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Searching... Woodburn Public Library | 641.5945 LA PLACE 2007 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
With 125 uncomplicated recipes and illustrated with charming, evocative watercolors, these lyrical passages and images let readers experience the magic of the Italian garden without leaving their kitchens.
Author Notes
She lives in San Francisco.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Even home cooks who are unable to keep the hardiest of plants alive or who live in tiny, dark apartments will be enchanted by La Place's description of her bountiful garden. La Place (coauthor of Cucina Fresca) begins with a lyrical account of how she created the garden in her San Francisco home after observing some in Italy, and each seasonal section and recipe is accompanied by an inspiring meditation on the ingredients. The dishes are relatively simple: a Passato of Cannellini Beans and Cima di Rapa bursts with a heady flavor unusual for winter, while a fall pasta celebrates the flavor of just-picked artichokes highlighted with parsley and white wine. La Place's insistence on relying on her garden's bounty alone to supply dishes for each course and every season spurs her to great creativity, as exemplified by the "Caprese" salad that morphs through the year from the summer classic to a winter version with radicchio, orange zest and hazelnuts. Though cooks without a garden will not have quite the experience that La Place describes, just the idea of concentrating on a few fresh ingredients will remind them of just how extraordinary vegetables can be. Color illus. not seen by PW. (May 8) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
WITH Web sites like allrecipes.com and epicurious.com serving up a bottomless stockpot of potential dinner menus, and countless blogs detailing the culinary adventures of cooks just like you, it would seem that cookbooks would be destined to join milkmen and the croissanwich in the culinary graveyard. And yet cookbook sales have grown more than 8 percent in each of the past two years. Could it be that consumers are actually responding to the increasing excellence of the product? Certainly despite - or perhaps because of - their online competition, cookbooks have never been as sophisticated, thoroughgoing and innovative as they are today. It took me days to figure out which handful of the many cookbooks published this season to review. (In addition to those covered here, an extended list may be consulted at nytimes.com/bookreview.) Two new ones actually spring from the other side of the digital divide: Clotilde Dusoulier and Heidi Swanson are both accomplished bloggers (at Chocolate andZucchini.com and 101Cookbooks.com). Dusoulier's CHOCOLATE AND ZUCCHINI (Broadway, paper, $18.95) and Swanson's SUPER NATURAL COOKING (Celestial Arts, paper, $20) are friendly books with appealing recipes, though they might be seen more as brand extensions than breakthroughs. Two cook-and-tell books describe working at the White House: WHITE HOUSE CHEF (Wiley, $24.95), by Walter Scheib with Andrew Friedman, and ALL THE PRESIDENT'S PASTRIES (Flammarion, $24.95), by Roland Mesnier with Christian Malard. (There's nothing like a state dinner to get my mouth watering - gingered pheasant consommé!) Two more, 5 SPICES, 50 DISHES (Chronicle, paper, $19.95,) by Ruta Kahate, and Neeta Sluja's SIX SPICES (Jones Books, $24.95, available in July) attempt to simplify Indian cooking by reining in the number of spices. (Kahate's book succeeds.) These were among a slew of noteworthy reference books, like THE OXFORD COMPANION TO AMERICAN FOOD AND DRINK (Oxford University Press, $49.95), edited by Andrew F. Smith, and THE RIVER COTTAGE MEAT BOOK (Ten Speed Press, $40), by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (complete with photos from slaughter to sausage - it's not for the squeamish). A standout and one of the most original dessert books in years is THE SWEET SPOT (Morrow, $29.95), by Pichet Ong, the pastry-chef proprietor of P*ong, a restaurant in Greenwich Village that treats the meal as the cover act and dessert as the headliner. Ong became well known when he was the pastry chef at Spice Market for a dessert called Thai Jewels, a lavish pile of crushed coconut ice, jackfruit, papaya and - the jewels - crunchy tapioca dumplings. That recipe and those for other Spice Market desserts, like Ovaltine and milk chocolate kulfi, and jasmine rice pudding, are also included here. Unlike most fusion cooks who rely heavily on a foundation of French classics, Ong presents a more integrated mosaic of influences. (His fortune cookies are made with a chocolate batter; chenna, an Indian cheese, is enhanced with sake, cherries, balsamic vinegar and orange-blossom water.) But although he introduces ingredients like red sala syrup, matcha (green tea powder), Horlicks (powdered malted barley) and mukwa (candied fennel seeds) as if they should be new friends in your life, he doesn't force them on you. Most recipes can be shopped for at a typical grocery store - a condensed-milk poundcake, for instance. Probably the best dessert I made called for just four ingredients: small tapioca pearls blended with coconut milk, spooned into a bowl and topped with a pool of barely sweetened, pureed cantaloupe. Ong's a clever technician, too. Toasted and crushed jasmine rice becomes a crust for a coconut cream pie. An orange-blossom-water sabayon is thickened in the microwave (and I will never again make finicky sabayon any other way). Ong stresses that all of his recipes were created and tested in a home kitchen - one that was sometimes ill equipped. "Without a cookie stencil for the fortune cookies," he and his co-author, Genevieve Ko, write, "we quickly made one out of a yogurt container lid." No yogurt-lid cookie stencils will be found in Carole Bloom's kitchen. In THE ESSENTIAL BAKER (Wiley, $40), she reminds us that pastry chefs and bakers come from separate planets - or at least use different sides of the brain. Pastry chefs like Ong are wayward artists and enthusiasts. Bloom, a baker, is a concise taskmaster. Her 645-page book is a paean to precision, some of it parody-worthy: "Stirring is the technique for lightly mixing ingredients. Use low speed if mixing with an electric mixer. Stirring can also be accomplished by hand using a rubber spatula or a spoon. To do this, start at the center of the bowl and use a circular motion that moves to the outside edge of the bowl." Then put the spatula down and take Valium. But Bloom can also be the fount of wisdom you need when you're mixing up cookies at midnight and run out of baking powder: she gives a recipe for making your own. She tells you tricks for cutting parchment paper to fit a pan, and defines a pinch as one-sixteenth of a teaspoon. Bloom structures her book in a refreshingly novel way, with sections like "fruit and vegetables," "chocolate" and "spices and herbs." If you're a chocoholic, your fix is preselected - no need to waste time paging through the cakes, hoping for a chocolate one. It's a provocative concept: why should we bake by shape and texture rather than flavor? Bloom's pine nut sablés had a beautiful dough, and the pine nuts were like soft little pearls nestled in the crisp cookies. And though her dark chocolate madeleines didn't form a hump on top, like classic madeleines, they were delicious. As were her rosemary and lemon scones with dried figs. Although you're unlikely to come away from "The Essential Baker" feeling as if you've experienced revelations - as you may with Ong's book - it's a thorough and impressive work. And if you get crazy now and then and use a fork when Bloom calls for a whisk ... well, you'll just ruin the recipe, that's all. Another master of precision is Patricia Wells. For years, Wells, an American, has acted as an investigative reporter in France's top kitchens, bakeries and food shops, carefully prying out closely held recipes. Her cookbooks are filled with evocative yet simple-sounding dishes, but when you use them you appreciate both her repertorial skills and her eye for detail. In "Bistro Cooking," for example, her "roast lamb with Monsieur Henny's potato, onion and tomato gratin" has the lamb cooked on a rack directly over the gratin, so the drippings soak right in. In VEGETABLE HARVEST (Morrow, $34.95), Wells takes these skills to the garden, attempting to redefine our notions about the role vegetables play in a meal. Lesser cooks do this by replacing meats with grains and legumes; Wells focuses on flavor as a way of shifting our perceptions. So in a crab "ravioli" recipe (given to her by Pascal Barbot, the chef at the Paris restaurant Astrance), avocado is used in place of pasta, the small amount of crab is blended with lots of chives, orange and lime zest, and the dish is finished with another distinct flavor, almond oil. Most of the recipes are designed to be low calorie (which seems entirely beside the point of French cooking), but I was impressed by how satisfying the food was nonetheless. Wells has a knack for coming up with simple combinations that deliver complex flavors. In her recipe for chicken breasts, the meat is marinated in olive oil and a small handful of mint leaves, but the mint flavor takes hold like a heavy, fragrant cloud, set off by a tiny dose of wine and capers. In a warm salad, strips of eggplant are steamed, then doused with a buttermilk-thyme dressing. (Steaming eggplant is so easy, you'll wonder why you've wasted hours of your life sautéing it, only to have it drink oil like a sponge. Here the eggplant soaks up the tangy dressing and nothing else.) Certainly no one writes a recipe title like Wells. Take, for instance, Butter-Warmed Corn Kernels With Fresh Cilantro Leaves. She had me at "Butter-Warmed." Likewise, Broccoli Purée With a Hint of Mint. Where Wells has built her reputation on elegantly formed recipes, Viana La Place has founded hers on ideas. American home cooks are often mocked by Europeans for wanting precise measurements and instructions. If you're one of these cooks, you'll find neither in La Place's latest book, MY ITALIAN GARDEN (Broadway, paper, $19.95). La Place, who lives in San Francisco, built a seven-tiered garden in her backyard, modeling it after ones she had seen in Italy. In it she planted wild fennel, lemons, jasmine, treviso radicchio, lacinato kale and figs - creating a tasty, if esoteric, Eden. Her homage to this Eden is divided by the seasons. At the beginning of each section, she writes about the garden, then includes recipes using ingredients she harvested from it. "An Italian garden is really a state of mind," she argues. You don't decide what you're hungry for, then head to the garden. You go to the garden and let it tell you what you should have. Although this is aspiration for some and fantasy for most, if you can't dream in the kitchen, then why not pop a frozen dinner into the microwave and go lie down? La Place believes that "cooking from the garden is uncomplicated cooking," and she sticks to this precept. Rarely do her recipes contain more than a handful of ingredients or require more than a few minutes to prepare. A fettuccine with sautéed radicchio, grappa-soaked raisins and truffle oil did require advance soaking of the raisins, but then there were extras for spooning over ice cream - or just spooning directly into your mouth. Her broccoli rabe in lemon cream has forever changed my feelings about that vegetable, softening its harsh edges. And candy-sweet chopped fresh tomatoes, sautéed briefly with sugar and vanilla, were a strange but pleasant reminder that tomatoes are a fruit. One of the most satisfying elements of La Place's book is her insistence on including a caprese salad for every season. Usually a plate of sliced tomatoes, mozzarella, basil and olive oil served year round at many Italian restaurants, this is one of Italy's most bastardized recipes. Her fall caprese contains, in addition to fresh mozzarella, green olives, walnuts, lemon zest, parsley and olive oil. Spring caprese incorporates radishes, fava beans and almonds. La Place's cooking style tends to be more an assemblage of flavors that she brings together in novel ways. Avocados, for instance, are warmed and served "on the half shell," then filled with Meyer lemon juice, butter, chives, caviar and chive blossoms. Whole Foods may occasionally let you down when you shop for her recipes, but as long as you don't snap out of your Italian garden state of mind you'll improvise and you'll do just fine. Not far from La Place's garden lie some of the world's best oyster beds. According to Jairemarie Pomo, author of THE HOG ISLAND OYSTER LOVER'S COOKBOOK (Ten Speed, $19.95), there were once more than 400 shell middens in the Bay Area. One of the largest and oldest - 2,800 years old - was excavated in 1999. "Today," Pomo notes, "a massive Ikea store sits on top of the site." Holding off a big-box store, the Hog Island Oyster Company is located in Tomales Bay in western Marin County. In 1982, its owners, John Finger and Mike Watchorn, got a $500 loan from their parents, bought some oyster spat and borrowed a skiff to get the company off the ground. It was a typical start-up. They lost half of their first batch of oysters to hungry rock crabs, some more to sea lions, and they got stranded on Hog Island. This last event worked to their advantage: it gave their company a name. Pomo isn't affiliated with the business, so she writes as a fan, turning her book into a roadie's guide to oysters and their history. She cites a New Jersey law, passed in 1719, that prohibited oyster harvesting between May and September as the probable reason for the widespread misconception that oysters should be eaten only in months containing an "R." In fact, oysters raised in cold water, like those in the Bay Area, may be consumed year-round. Pomo explores oyster etiquette - fork versus slurping, chewing versus not chewing - as well as what to look for in an oyster knife (a blade that's three-quarters of an inch to four inches long, and never use a paring knife). The second half of her book is devoted to the best part about these creatures: their consumption. Many connoisseurs wouldn't think of doing anything with a raw oyster except slurp it down, but after topping some with strands of cucumber and a little lime juice and filling the shells with sake, I was convinced the purists are missing out. Pomo's recipes are brimming with exciting and thoughtful ideas - like using a little apple cider vinegar in a mignonette sauce to soften the red wine vinegar - but they aren't always accurate. Take them as ideas that you may need to shape on your own, though, and your efforts will be well rewarded. Her buttery pan-fried oysters, coated with crushed saltines, had a salty outer shell and a sweet interior. An oyster stew with chipotle butter was fantastic, though because it's essentially oysters floating in warm cream and topped with a smoky butter, I would serve it in much smaller portions. As for the leftover butter, you can always go to epicurious .com and figure out what to do with it. Amanda Hesser is the food editor of The New York Times Magazine.
Library Journal Review
La Place grew up in California, but her parents were Italian, and she lived in Salento, in southern Italy, for six summers. The author of Verdura and coauthor of Cucina Rustica, among other titles, she now lives in San Francisco, where she tends her own terraced Italian garden. The recipes in this new book, mostly but not entirely vegetarian, are organized by season and feature the bounty of the garden, from summer's Meyer Lemon and Cucumber Salad to a wintertime Farro Soup with Ricotta Salata. She begins each section with a gardener's musings on the season, and charming watercolor illustrations throughout the text complete the package. For most collections. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.