Burnt Toast and Other Disasters: A Book of Heroic Hacks, Fabulous Fixes, and Secret Sauces

Cal Peternell

A gifty, funny, and practical guide to transforming the most lackluster of ingredients into a delicious meal, making bad food good and making good food even better, from the author of the New York Times bestselling and IACP Award-winning Twelve Recipes.

Dinner is looking meh. Maybe the stove was left unattended for just a second too long for your original plan; maybe the on-sale meat at the supermarket isn’t looking quite worth the savings after two days in the fridge. Do you waste food and time trying to start from scratch, or money ordering takeout? No, you face up to the facts, step up your game, and transform that cooking conundrum into a delicious meal. The best way to do that? Follow the guidance of Cal Peternell, a chef coming out of the restaurant kitchen to meet cooks where they are with this funny, practical manual for making Bad Food Good.

Though many pro chefs may be able to get their sustainably sourced, locally grown, 100 percent grass-fed, organic ingredients and gently guide them through careful preparation to a simply sublime dish, most of us don’t achieve farm-to-table perfection in every step of the process. From facing down third-day leftovers that have lost a little of their luster to the limits of their local supermarket’s quality, many home cooks start at a disadvantage. With his signature dry wit and years of experience cooking for everyone from high-end restaurant patrons to his hungry family, Cal Peternell is here to level the playing field with this bag of tricks for turning standard (or substandard) fare into a meal to be proud of, troubleshooting such situations as:

• Making the best of burned food (Burned your toast? Time to make Cheesy Onion Bread Pudding!)
• Hacking packaged food (including 5 variations on “Hackaroni and Cheese”)
• Things restaurants often do wrong and you can do better (including pesto, queso, bean dip, ranch, and more)
• Spicing up lackluster vegetables (Brocco Tacos dazzle both in name and in flavor)
• Snazzing up dishes with “special sauces for the boring” (including vegetable purees and an infinite variety of savory butter sauces)

Cal also includes a series of hilarious Old Man cocktails, ranging from the Bitter Old Man (one part bitter, one part brandy) to the Wise Old Man (8 ounces water and a good night’s sleep).

Up your cooking game by learning how to spin anything in your pantry or fridge into something special with Burnt Toast and Other Disasters.

Salt Fat Acid Heat​

Samin Nosrat

New York Times Bestseller and Winner of the 2018 James Beard Award for Best General Cookbook and multiple IACP Cookbook Awards

Named one of the Best Books of 2017 by: NPR, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Rachel Ray Every Day, San Francisco Chronicle, Vice Munchies, Elle.com, Glamour, Eater, Newsday, Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Seattle Times, Tampa Bay Times, Tasting Table, Modern Farmer, Publishers Weekly, and more.

A visionary new master class in cooking that distills decades of professional experience into just four simple elements, from the woman declared “America’s next great cooking teacher” by Alice Waters.

In the tradition of The Joy of Cooking and How to Cook Everything comes Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, an ambitious new approach to cooking by a major new culinary voice. Chef and writer Samin Nosrat has taught everyone from professional chefs to middle school kids to author Michael Pollan to cook using her revolutionary, yet simple, philosophy. Master the use of just four elements—Salt, which enhances flavor; Fat, which delivers flavor and generates texture; Acid, which balances flavor; and Heat, which ultimately determines the texture of food—and anything you cook will be delicious. By explaining the hows and whys of good cooking, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will teach and inspire a new generation of cooks how to confidently make better decisions in the kitchen and cook delicious meals with any ingredients, anywhere, at any time.

Echoing Samin’s own journey from culinary novice to award-winning chef, Salt, Fat Acid, Heat immediately bridges the gap between home and professional kitchens. With charming narrative, illustrated walkthroughs, and a lighthearted approach to kitchen science, Samin demystifies the four elements of good cooking for everyone. Refer to the canon of 100 essential recipes—and dozens of variations—to put the lessons into practice and make bright, balanced vinaigrettes, perfectly caramelized roast vegetables, tender braised meats, and light, flaky pastry doughs.

Featuring 150 illustrations and infographics that reveal an atlas to the world of flavor by renowned illustrator Wendy MacNaughton, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will be your compass in the kitchen. Destined to be a classic, it just might be the last cookbook you’ll ever need.

With a foreword by Michael Pollan.

An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

Tamar Adler

In An Everlasting Meal, Tamar Adler has written a book that “reads less like a cookbook than like a recipe for a delicious life” (New York magazine).

In this meditation on cooking and eating, Tamar Adler weaves philosophy and instruction into approachable lessons on feeding ourselves well. An Everlasting Meal demonstrates the implicit frugality in cooking. In essays on forgotten skills such as boiling, suggestions for what to do when cooking seems like a chore, and strategies for preparing, storing, and transforming ingredients for a week’s worth of satisfying, delicious meals, Tamar reminds us of the practical pleasures of eating. She explains what cooks in the world’s great kitchens know: that the best meals rely on the ends of the meals that came before them. With that in mind, she shows how we often throw away the bones, skins, and peels we need to make our food both more affordable and better. She also reminds readers that almost all kitchen mistakes can be remedied. Summoning respectable meals from the humblest ingredients, Tamar breathes life into the belief that we can start cooking from wherever we are, with whatever we have.

An empowering, indispensable work, An Everlasting Meal is an elegant testimony to the value of cooking.

Ingredienti

Marcella Hazan

From the inimitable woman who popularized Italian cuisine in America, Marcella Hazan’s simple and elegant manual on how to shop for the best ingredients and prepare the most delicious meals is a must-have for every home cook.

When Marcella Hazan died in 2013, the world mourned the passing of the “Godmother of Italian cooking.” But her legacy lives on, through her cookbooks and recipes, and in the handwritten notebooks filled with her thoughts on how to select the best ingredients—Ingredienti. Her husband and longtime collaborator Victor has translated and transcribed these vignettes on how to buy and what to do with the fresh produce used in Italian cooking, the elements of an essential pantry, and salumi.

Before you know how to cook, you must know how to shop. From Artichokes to Zucchini, Anchovies to Ziti, Ingredienti offers succinct and compelling advice on how to choose vegetables, pasta, olive oil, Parmigiano Reggiano, prosciutto, and all of the key elements of Marcella’s classic meals. Organic isn’t necessarily best, boxed pasta can be better than fresh. Marcella’s authoritative wisdom and surprising tips will change the way you cook. Her clear, practical guidance in acquiring the components of good cooking is helpful wherever you choose to shop—in supermarkets, farmers’ markets, specialty food stores or online.

Based on sixty years of almost daily visits to the market to choose the ingredients of that day’s meal, Ingredienti is a life’s work, distilled—an expression of Marcella’s judgments, advice, and suggestions. Uncomplicated and precise, this volume will be essential to home cooks eager to produce meals in the same delicious style Marcella was the first to introduce to America.

How to Pick a Peach

Russ Parsons

Critics greeted Russ Parsons’ first book, How to Read a French Fry, with raves. The New York Times praised it for its “affable voice and intellectual clarity”; Julia Child lauded it for its “deep factual information.” Now in How to Pick a Peach, Parsons takes on one of the hottest food topics today.

Good cooking starts with the right ingredients, and nowhere is that more true than with produce. Should we refrigerate that peach? How do we cook that artichoke? And what are those different varieties of pears? Most of us aren’t sure.

Parsons helps the cook sort through the produce in the market by illuminating the issues surrounding it, revealing intriguing facts about vegetables and fruits in individual profiles about them, and providing instructions on how to choose, store, and prepare these items.

Whether explaining why basil, citrus, tomatoes, and potatoes should never be refrigerated, describing how Dutch farmers revolutionized the tomato business in America, exploring organic farming and its effect on flavor, or giving tips on how to recognize a ripe melon, How to Pick a Peach is Parsons at his peak.

SPECIAL GUEST – Steve Ela of Ela Family Farms!!

Food Heroes: Sixteen Culinary Artisans Preserving Tradition
by Georgia Pellegrini

Readers are introduced to the lively stories of food artisans such as potato breeder David Langford from Ireland, New York mushroom forager Marion Burroughs, “The Butter Poet” Sue Forrester from Cumbria, England and Ugo Buzzio of New York City, one of the last makers of traditional dry-cured sausages in the United States. Filled with colorful anecdotes, photographs, and recipes, this book offers an insight into the artisanal food movement, and vicarious living for food lovers, and others who wonder what it would be like to drop everything and start an olive farm. These are, in author Pellegrini’s words, “…stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things with food while living and thriving outside a corporate urban environment… people taking extraordinary measures to preserve good taste…and preserve our endangered food traditions.”

Tasty Reads Book Club Meeting

Date and Time: Wednesday, October 1, 5:30 pm
Location: Small Potatoes Bakery, 40575 O Road, Paonia
Potluck

In keeping with the theme of our first book, we will celebrate our own local food artisan Monica Wiitanen, who produces weekly artisan breads (and more) from her wood-fired oven. Monica baked pitas for our gathering. People broght a potluck dish with a Mediterranean flavor–dips, salads, tapas– from Europe, the Middle East or North Africa.

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
by Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen, and discovers the enduring power of the four classical elements—fire, water, air, and earth—to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Apprenticing himself to a succession of culinary masters, Pollan learns how to grill with fire, cook with liquid, bake bread, and ferment everything from cheese to beer. But the lessons move beyond the practical to become an investigation of how cooking involves us in a web of social and ecological relationships. Cooking, above all, connects us. The effects of NOT cooking are similarly far reaching. Relying upon corporations to process our food means we consume large quantities of fat, sugar, and salt; disrupt an essential link to the natural world; and weaken our relationships with family and friends. In fact, Cooked argues, taking back control of cooking may be the single most important step anyone can take to help make the American food system healthier and more sustainable.

We will combine this book Club with a Terra Madre talk presented by Emma Stopher-Griffin, Matt Kottenstette and Mike Gillespie at the Hotchkiss Library, Jan 14, 6pm.

Listen to Emma, Matt and Mike’s stories about their experiences at Slow Food’s Terra Madre conference in Italy, then stay afterward for a short gathering of Book Club. And for those who were planning to attend Book Club, please bring a dessert to share for this event, instead of a potluck dish based on the book.

Wheat Belly
by William Davis, M.D.

Over 200 million Americans consume food products made of wheat every day. As a result, over 100 million experience some form of adverse health effect, ranging from minor rashes to high blood sugar to unattractive stomach bulges preventative cardiologist William Davis calls “wheat bellies.” According to Davis, that excess fat has nothing to do with gluttony, sloth, or too much butter: it’s due to the whole grain wraps we eat for lunch. After witnessing over 2,000 patients regain health after giving up wheat, Davis reached the disturbing conclusion that wheat is the single largest contributor to the nationwide obesity epidemic—and that elimination of wheat is key to dramatic weight loss and optimal health. In Wheat Belly, a national bestseller, Dr. Davis exposes the harmful effects of what is actually a product of genetic tinkering and agribusiness being sold to the American public as “wheat”—and provides readers with a user-friendly, step-by-step plan to navigate a new wheat-free lifestyle.

At Mesa’s Edge: Cooking and Ranching in Colorado’s North Fork Valley
by Eugenia Bone

Eugenia Bone, a New York City food writer, was lured by her husband, a transplanted westerner, to buy a forty-five-acre ranch in Crawford, Colorado (population 255). He had just returned from a fishing trip in the Rockies, and Eugenia had sensed his vague discontent with urban life. She reluctantly consented, and bravely jumped into Western Colorado life, packing her suitcase with her “necessities”–imported pasta, artichokes in oil, and cured Italian salami—before she and her 2 young children headed West to live part time in the North Fork Valley. At Mesa’s Edge is the witty, candid, often moving story of ranch restoration and of struggles with defiant skunks, barbed wire, marauding cows, and loneliness. And in the process of learning the way of the West, Eugenia discovers the bounty and blessings of the region. The author approaches life on the Plateau with humor and grace, making fun of herself as she acknowledges the difficulties of ranch life in the North Fork Valley. Partly a memoir, partly a cookbook with 150 appealing recipes, At Mesa’s Edge is a transporting tale of rejuvenation, a celebration of everything local, and a reminder that the best food is to be found in our own back yards.

What We Eat When We Eat Alone: Stories and 100 Recipes
by Deborah Madison, Patrick McFarlin

Deborah Madison–cook, restaurateur, teacher and award-winning author of books that herald the garden, stress vegetarian cuisine, and promote eating locally—has taken a new twist with her writing. Madison and her husband, Patrick McFarlin, set out to learn what people chew on when there isn’t anyone else around. The responses are surprising-and we aren’t just talking take-out or leftovers. The result is a delightful, conversational journey about solo eating rituals–this is food-gone-wild in its most elemental form.

Betty Fussell, noted food writer, shares this in one of the chapters: “I eat alone all the time in this my seventy-ninth year, and I love to eat alone. Nobody to please but myself. I open the door of the fridge and look inside. It’s always exciting, so many little things forgotten at the back of the shelves. What can I put together for this improvised, unrepeatable, once-in-a-lifetime meal?”

The book is playfully illustrated with the delightful art of Patrick McFarlin, and each chapter ends with recipes for those who dine alone. And Madison’s upbeat message is–Treat yourself right. Eat what you like. And go ahead, improvise!