Cooking

From practical to playful, inspired recipes that reveal the hidden potential of plants

At the award-winning restaurant, The Acorn, plants are celebrated: explored, enhanced, coaxed with creativity, and dressed for a night of being the center of attention and the phenomenal focus of every plate. In their first cookbook, Shira Blustein and Brian Luptak--The Acorn's owner and chef--share their truly unique recipes, highlighting the endless possibilities that come when cooking with the seasonal and wild-crafted ingredients gifted to us by nature. Defying categorization, with dishes that are anything but predictable, this cookbook will leave even the staunchest of meat eaters satisfied.

The recipe chapters are structured by season, with an Essentials chapter at the start of the book--full of pickles, vinegars, oils, and plant-based alternatives--and a Cocktails chapter at the back. All the recipes are broken into components, and range from the simple but sublime Spring Radishes with Ashed Spring Onion Almond Sauce, Fried Garlic Scapes or Stinging Nettle Soup, to the intriguing Fried Zucchini Blossoms with Fermented Zucchini Purée and Apricot Chili Sauce, Smoked Caramelized Parsnip and Potato Pâté, or Squash and Chanterelle Gnocchi. And the recipes focus on minimizing waste and maximizing the potential of each plant--as the stems of one recipe become the pickled star of another.

Encouraging us all to be adventurous with our vegetables, Acorn offers a year's worth of seasonal recipes, infused with brilliant creativity. Visually compelling, and masterfully thought through, Acorn takes vegetarian cooking to the next level, and is a cookbook to read, admire, and inspire.

After marrying a vegetarian, meat-lover Ivy Manning developed a collection of recipes that each had a fork in the road to a few vegetarian servings of a meaty dish or a few omnivore servings of a vegetarian dish. Over the years, the author has assembled a diverse and delicious array of recipes from cuisines worldwide that are flexible enough to accommodate everyone at the table. Typical entries in this beautifully illustrated cookbook include elegant Japanese Eggplant and Halibut with Miso Glaze, and a sumptuous Spaghetti Carbonara for gourmands of all persuasions.

Bake the Best Bread of Your Life

Calling all bread enthusiasts! Let this vivid guide take you on a journey through the essential techniques of advanced bread baking. With Chef Daniele Brenci's expert guidance, you'll learn how to manipulate your doughs for deliciously complex flavor, perfect flaky crust and luscious interior crumb.

In exquisite detail, Daniele walks you through every step of his master sourdough process, including guidelines on using time and temperature to your advantage for awe-inspiring bread every single time. He also breaks down all of the advanced methods you'll need to be successful with a wide variety of creative breads, from ancient grain combos to two-tone doughs and more.

Tackle the bi-color lamination process with ease as you whip up a decadent Spiced Marble Chocolate Sourdough or dazzle the senses as you cut into a gorgeous and vibrant loaf of Purple Sweet Potato Bread. Unlock the secrets of ancient grains with soft and aromatic Einkorn Baguettes or the buttery, chewy crumb of a flawless Khorasan Wheat loaf. There's even an entire chapter devoted to demystifying complicated pastries like Honey Lavender Cream Puffs and Triple Chocolate Babka, as well as taking on the ultimate challenge: baking perfect Croissants with confidence.

Take your bread to new heights as you discover the delicious joys of advanced bread baking.

Food -- its smells, textures, colors, flavors, and rituals -- is tied intrinsically to place. This heartwarming, surprising, and sumptuous collection of stories reveals our obsession with how food nourishes and sustains us, teaches us about other cultures, and creates community and connection with others. From the award-winning editor of Travelers' Tales Food, here is another collection of funny and sometimes frightening true stories of eating that will make your mouth water while helping you better understand other cultures. Notable authors include Jeffrey Steingarten, Frances Mayes, Jonathan Raban, John Krich, and Maxine Kumin.

The James Beard-nominated food writer revamps the slow cooker for the modern home cook, providing ingenious ideas and more than 100 delicious recipes for maximizing this favorite time-saving kitchen appliance and making it easier than ever to use.

Sarah DiGregorio shares the nostalgia most of us feel when it comes to slow cookers. Her first memory of slow-cooker cooking is her grandmother's pot roast. While these handy devices have been time savers for incredibly busy lives, traditional slow cooker food is sometimes underwhelming. Now, Sarah, an experienced food professional, has reinvented slow cooking for a generation that cooks for fun and flavor, taking a fresh approach to reclaim this versatile tool without sacrificing quality or taste.

For Sarah, it's not just about getting dinner on the table--it's about using a slow cooker to make fabulous dinners like herb oil poached shrimp or the most perfect sticky toffee pudding for dessert. It's about rethinking how to use this magic appliance--such as throwing a biryani dinner party with the slow cooker at the center of the table.

Showcasing a beautiful, engaging design, inviting color photographs, and 105 original, innovative recipes thoroughly tested in a variety of brands of slow cookers, Adventures in Slow Cooking provides a repertoire of delicious food for any time of day. Inside you'll find ideas for flavorful sweet and savory slow cooker dishes, including:

Whipped Feta, Red Pepper and Olive Dip

Granola with Pistachios, Coconut and Cardamom

Savory Overnight Oatmeal with Bacon, Scallions and Cheddar

Turkey-Spinach Meatballs Stuffed with Mozzarella

Spicy Kimchi and Pork Ramen

Orange, Olive and Fennel Chicken Tagine

Daal with Mango and Mustard Seeds

Farro Bowl with Smoked Salmon, Yogurt, and Everything-Bagel Spice

Oxtail and Short Rib Pho

Corn, Mushroom and Zucchini Tamales

Proper Red Sauce Eggplant Parm

Peach-Orange Blossom Jam

Matcha-White Chocolate Pots de Crème

Cardamom-Molasses Apple Upside-Down Cake

Star Anise-Black Pepper Hot Toddy

Sarah also provides ingenious tips and tricks that will help cooks get the most out of today's slow cookers, and have them saying, "I never knew my slow cooker could do that!" With a foreword by Grant Achatz, a modernist chef and huge advocate of the slow cooker, Adventures in Slow Cooking makes this convenient appliance an indispensable tool for the modern kitchen.

Adventures in Wine takes you to the wine country like no other wine book: behind the scenes, into the vineyards and cellars, with some of the world's finest wine writers. Here the emphasis is not on the wine - though it's always present - but on the richly textured tapestry that wine has woven into our world for centuries. Each story is a personal exploration of a place on earth that is fortunate enough to be called wine country. Yes, you'll visit Napa and Provence and Tuscany, but also Greece and Hungary, Arizona and Alsace, Georgia and Georgia (the state and the country). These writers let the world of wine affect them deeply: Gerald Asher discovers a moment of rare happiness with a wine he can never name, Karen MacNeil is led inexorably from midtown Manhattan to a mountaintop vineyard in California, vintner Steve Edmunds discovers that perhaps the wine is making him, not the other way around - and novelist Jim Harrison reveals how wine helped save his life. These are the stories that wine country travelers tell each other late into the evening, when pretense is put aside and deeper truths are revealed. There's also plenty of rollicking good fun, such as learning how Kit Snedaker craftily gets the upper hand on snooty sommeliers; joining Bob Blumer, the Surreal Gourmet, as he works the harvest at Burgundy's most august domaine, Romanée-Conti; and wading into the Seine with DeAnne Musolf Crouch to catch trout - with a net. There's something for every wine lover in Adventures in Wine, including history, technology, and Peter Mayle searching for a spittoon. So uncork a bottle and take a trip to the wine country with some of the most observant, engaging, and enlightening guides you'll ever meet between the covers of a book.

With 100 recipes, this is the first book to explore the vibrant food culture of Macau--an east-meets-west melting pot of Chinese, Portuguese, Malaysian, and Indian foodways--as seen through the lens of the cult favorite Chicago restaurant, Fat Rice.

"Stan Lee and other comic book creators can literally eat their hearts out, as the format of the traditional cookbook continues to evolve. The latest to challenge the standard: The Adventures of Fat Rice."--Eater

An hour's ferry ride from Hong Kong, on the banks of the Pearl River in China, lies Macau--a modern, cosmopolitan city with an unexpected history. For centuries, Macau was one of the world's greatest trading ports: a Portuguese outpost and crossroads along the spice route, where travelers from Europe, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and mainland China traded resources, culture, and food. The Adventures of Fat Rice is the story of how two Chicago chefs discovered and fell in love with this fascinating and, at least until now, unheralded cuisine.

With dishes like Minchi (a classic Macanese meat hash), Po Kok Gai (a Portuguese-influenced chicken curry with chouriço and olives), and Arroz Gordo (if paella and fried rice had a baby), now you, too, can bring the eclectic and wonderfully unique--yet enticingly familiar--flavors of Macau into your own kitchen.

When Adventures on the Wine Route was first published, Victor Hazan said, "In Kermit Lynch's small, true, delightful book there is more understanding about what wine really is than in everything else I have read." A quarter century later, this remarkable journey of wine, travel, and taste remains an essential volume for wine lovers. In 2007, Eric Asimov, in The New York Times, called it "one of the finest American books on wine," and in 2012, The Wall Street Journal pro-claimed that it "may be the best book on the wine business."

In celebration of its twenty-fifth anniversary, Adventures on the Wine Route has been thoroughly redesigned and updated with an epilogue and a list of the great wine connoisseur's twenty-five most memorable bottles. In this singular tour along the French wine route, Lynch ventures forth to find the very essence of the wine world. In doing so, he never shies away from the attitudes, opinions, and beliefs that have made him one of our most respected and outspoken authorities on wine. Yet his guiding philosophy is exquisitely simple. As he writes in the introduction, "Wine is, above all, about pleasure. Those who make it ponderous make it dull . . . If you keep an open mind and take each wine on its own terms, there is a world of magic to discover." Adventures on the Wine Route is the ultimate quest for this magic via France's most distinguished vineyards and wine cellars. Lynch draws vivid portraits of vintners--from inebriated négociants to a man who oversees a vineyard that has been in his family for five hundred years--and memorably evokes the countryside at every turn. "The French," Lynch writes, "with their aristocratic heritage, their experience and tradition, approach wine from another point of view . . . and one cannot appreciate French wine with any depth of understanding without knowing how the French themselves look at their wines, by going to the source, descending into their cold, humid cellars, tasting with them, and listening to the language they employ to describe their wines."

Here, Kermit Lynch assures a whole new generation of readers--as well as his loyal fans--that discussions about wine need not focus so stringently on "the pH, the oak, the body, the finish," but rather on the "gaiety" of the way "the tart fruit perfume[s] the palate and the brain."