.

Buy The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from Amazon.

Harold McGee knows food, and he’s been sending me to bed with dreams of long-chain amylose starches.

If you’ve ever wondered why food behaves the way it does in the kitchen, this is a great resource. It’s not a cookbook per se (and not the cookbook from Per Se - we’ll get to that later), but it is an incredibly detailed examination of why food behaves the way it does, of what kinds of common foods there are, and how this all fits together to make the art of the kitchen.

This second revised and expanded edition nearly qualifies as a “tome”. Every section has been improved and modernized over the previous cut. It is beautifully illustrated with hand-drawn diagrams. The chapters are comprehensive, organized by food category in the beginning - milk, eggs, meat, fish, fruits, vegetables, grains/seeds/legumes - and moving to techniques - breads, sauces, confections, and alcohols.

It fills a middle ground on the science. He talks freely in chemical terms (much more so than most other food writers), and it should be understandable to most intelligent readers. I found myself wanting more discussion of the actual chemistry sprinkled throughout instead of bunched up at the end into two small chapters. (and if you know of a book that covers food chemistry from the chemistry side, please send it along).

McGee is a pleasure to read. He clearly loves to cook, and he clearly loves to share.

Buy On Food and Cooking from Amazon.

So many cookbooks, so little time. I have a thing for great cookbooks, and this one is just about the cream of the crop. Beautifully photographed, short and to the point. It’s not a book about recipes, or tools, or ingredients. It’s about techniques. The title says it all - “think like a chef”. So simple. This is the book that got me really started with serious fine cooking. It’s easy to follow and it has great advice, illustrated with examples (they’re not really “recipes”, and that’s the point).

Tom Colicchio’s passion for “simple fine cooking” is evident throughout (and also in his restaurants). He goes through all of the basic techniques of fine cooking, and it’s obvious that he also doesn’t want to do any more work than he has to, so he’s cut out a number of extraneous steps for a more efficient process. You’re left feeling that there’s still a lot of work in there, but the things that remain are well worth it, and he explains why you still have to do those things to get the results you want.

The perfect example is roast chicken. There are a hundred ways to roast chicken, but I still find his the easiest (even though it sounds difficult) and also the most rewarding. While others struggle to deal with overcooked breasts or undercooked thighs, he turns the whole process on its side (literally), and sears the sides of the bird in a pan on the stovetop before throwing the whole thing into the oven to finish. There’s one more step - browning on the stove - but the tradeoff is a perfectly cooked bird, and it’s a lot easier to clean a 10″ frypan than a huge roasting pan with a rack.

Buy Think Like a Chef from Amazon.

The illustrations below show this technique in action (also illustrating the basting spoon/spout ladle reviewed for Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools):

Wash bird, trim wing tips.

Collect prep ingredients, preheat oven to 375F.

Stuff and truss bird, coat with salt and pepper, then sear one side on the stovetop.

Sear other side.

Turn chicken on its back, and put the whole pan into the oven.

After 30 minutes, add butter, and baste.

Baste again every 15 minutes until done.

Remove when chicken is 155F internally.

Cover with foil to rest (internal temp will rise 5-10 degrees).

Carve and eat, or let cool and refrigerate whole and pick.

I must admit - I got a little distracted by the photography in making the demo bird for this, and overcooked it a little. That’s another great thing about this technique - you can overcook it, and it will still be delicious, moist, and tender.

Buy Think Like a Chef from Amazon.