Picador Cookstr Classics

Anyone who can understand the reasoning behind basic cooking techniques can become a creative, relaxed, and confident cook. Chalmers takes the would-be chef through how the addition or substitution of a few ingredients can transform a simple dish into a culinary masterpiece. The Confident Cook, invaluable to experienced cooks as well as to beginners, demonstrates that in fact there are only four or five basic methods of cooking food. Once mastered, these basic methods can be used with many different ingredients to create countless dishes. Chalmers shows how beef stew, braised veal, coq au vin, and a vegetable casserole, for example, are similar in their preparation; how a simple beef stew can become a hearty Mulligan, a Belgian carbonnade, a French boeuf bourguingnon, or your own less classic invention. More important, she shows how you can whip up something delectable from whatever supplies you have available without being tied to a recipe with specified ingredients. About two hundred recipes are given with logical and practical directions, and some seventy-five original line drawings clearly illustrate each technique and some of the finished dishes. But, the heart of this book is the information that makes it possible to dispense altogether with recipes and to start experimenting-confidently and successfully-with your own creative cooking ideas.

A perfect gift for anyone making meals in cramped quarters, Cooking in a Small Kitchen is a four-star cooking guide that shows you how to cut loose like a cordon bleu chef in a kitchen the size of a closet. If cramped quarters have stifled your menu or limited your company for dinner, Arthur Schwartz, expansive Daily News food editor, tells you how to prepare delicious, sophisticated cuisine in a pinch for yourself and any number of guests. A devotee of the small kitchen himself ("the small size of your kitchen actually dictates a few of the basic rules of good, basic cooking and sensible easting"), Schwartz gives invaluable tips on how to juggle space and get double use from utensils, discusses ranges, extols food processors for the time and effort they save, and compiles "must have" lists of implements for the efficient kitchen. Ranging from the modest to the opulent, the 236 international recipes in Cooking in a Small Kitchen include entries for soups, pasta, salads, one-pot and skillet dinners, and desserts, in addition to unique sections on breakfast or brunch and dinners for two and four that provide complete menus and advise you on timing and what kitchenware to use. A creative gourmet, well versed in the world's great culinary traditions, Schwartz masterfully teaches readers how to manage a king's cuisine in a pauper's pantry.