*** On sale now at this blog's Amazon book store - Mad Hungry: Feeding Men and Boys by Lucina Scala Quinn
Civilize the wild beasts in your life, one meal at a time.
Four hungry brothers. Three ravenous sons. A husband who loves to eat. Lucinda Scala Quinn has spent much of her life feeding the men and boys in her life and teaching them how to feed themselves. Now Scala Quinn—chef, television personality, and Martha Stewart Omnimedia's resident food guru—shares winning strategies for how to sate the seemingly insatiable, trade food for talk, and get men to manage in the kitchen.
She provides recipes for single-skillet meals and dinners that yield fabulous leftovers and that are a cinch to stretch for extra guests. Her grab-and-run breakfast will help kids start the day right, and her healthful drinks make it easier for guys to say no to soda. Scala Quinn's recipes are easy to prepare, affordable, and so good that even the most finicky eater will want to dig in.
Along with her cooking techniques and survival strategies ("Never be caught without bacon"), Quinn muses about life in a predominantly male household and provides empowering advice to feed guys' spirits as well as fill their bellies. With her help, homemade meals become second nature, nourishing both diner and cook.
*** On sale now at this blog's Amazon book store - Now Eat This!: 150 of America's Favorite Comfort Foods, All Under 350 Calories By Rocco DiSpirito
FRIED CHICKEN, MACARONI AND CHEESE, BROWNIES, AND 147 OTHER FAVORITE RECIPES UNDER 350 CALORIES
In this delectable cookbook, award-winning chef Rocco DiSpirito transforms America’s favorite comfort foods into deliciously healthy dishes—all with zero bad carbs, zero bad fats, zero sugar, and maximum flavor. What’s more, Rocco provides time-saving shortcuts, helpful personal advice, and nutritional breakdowns for each recipe from a board-certified nutritionist. So prepare your favorite foods without the guilt. Finally, a world-class chef has made healthy food taste great!
Featured Recipe: No Cream-No Cry Penne Alla Vodka
The dirty little secret about Penne alla Vodka is not the vodka but the hefty amount of heavy cream. Vodka is colorless, odorless, and without much flavor—not really attributes of a superstar ingredient. It’s the combination of cream and tomato sauce that gives this dish its signature flavor. The traditional cream is swapped here for low-fat Greek yogurt. --Rocco DiSpirito
Ingredients:
8 ounces whole- wheat penne
2 cups Rocco’s How Low Can You Go Low-Fat Marinara Sauce (page 206 of Now Eat This!) or store-bought low- fat marinara sauce
Pinch of crushed red pepper
One 7-ounce container 2% Greek yogurt
1 cup chopped fresh basil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
6 tablespoons grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
(Serves 4)
Directions:
1. Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook according to the package directions, about 9 minutes; drain.
2. While the pasta is cooking, bring the marinara sauce and crushed red pepper to a simmer in a large nonstick saute pan over medium heat. Cook the sauce, stirring it occasionally with a heat-resistant rubber spatula, until it is slightly thickened, about 5 minutes. Remove the saute pan from the heat.
3. Stir about 1/2 cup of the marinara sauce into the yogurt until smooth (this tempers it and prevents the yogurt from curdling). Then whisk the yogurt mixture back into the marinara sauce.
4. In a large serving bowl, toss the sauce with the drained penne and the basil. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Sprinkle the cheese on top, and serve.
Healthy Tips
Whole-wheat pasta has a dense texture that makes it a little tougher than regular pasta. Some people like that chewiness; some don’t. If you’re in the latter category, overcook it a bit. Toward the end of the cooking time, keep testing it until it’s as tender as you like it.
Fat: 4.8 g
Calories: 320
Protein: 18 g
Carbohydrates: 55 g
Cholesterol: 11 mg
Fiber: 6 g
Sodium: 416 mg
Featured Recipe: Seared Tuna With Green Beans, Lemon, And Wasabi
This dish isn’t a makeover, per se. But there are so many beloved--and believe it or not, unhealthy--seared tuna dishes out there in the restaurant world that I thought I should offer at least one healthy version. The tuna is never the problem. Tuna is rich in nutrients, low in fat, delicious, and just a good bet all around. It’s the stuff that’s put on top that’s the problem--anything from seared foie gras to deep-fried tempura crispies. Sure, it tastes great, but those additions turn a healthful dish into an artery-clogging one. --Rocco DiSpirito
Ingredients:
4 sushi-grade tuna steaks (3 ounces each)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Nonstick cooking spray
12 ounces haricots verts or slim green beans, trimmed
Juice and grated zest of 1 lemon
1 garlic clove, minced
2 tablespoons wasabi paste
4 scallions (white and green parts), sliced thin on the diagonal
3 tablespoons black sesame seeds
(Serves 4)
Directions:
1. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Preheat a grill or grill pan over high heat.
2. Season the tuna steaks with salt and pepper to taste, and spray them lightly with cooking spray. When the grill is hot, add the tuna and cook for 1 1/2 minutes per side for medium-rare. Transfer the tuna to a platter and allow it to rest, uncovered, for 5 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, cook the haricots verts in the boiling water until they are just tender, about 3 minutes; drain.
4. In a medium bowl, whisk together the lemon juice and zest, garlic, and wasabi paste. Add the haricots verts, scallions, and sesame seeds. Toss to coat, adding salt and pepper to taste.
5. Thinly slice the tuna. Fan each portion onto each of 4 plates. Pile a mound of dressed haricots verts on top of the tuna, and serve.
Fat: 3.8 g
Calories: 166
Protein: 23 g
Carbohydrates: 11 g
Cholesterol: 38 mg
Fiber: 5 g
Sodium: 211 mg
*** On sale now at this blog's Amazon book store - Everyday Food: Great Food Fast By Martha Stewart Living Magazine
No matter how busy you are, at the end of the day you want fresh, flavorful meals that are easy to prepare. And you want lots of choices and variations—recipes that call for your favorite foods and take advantage of excellent (and readily available) ingredients. In the first book from the award-winning magazine Everyday Food, you’ll find all of that: 250 simple recipes for delicious meals that are quick enough to make any day of the week.
Because a change in weather affects how we cook as much as what we cook, the recipes in Everyday Food are arranged by season. For spring, you’ll find speedy preparations for main-course salads, chicken, and poached salmon that minimize time spent at the stove; summer features quick techniques for grilling the very best burgers and kabobs as well as no-cook pasta sauces; for fall, there are braised meats and hearty main-course soups; and winter provides new takes on rich one-dish meals, roasts and stews, and hearty baked pastas. Finally, a chapter on basics explains how to make year-round staples such as foolproof roast chicken, risotto, couscous, and chocolate sauce.
Designed in a contemporary and easy-to-read format, Everyday Food boasts lush, full-color photography and plenty of suggestions for substitutions and variations. With Everyday Food, even the busiest on-the-go cook can look forward to meals that bring freshness, nutrition, and a range of flavors to dinner all week long.
*** On sale now at this blog's Amazon book store - Ad Hoc at Home By Thomas Keller
Thomas Keller shares family-style recipes that you can make any or every day.
In the book every home cook has been waiting for, the revered Thomas Keller turns his imagination to the American comfort foods closest to his heart—flaky biscuits, chicken pot pies, New England clam bakes, and cherry pies so delicious and redolent of childhood that they give Proust's madeleines a run for their money. Keller, whose restaurants The French Laundry in Yountville, California, and Per Se in New York have revolutionized American haute cuisine, is equally adept at turning out simpler fare.
In Ad Hoc at Home—a cookbook inspired by the menu of his casual restaurant Ad Hoc in Yountville—he showcases more than 200 recipes for family-style meals. This is Keller at his most playful, serving up such truck-stop classics as Potato Hash with Bacon and Melted Onions and grilled-cheese sandwiches, and heartier fare including beef Stroganoff and roasted spring leg of lamb. In fun, full-color photographs, the great chef gives step-by-step lessons in kitchen basics— here is Keller teaching how to perfectly shape a basic hamburger, truss a chicken, or dress a salad. Best of all, where Keller’s previous best-selling cookbooks were for the ambitious advanced cook, Ad Hoc at Home is filled with quicker and easier recipes that will be embraced by both kitchen novices and more experienced cooks who want the ultimate recipes for American comfort-food classics.
*** On sale now at this blog's Amazon book store - DamGoodSweet: Desserts to Satisfy Your Sweet Tooth, New Orleans Style By David Guas, Raquel Pelzel
As featured on NBC The Today Show, pastry chef is from New Orleans.
A city rich in food diversity, New Orleans is as much a city of banana cream pie as it is crawfish boil. In DamGoodSweet, pastry chef David Guas and food writer Raquel Pelzel delve into the rich fabric of the home-style sweets of New Orleans and its surrounding area. Through 50 amazing desserts, from traditional beignets, red velvet cake, and pralines to the lesser-known Roman chewing candy and calas fried rice cakes, Guas and Pelzel transport cooks from their home kitchens into the giant dessert gumbo that is New Orleans. Through instructional and anecdotal headnotes, plenty of great tips, and fun stories, DamGoodSweet is completely dedicated to the pastries and desserts of a unique American city.
*** On sale now at this blog's Amazon book store - How to Grill: The Complete Illustrated Book of Barbecue Techniques By Steven Raichlen
Steven Raichlen is America's grilling authority. He is the author of The Barbecue! Bible, winner of an IACP/Julia Child Cookbook Award, and Barbecue! Bible Sauces, Rubs, and Marinades. Esquire calls him the "master griller." The New Yorker writes, "For aspiring gourmets of the grill . . . there is only one book: The Barbecue! Bible."
Now Steven Raichlen's written the bible behind The Barbecue! Bible. A full-color, photograph-by-photograph, step-by-step technique book, HOW TO GRILL gets to the core of the grilling experience by showing and telling exactly how it's done. With more than 1,000 photographs and lively writing, here are over 100 techniques, from how to set up a three-tiered fire to how to grill a prime rib, a porterhouse, a pork tenderloin, or a chicken breast. There are techniques for smoking ribs, cooking the perfect burger, rotisserieing a whole chicken, barbecuing a fish; for grilling pizza, shellfish, vegetables, tofu, fruit, and s'mores. Bringing the techniques to life are over 100 all-new recipes-Beef Ribs with Chinese Spices, Grilled Side of Salmon with Mustard Glaze, Prosciutto-Wrapped, Rosemary-Grilled Scallops-and hundreds of inside tips.
Editorial Review From Publishers Weekly:
The giddy joy that comes with picking up this tribute to outdoor cooking is comparable to the adolescent thrill of sneaking a naughty magazine into the garage. Not only does every conceivable meat, fish and fowl get its turn over the coals, there is a whole Barbecued Cabbage stuffed with bacon and onion and even a grilled CrŠme Br–l‚e. Raichlen focuses on creative techniques, employing everything from butcher's string and bricks wrapped in foil to inserting a half-full can of beer into the cavity of a chicken: when placed on the grill it simultaneously steams the bird and holds it upright, allowing the skin to grow crisp. Indeed, Raichlen's (Miami Spice; High-Flavor Low-Fat Cooking) approach is anything but shy. However, to limit the book to a manageable size, Raichlen presents just one or two recipes for each cut of meat or type of seafood. Thus a single lamb is chopped into a new-world-order menu of Rack of Lamb Marrakech, Sichuan-Spiced Loin Lamb Chops and Leg of Lamb Proven‡al. Throughout, every recipe is made foolproof with step-by-step instructions and, happily, a photo accompanies every one of the steps. While none could be considered a full-fledged centerfold, it is impossible not to gaze upon them and lust.
*** On sale now at this blog's Amazon book store - From Emeril's Kitchens: Favorite Recipes from Emeril's Restaurants By Emeril Lagasse
Emeril Lagasse, America's favorite chef, has gathered 150 of the most popular, most requested recipes from six of his restaurants, and has included two dozen new personal favorites as well. If you are one of the many fans who have enjoyed a memorable meal at one of Emeril's restaurants or tuned into his television cooking shows, and want to share that extraordinary experience with friends and family,From Emeril's Kitchens is the book for you.
*** On sale now at this blog's Amazon book store - Crescent City (New Orleans) Farmers Market Cookbook By Poppy Tooker
This book is about $6 less than offered online elsewhere, good buy! Also, helps support the New Orleans Farmers' Market since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. The author is Chef Poppy Tooker, New Orleans food instructor and farmers' market advocate that helped rebuild the local market after the hurricane. Proceeds go to support this market. Foreward by famed author, chef and farmers' market advocate Alice Waters.
Thirteen years in the making, the Crescent City Farmers Market Cookbook is ready for the audience that has long been awaiting it. The world’s loudly proclaimed interest in New Orleans—its food, its culture, and most recently its struggle to rebuild after one of the greatest disasters in modern times—proves that, now more than ever, there is tremendous demand for such a book.
Poppy Tooker tells the story of the Crescent City Farmers Market through her distinctly New Orleans voice as one of a local food preservationist, Slow Food New Orleans founder, and longtime market collaborator. With a market tradition dating back to the late 1600s, the story of the rise and decline of New Orleans’ city markets prior to the creation of the Crescent City Farmers Market is both educational and entertaining. Tooker recalls whimsical and wacky market events with both prose and archival photography. On a more serious note, she tells compelling stories of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating impact on market vendors from an insider’s point of view. More than 70 profiles of key market vendors are included, humanizing the book’s recipes in a truly unique way.
The Crescent City Farmers Market Cookbook incorporates renowned New Orleans chefs’ recipes inspired by the region’s seasonal bounty, as well as family favorites from market vendors and shoppers. More than 125 recipes, ranging from Creole classics such as Oysters Rockefeller, Gumbo Z’Herbes, and Bread Pudding to Gator-Tater Salad, Asian Pear Slaw, Chevre-Stuffed Squash Blossoms, Kakurei Turnip and Pork Fricasse, Barbecue Shrimp Pie, and Satsuma- Chocolate Gelato reveal why New Orleans is one of the great food cities of the world.
*** On sale now at this blog's Amazon book store - Justin Wilson's Homegrown Louisiana Cookin' By Justin Wilson
Welcome to Louisiana! & Welcome to Homegrown! Let Justin Wilson introduce you to the bounty of Louisiana and the food of friendship and family. In Justin Wilson's Homegrown Louisiana Cookin' Justin serves up all the recipes from his "Homegrown" television series in addition to hundreds more for:
Appetizers
Salads and Dressings Gumbos and Soups
Sauces and Gravies Rice, Pasta, and Stuffings
Seafood Poultry and Eggs
Meats
Game Vegetables
Breads
Desserts Beverages
Preserves
So, come to Louisiana and enjoy some good cookin' and eatin' —I garontee!
*** On sale now at this blog's Amazon book store - 100 Greatest New Orleans Creole Recipes, The (100 Greatest Recipes Series) By Roy Guste, Jr.
Each recipe is accompanied by reminiscences and anecdotes of its origin that only a few Louisianians could know.
*** On sale now at this blog's Amazon book store - Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen By Paul Prudhomme
Here for the first time the famous food of Louisiana is presented in a cookbook written by a great creative chef who is himself world-famous. The extraordinary Cajun and Creole cooking of South Louisiana has roots going back over two hundred years, and today it is the one really vital, growing regional cuisine in America. No one is more responsible than Paul Prudhomme for preserving and expanding the Louisiana tradition, which he inherited from his own Cajun background.
Chef Prudhomme's incredibly good food has brought people from all over America and the world to his restaurant, K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen, in New Orleans. To set down his recipes for home cooks, however, he did not work in the restaurant. In a small test kitchen, equipped with a home-size stove and utensils normal for a home kitchen, he retested every recipe two and three times to get exactly the results he wanted. Logical though this is, it was an unprecedented way for a chef to write a cookbook. But Paul Prudhomme started cooking in his mother's kitchen when he was a youngster. To him, the difference between home and restaurant procedures is obvious and had to be taken into account.
So here, in explicit detail, are recipes for the great traditional dishes--gumbos and jambalayas, Shrimp Creole, Turtle Soup, Cajun "Popcorn," Crawfish Etouffee, Pecan Pie, and dozens more--each refined by the skill and genius of Chef Prudhomme so that they are at once authentic and modern in their methods.
Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen is also full of surprises, for he is unique in the way he has enlarged the repertoire of Cajun and Creole food, creating new dishes and variations within the old traditions. Seafood Stuffed Zucchini with Seafood Cream Sauce, Panted Chicken and Fettucini, Veal and Oyster Crepes, Artichoke Prudhomme--these and many others are newly conceived recipes, but they could have been created only by a Louisiana cook. The most famous of Paul Prudhomme's original recipes is Blackened Redfish, a daringly simple dish of fiery Cajun flavor that is often singled out by food writers as an example of the best of new American regional cooking.
For Louisianians and for cooks everywhere in the country, this is the most exciting cookbook to be published in many years.
*** On sale now at this blog's Amazon book store - Who's Your Mama, Are You Catholic, and Can You Make A Roux? (Book 1): A Cajun / Creole Family Album Cookbook By Marcelle Bienvenu
A 160-page hardcover book containing more than 200 Cajun and Creole recipes, plus old photos and interesting stories about the author s growing up in the Cajun country of south Louisiana. Recipes include Pain Perdu, Couche Couche, Chicken Fricassee Stuffed Mirliton, Shrimp Stew, Grillades, Red Beans & Rice, Shrimp Creole, Bouillabaisse, Pralines.
*** On sale now at this blog's Amazon book store - Who's Your Mama, Are You Catholic & Can You Make A Roux? (Book 2): A Cajun / Creole Family Album Cookbook (Louisiana Classic)By Marcelle Bienvenu
A 104-page hardcover book containing about 100 Cajun and Creole recipes, plus old photos and interesting stories about the author s growing up in the Cajun country of south Louisiana. Recipes include Shrimp Bisque, Andouille & Black Bean Soup, Crawfish-Okra Gumbo, Smothered Okra, Stuffed Tomatoes, Eggplant & Rice Dressing, Stuffed Pork Chops, Chicken & Oyster Pie, Apple Cake, Roasted Pecans.
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