Food writer Eugenia Bone comes to the Book Cellar to talk about her new cookbook The Kitchen Ecosystem: Integrating Recipes to Create Delicious Meals!

Rarely does a book change the way we think about food and cooking, but in The Kitchen Ecosystem: Integrating Recipes to Create Delicious Meals Eugenia Bone sets out to do just that with a new way of looking at the food you buy, prepare, and discard, and understanding why it tastes the way it does. In this book you will find 400 interconnected recipes that create a perpetual pantry: each dish draws on elements from a previous one and provides the building blocks for another. For example, with this week’s apple bounty, make Baked Apples with Bread Pudding. And while you’re coring apples and have your pots out, put up some applesauce to have with potato pancakes in a few months. And—here’s the rub—save the apple juice from cooking all those apples to have apple granita next week. This synchronicity is a Kitchen Ecosystem. The more homemade components you use in your cooking—the better tasting your food will be, regardless of the recipe. This is the secret to delicious food.

The Kitchen Ecosystem is a new approach to shopping and cooking. Eugenia Bone’s 400 recipes derived from 40 common ingredients—from apples and asparagus to fish and zucchini—maximize each stage of their life cycle: fresh, preserved, leftovers, and the parts we usually throw away.

Just about everything, it turns out, can be transformed into a preserve, stock, marinade, syrup, zest, jam, jelly, pickle, or condiment that can be used in or with other recipes. The yield? Food that is more delicious and prepared with less effort—and a pantry and refrigerator that are always stocked with fresh flavor boosters.

Eugenia Bone is a long time food writer, author of four books (the fifth comes out in September), an Italian cook, mushroom hunter , master canner, and all-around bloated pleasure seeker. Eugenia is the author of the critically acclaimed Mycophilia and the category staple and James Beard–nominated Well-Preserved. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Saveur, Food & Wine, Gourmet, New York, and Harper’s Bazaar, among many other publications. She is married to architect Kevin Bone with whom she has two grown children, and live and write and cook in a loft in SoHo that Kevin moved into in 1978, when it had nothing but six urinals. She grew up in a food environment as her dad, Ed Giobbi, is an accomplished Italian cook and cookbook author. He and her mom hung out with a gang of chefs who were influential in their day, and Eugenia learned a lot from observing them. "Indeed, those chefs shaped my attitude about food: to use everything, to taste constantly, and to be grateful for every mouthful."- Eugenia Bone