Cookbooks

A perfect soup recipe is one you make forever--it is comforting, nourishing, the very essence of flavor. In this handsome, focused cookbook, the experts at Cooks Illustrated boil the world of soups down to the very best choices, each one a kitchen-tested keeper yielding flavors that exceed even what grandma cooked up. Here are the ideal broths, the heartiest rustic soups, most elegant purees, and the best examples from around the world. All-Time Best Soups turns soup-making into an everyday pleasure with recipes guaranteed to become cherished favorites.

A cookbook and culinary memoir about growing up as the daughter of revered chef/restaurateur Alice Waters: a story of food, family, and the need for beauty in all aspects of life.

In this extraordinarily intimate portrait of her mother--and herself--Fanny Singer, daughter of food icon and activist Alice Waters, chronicles a unique world of food, wine, and travel; a world filled with colorful characters, mouth-watering traditions, and sumptuous feasts. Across dozens of vignettes with accompanying recipes, she shares the story of her own culinary coming of age and reveals a side of her legendary mother that has never been seen before. A charming, smart translation of Alice Waters's ideals and attitudes about food for a new generation, Always Home is a loving, often funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely written look at a life defined in so many ways by food, as well as the bond between mother and daughter.

Sandy: This book is perfect for a foodie in your life - maybe you! Most lovers of food know of the Berkeley chef Alice Waters who almost literally created the restaurant farm-to-table movement with her unalterable insistence on fresh-grown and sourced ingredients.  Not only is her restaurant Chez Panisse famous, she’s created educational gardening programs for schools across the country and penned and cooked her way to over a dozen cookbooks. This is her story seen through the eyes of her only child, Fanny.  It is tender but true, and packed with recipes and art-worthy photographs. I loved it - and you and your foodie will too. The perfect WOW gift.

 

Swaddled in dish towels and set inside a huge salad bowl, newborn Singer (co-author, with Waters: My Pantry, 2015) was a regular visitor at Chez Panisse, her mother’s famed Berkeley restaurant, while Waters conferred with the manager or tasted dishes. “I don’t remember this, of course,” Singer writes, “but I feel like my disproportionate love of salad might have something to do with my early kitchen cribs.” Singer’s charming narrative, interwoven with Lacombe’s painterly black-and-white photographs, bursts with sensuous descriptions of tastes, fragrances, and textures as she recounts her “very rich and full and just a little bit unconventional” young life. Her remarkable school lunches featured greens with vinaigrette, kiwi in orange juice, and garlic toast that her classmates coveted. At home, even breakfast was transcendent: “a perfectly soft-boiled blue Araucana egg, with a marigold-hued liquid center into which I would delight in plunging buttered toast ‘soldiers.’” Instructions for making this dish, along with 59 other recipes—her mother’s garlicky noodle soup, her grandfather’s special pancakes, and, not surprisingly, several salads—add delectable details to the colorful narrative. Singer’s culinary adventures with her parents took her to the south of France as well as on a research trip of France’s great restaurants and wineries and because neither parent spoke French, Singer, who went to a bilingual French school, served as official interpreter at age 9. Waters, who has been the subject of much media attention and multiple books, including her own memoir, Coming to My Senses (2017), is lovingly portrayed throughout Singer’s book.

A landmark book from the test kitchen that has been teaching America how to cook for 20 years.

We launched the America's Test Kitchen Cooking School two years ago to teach home cooks how to cook the test kitchen way, and since then thousands of students have taken our interactive video-based online courses. The America's Test Kitchen Cooking School Cookbook shares the same goal as our online school and brings all our best practices--along with 600 all-time favorite recipes--into one place so that you can become a better, more confident cook. There is no better way to learn than seeing an expert in action, so we've included over 2,500 color photos that bring you into the test kitchen so you can see how to prepare recipes step-by-step. The book starts off with an exhaustive 46-page Cooking Basics chapter that covers everything from what equipment you need (and how to care for it) to test-kitchen tricks for how to make food taste better. Then we move on to cover all the major cooking and baking categories, from meat, poultry, and pasta to breads, cakes, and pies.

Illustrated Core Techniques, like how to whip egg whites, roast a chicken, or bake flawless pie dough, focus on the building block recipes everyone should know. Recipe Tutorials that each feature 20-35 color photos then walk readers through recipes that are either more complicated or simply benefit from the visual clues of step photography, like Extra-Crunchy Fried Chicken, Sticky Buns with Pecans, and Deep-Dish Apple Pie. Every chapter ends with a library of the test kitchen's all-time favorite recipes, such as Pan-Seared Steaks with Red Wine Pan Sauce, Meatballs and Marinara, Best Vegetarian Chili, Memphis-Style Barbecued Ribs, and New York-Style Cheesecake--more than 600 in total--that will allow home cooks to expand their repertoire.

The America's Test Kitchen Cooking School Cookbook is a how-to-cook book that also explains why recipes succeed or fail, which makes it the ideal book for anyone looking to cook better.

An ideal cookbook for families who want healthy food options
A groundbreaking addition to our best-selling ring-bound cookbook series, this all-purpose cookbook delivers 800 foolproof recipes for healthier everyday fare from breakfast dishes and appetizers to pasta, meat, chicken, kid-friendly favorites, desserts, and more. With this comprehensive cookbook in your kitchen, eating well will no longer be a chore. Here we offer up all-American, home-style recipes that won t leave you hungry from multigrain pancakes, low-fat spaghetti and meatballs, Tex-Mex meatloaf, skillet pizzas, hearty beef and vegetable stew, and creamy lowfat spinach lasagna to rich-tasting scalloped potatoes, fudgy brownies, rustic apple tart, carrot cake, and lots of simple fruit desserts. Here you ll also find naturally lean recipes like our Spa Chicken and Lemony Steamed Spa Fish as well as healthy vegetable and grain classics and an entire chapter of vegetarian main dishes.
Cook from this volume and you ll learn tips and techniques that will forever alter the way you cook. Banish fried foods but still serve crispy chicken fingers, eggplant parmesan, and oven-fried fish with our simple tricks (we toast the bread crumbs for that fried flavor). And learn to incorporate more vegetables and whole grains into all sorts of everyday dishes with easy recipes such as Hearty Ten Vegetable Stew, Chicken Baked in Foil with Fennel, Carrots, and Orange, Stuffed Acorn Squash with Barley, Multigrain Pizza Dough, Fusilli with Kale and White Beans, and Barley Risotto with Roasted Butternut Squash.
And while we kept our eye on the bottom-line nutritionals, we also focused on using healthy ingredients too, so while some recipes might be a little higher in fat and calories, that is because they use nutritionally valuable foods like salmon, avocados, nuts, and seeds (and more). We also relied on many lower-fat ingredients here and we tell you which ones really measure up from ricotta and cream cheese to cheddar cheese, mayonnaise, and sour cream. Which one you choose and when you use it can make a big difference in your final dish. With this book in hand, home cooks everywhere will be able to make simple changes in how they shop, eat, and cook changes that will deliver a big payoff to their family s health."

Bestselling author and world-renowned chef Mario Batali pays homage to the American farmer-from Maine to Los Angeles-in stories, photos, and recipes.

America -- Farm to Table: Simple, Delicious Recipes Celebrating Local Farmers

Mario Batali, who knows the importance of ingredients to any amazing dish, sees farmers as the rock stars of the food world. In this new book he celebrates American farmers: their high quality products and their culture defined by hard work, integrity, and pride. Batali asked his chef friends from Nashville, Tennessee, to San Francisco, to tell him who their favorite farmers were, and those farmers graciously shared their personal stories along with their top-of-the-line produce and products.

In Seattle, Chef Matt Dillon introduces readers to Farmer Pierre Monnat, who produces fava beans and lamb. Batali then features those ingredients in such mouth-watering recipes as: Lamb Shank Sloppy Joes and Fava Bean Guacamole. In Washington, DC, Chef Jose Andres from Jaleo introduces us to Farmer Jim Crawford, who grows corn, broccoli, and strawberries Batali's accompanying dishes include: Chilled Sweet Corn Soup and Grilled Salmon with Strawberry Salsa. Other stops along the way include: Tampa; Austin; Nashville; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; New York, San Francisco; Portland, Maine; Chicago; Cleveland; Suttons Bay, Michigan; and Vail, Colorado.

With over 100 superb recipes, this is the book that every home cook will want upon returning from the farmer's market or grocers.