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Happy in the Kitchen: The Craft of Cooking, the Art of Eating :: 1579652999
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| "In cooking as in love, you have to try new things to keep it interesting." So says chef Michel Richard in his cookbook Happy in the Kitchen, a collection of 150-plus recipes that more than make his point. Whether reinventing traditional recipes, often whimsically, as he does with dishes like Tomato Tartare, Cuttlefish Schnitzel, and Turkey "Steak" au Poivre, or presenting otherwise novel treats like Tuna Medallions with Passion Fruit Salsa; Chicken with Preserved Lemon and Honeydew Melon; and Lamb-Loin with Basil Crust and Fennel, Richard delights readers with creativity that can thrill. Vegetable dishes, including his spuds-for-rice Potato Risotto and Lo-Carb Carbonara, in which sliced onions sub for pasta, are particularly ingenious. Equally novel--and tempting--are sweets like Upside-Down Chocolate Orange Sponge Cake, Lemon-Lime Madeleine Muffins, and Raspberry Meringues with Raspberry Tuiles. To pull off his particular sleight-of-hand, Richard has devised novel techniques--like using plastic film to shape and poach food, and gelatin to bind fatlessly--that all cooks should know about. Whether readers will tackle the often-exacting recipes will depend on their willingness to engage in kitchen workouts that also regularly require special equipment like a Japanese mandoline and electric meat slicer. Though there are a number of simpler, homier recipes like Tomato Soup with Fresh Mozzarella and Thyme-Glazed Baby Back Ribs--and the formulas themselves couldn't be more lucid--this handsome book will probably be best appreciated as an artful record of a great and wonderfully playful cooking intelligence. Replete with stunning photos, used generously to illustrate techniques, it's hard to imagine any serious cook who wouldn't want to join Richard, dig in, and learn. --Arthur Boehm Editorial Descriptions are usually submitted by the manufacturers, publishers and authors. Contact us if you are one of them, and wish to change the above description. |
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Author: Guest
`Happy in the Kitchen' by the outstanding French / American chef, Michel Richard is a book all foodies should immediately buy and read from cover to cover, twice. If you are a card-carrying cooking amateur or professional, stop wasting your time reading this review, go to the top of the page, and click yourself an order for this volume. Now! At the very worst, put this book on the top of your Christmas wish list and give it to your best, or best-heeled friend.
Mentioning Christmas reminds us that Monsieur Richard looks remarkably like old St. Nick himself, and this book is simply chocked full of goodies for the adventuresome chef. I immediately place this among the few exceptional books by leading American restaurant chefs, such as Thomas Keller's `The French Laundry Cookbook', Judy Rodgers' `The Zuni Café Cookbook', Eric Ripert's `A Return to Cooking' and Paul Bertolli's `Cooking by Hand'. I've read several `good' restaurant books, all with their fair share of useful recipes for the home kitchen. But, I've also read many restaurant cookbooks which have very little value for the average home cook, even for the serious amateur cook, since they teach relatively little which adds to our basic understanding of cooking and less to our arsenal of useful techniques. Monsieur Richard does all of these things, and he does them well.
I may even go so far as to say that Michel Richard may be America's answer to Spain's inventive Ferran Adria, if it were not for the equally inventive Thomas Keller. The thing is, however, that Richard has done better than Keller of communicating his techniques to us mere mortals in the kitchen. At the very least, he has done a much better job (witness the title of the book) of communicating the joy of inventive cooking in the kitchen. And, this is a level of inventiveness which goes far beyond the ability to cook without a recipe and come up with good dishes from a selection of ingredients found in the refrigerator on any given day.
For starters, Michel makes us aware of the value of many old, but uncommon or new but formerly expensive kitchen tools. The most surprising on this list is the home version of a deli food slicer, Michel is pointing out that there are now small, inexpensive home models which will work very well, thank you. My favorite is the old food mill which has clearly NOT been replaced by the food processor, and which does several important tasks in Richard's techniques.
The book's main section of recipes is organized very much like a graduate level text on cooking ingredients and techniques. The first main section, `Vegetables' is organized around eight (8) very important vegetables (one, the tomato, is actually a fruit), techniques used with these vegetables, and a few very interesting dishes to illustrate what you can do with these foods.
What is so immediately great about some of the techniques in this book is that they are sound, easy solutions to major cooking problems. My favorite example is the problem of poaching chicken or any other dryish low fat meat such as `the new pork'. I commonly use a venerable James Beard method for poaching chicken breasts when I need chicken meat for a salad. The paradox is that if you leave the chicken in the poaching liquid for too long or at too high a heat, it will literally dry out while surrounded with a water-based liquid. So, it will become too tough and stringy when you cut it up and mix it with the usual mayonnaise, onions, and celery. Richard's solution in retrospect is so simple and obvious, one may be ashamed that they didn't think of it themselves. The trick, used in several different recipes, is to wrap the raw meat in plastic wrap (be sure to avoid plastic which includes PVC) and poach the chicken breast `sausage' at a moderate temperature, somewhere around 160 degrees Fahrenheit.
One of Richard's other major techniques is in the use of packaged gelatin as an intermediate ingredient in forming ingredients before or during cooking, and in maintaining moisture. But wait, haven't French chefs been using gelatin for centuries in creating aspics and the like. Of course they have. What we have here is Michel Richard's putting old wine in very new, and delightfully friendly bottles, and making it all feel like great fun.
In spite of the fact that most of this book is best suited for the advanced amateur or professional (if only because there is nothing here which is quick or easy on the first few tries), it still has some remarkably well illustrated presentations of some really basic techniques. As always, I pay close attention to an author's treatment of lamb. And, lo and behold, Richard has a superbly illustrated technique for preparing my favorite lamb shoulder for braising, following a superior recipe for braised lamb shoulder or `melon'.
A third seemingly novel technique is Richard's use of `waters', the natural juices retrieved from some vegetables, most notably tomatoes. The fact is that this is not new with Richard. Paul Bertolli discusses this material at great length, but I have seen practically no mention of it in even the most complete and authoritative Italian cookbooks. What I have seen is Deborah Madison's excellent advice to use similar resources in general in stock making to make the stock match the main ingredient in a dish.
With the great quality of this book, one wonders why Richard took so long to bring it to us. But now we have it and I for one am enormously grateful. Look for a discount, but it is truly worth every penny to someone who is serious about having fun in the kitchen!
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Author: Guest
After having this book for less than 24 hours I have already learned so much. From something as simple as pureeing red beets with potatos.. why havnt I thought of doing that... to using plastic wrap as sausage casings..
I have attended culinary school, and am starting my first restaurant job on Monday... so while I am not a home cook per se... this book is very inspirational and very doable for the earnest and experienced home cook.
A word about the photograpy: Gorgeous.
Buy this cookbook, as it is definately one of the years, if not past five years best. You will treasure it.
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