| In association with |
 |
|
Learn to COOK - Cat Cora's Kitchen: Favorite Meals for Family and Friends
|
List Price: $22.95
Our Price: $22.95
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Chronicle Books
|
Average Customer Rating:  
|
|
Binding: Paperback
Brand: Chronicle Books
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.59495
EAN: 9780811839983
ISBN: 0811839982
Label: Chronicle Books
Manufacturer: Chronicle Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 204
Publication Date: 2004-08-12
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Studio: Chronicle Books
|
|
|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
What could be better than family and friends gathered around a table laden with laughter and good food? The Food Network's Cat Cora is the perfect companion in the kitchen to help create meals and memories to share and remember. With recipes inspired by Cat's Greek heritage and her roots in the American South, honed by her experiences in restaurants in France and California, Cat Cora's Kitchen shines with simplicity and flavor. Organized by menu, these dishes tempt palates with specialties such as freshly baked Spana-kopita, the traditional Greek favorite of spinach, dill, and feta in pastry, and savory chicken stew, redolent of wine, garlic, and cinnamon. Desserts are also not-to-be-missed, with treats such as the Orange-Scented Almond Cookies or an unusual rolled version of Baklava. The pantry offers basic recipes for homemade stock and a resource section gives suggestions for finding unusual ingredients. With gorgeous photographs throughout, these approachable, elegant dishes will leave everyone asking for the recipe.
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: Beware of errors
Comment: I have made a couple of recipes from this book, including the Koto Kapama, which was very good. But I just made the olive oil cake (p. 22) and the recipe is completely WRONG. It calls for 1/2 cup of flour, which results in something that doesn't qualify even remotely as cake, and does qualify as completely inedible and disgusting (sad to say, as I just wasted about $15 worth of ingredients and my even more precious time on this mess). The same recipe on the Food Network site, which also features Cora, calls for 2 cups of flour--a bit different! I just wish I could find a way to stop others from making the same mistake; in any case, it certainly saps my desire to cook ever again from this book, which also has a rather confusing layout and organizational style. Too bad--I wanted to support a fellow Greek.
Customer Rating:
Summary: creative and easy
Comment: I like the style of the book with clear information and tips. I also appreciated the great
photos and personal tid bits Cat adds.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Some flaws
Comment: This is an engaging book, with some interesting variations on a number of basic dishes. It is limited in its ambition, a niche book. I have enjoyed using it as inspiration for a number of meals. However, one recipe that was appealing was a total failure. Her Olive Oil Cake turned out to be a soggy mess, dumped in its entirety. I suspect the amount of flour called for, 1/2 cup, was wrong. If I were a better baker, I might have caught that, but then I believe in giving a recipe by a distinguished chef a fair try before changing it. This one will be changed. Nevertheless, I really enjoy this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Spreading Her Wings
Comment: I am a long time fan of Postino which Cat worked for a number of years. It is inspiring to see her style beyond the Micheal Chiarello's (of Tra Vigne fame / Napa Style) which she took on at Postino. She has created an inspiring cookbook with very good recipes.
Customer Rating:
Summary: My slim but delicious Greek cookbook. Highly recommended
Comment: Cat Cora and her very southern American accent always presented something of an anomaly when she appeared on the Food Network with Rocco DiSpirito doing the Greek half of the Mediterranean food segments paired with Rocco's Italian dishes. This book fills out the explanation given on TV that Cat (Catherine) was born and raised in Jackson, Alabama to Greek parents embedded in a strongly Greek neighborhood with all that entails, as seen in detail in the movie `My Big Fat Greek Wedding'.
Cat has been working several different Food Network shows as well as several of her own California culinary shows and appearances on network talk shows for the last few years, establishing herself as a culinary celebrity staple equal to Tyler Florence and Sara Moulton, and just a notch below fast cooking diva Rachael Ray and super food nerd Alton Brown. This is her first book of recipes / memoirs and she has matched the quality of her equals, Tyler and Sara, and has made a very worthy contribution to the literature on Greek cooking.
This is not a reference book on Greek food like Diane Kochilas' `The Glorious Foods of Greece' nor is it a popular survey of Greek cooking such as the recent `The Olive and the Caper' by Susanna Hoffman. It is a personal history of Cat's food experiences in her childhood Jackson home, in the ancestral home of her family on the Aegean island of Skopelos, Greece, in her California restaurant kitchens in northern California, and in her modern home kitchen. This orientation with the liberal notes on the niceties of Greek ingredients, her experiences with famous influences such as Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, Thomas Keller, and Alice Waters, and stories of her US and Greek family members make this a more than usually entertaining personal cookbook.
Although the recipes are divided between four different venues, there is not a lot of differences between, for example, the dishes prepared in Jackson and the dishes prepared on Skopelos. They are all Greek recipes, methods, and ingredients. The Jackson recipes are the least Greek, as there is some Johnny Reb influence in some barbecue recipes, but every single recipe has both an English main name and an Greek name. Extra points to Cat for consistency in uniformly providing both names. Makes things much easier when comparing her recipes to standard works such as Kochilas' book.
The first overall impression is the omnipresence of lemon as an ingredient. It is so pervasive that I wonder why Nancy Harmon Jenkins did not feature lemons in a chapter of her excellent `The Essential Mediterranean'. Another oddity is that the recipes from the island of Skopelos contain no fish. While Cat makes no note of this fact, it confirms an observation I saw in a book on Greek island cuisine that all the good Aegean fish is carted off to Athens to be sold. Little of it is eaten at home.
Menus of dishes that typically go together organize all the recipes in the four sections. This enhances the use to which books of this type are most commonly put, as sources for themed entertaining. If you want to do a Greek dinner, this book is an excellent resource.
Cat has the usual litany of praise for fresh ingredients and the usual tips for finding them. She has some special comments on important Greek ingredients such as feta. Apparently, most non-Greek Feta is bland when compared to the real thing, and, Dutch feta seems to be especially off the mark, but Cat does not elaborate. She is also especially fussy about getting red pearl onions instead of white for several dishes.
I have made several dishes from this book and these I have found uniformly tasty and relatively easy to make. As all recipes are organized by dinner menu, there are a roughly equal number of appetizer, main dish, salad, and dessert recipes. The star of many of the dessert recipes, of course, is phyllo dough. I wish she had not mentioned that our freezer staple phyllo dough is a pale, fragile product compared to fresh phyllo, but I'll live, and may even seek out a local source for fresh phyllo.
Like the Italian cuisine, there are lots of recipes for wild and bitter greens, beans, artichokes, tomatoes, bread, shellfish, and sardines. There are also plenty of recipes for chicken and lamb, some recipes for pork and rabbit, and not many for beef, although veal stock does play an important role as a pantry item. There is a really super lamb and cheese sandwich recipe and a fair number of grilled food recipes.
This is very much the kind of cookbook you want to get if you just happen to be in an adventurous culinary mood, but don't want to spend a lot of loot. The book has just the right mix of easy recipes, showoff recipes, and unusual tastes.
Highly recommended for a good read and a very good culinary change of pace.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
