Learn to COOK - A Twist of the Wrist: Quick Flavorful Meals with Ingredients from Jars, Cans, Bags, and Boxes

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List Price: $29.95
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Manufacturer: Knopf
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Binding: Hardcover Dewey Decimal Number: 641.555 EAN: 9781400044078 ISBN: 1400044073 Label: Knopf Manufacturer: Knopf Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 272 Publication Date: 2007-03-27 Publisher: Knopf Release Date: 2007-03-27 Studio: Knopf
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Editorial Reviews:
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Award-winning chef Nancy Silverton has conquered the gourmet world as the original dessert chef at Spago and founder of the celebrated La Brea Bakery. Her recipes are legendary, innovative, and delicious. However, in the last few years, there has been a great shift in cooking toward the Home Meal Replacement (HMR), better known as “takeout.” It’s impossible to spend hours in the kitchen after a hard day’s work, so more people are buying prepared foods and frozen meals, compromising taste for convenience. Realizing that people’s hectic workdays don’t afford everyone the time to re-create her epicurean triumphs, Nancy has come up with the perfect solution . . .
Enter, the jar!
Compiling a list of her favorite products that come in jars—and cans, bags, and boxes—Nancy has created easy-to-follow recipes that require less than thirty minutes to prepare. With this book there’s no need to sacrifice flavor, sophistication, and taste just because you’re spending less time chopping, cleaning, cooking, or baking. Nancy’s shortcuts not only allow us to produce quick and easy meals at home, they let us bring back the pride and the joy of creating gourmet meals for our family and friends.
A Twist of the Wrist contains 137 quick and delicious gourmet recipes from salads to pasta to meats and desserts, such as:
Cumin Shrimp and Chickpea Salad with Roasted Carrots Creamy Corn Soup with Bacon and Cheddar Crostini Orzo with Dried Porcini Mushrooms, Radicchio, and Aged Balsamic Vinegar Boneless Pork Chops, with Creamy Polenta and Fennel Pollen Seared Rare Tuna with Tomato-Olive Salsa Dulce de Leche Ice Cream Pie with Hot Fudge Sauce, Cajeta, and Salty Spanish Peanuts
In addition to Nancy’s own creations, she includes recipes concocted with prepared ingredients from some of her chef friends, including Sara Foster, Tom Colicchio, Charlie Trotter, Mario Batali, Suzanne Goin, Ruth Reichl, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten.
There is also a pantry section, telling us where to get—by the Internet and mail order—the best of all things canned, jarred, and bottled.
This charming and utterly indispensable cookbook is suited for any type of cook, whether you’re an on-the-go gourmand or you just love flavorful, accessible meals at home. A Twist of the Wrist fits perfectly into today’s modern lifestyle and is a must-have for the contemporary kitchen.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:      Summary: Complicated shopping makes these recipes time consuming Comment: I'm very disappointed in this book. I enjoy the quick and tasty recipes of the Dinner Doctor and other cookbook authors like her, and I also like the more adventuresome cooking offered by chef-authored writers like Silverton herself in her earlier Campanile cookbook. This book is an annoying blend of the two. The recipes in Twist of the Wrist are complicated; the ingredient lists are long; the canned and jarred items featured are expensive, and for the most part, I cannot find them in the big city grocery stores of the major metropolitan area where I live. I'd rather cook from scratch than mail order ingredients or fruitlessly search for ingredients in stores all over town.
Customer Rating:      Summary: cookbook Comment: I'm very disappointed in this cookbook. I purchased a second one to give as a gift, but cannot give it to anyone.
Customer Rating:      Summary: A 'must' for any public lending library catering to busy - but gourmet - home cooks. Comment: Chef Nancy Silterson is the original dessert chef at Spago and founder of the La Brea Bakery, but here shifts her attention to compiling a list of favorite products that come in convenience jars, cans, and boxes, along with recipes which need less than 30 minutes to prepare. From a Cream Corn Soup with Bacon and Cheddar Crostini to Seared Lamb Chops with Ratatouille, mouth-watering color photos of finished products accompany tips on how to blend quick ingredients with fresh for optimum home cooking. A 'must' for any public lending library catering to busy - but gourmet - home cooks.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
Customer Rating:      Summary: Fails to deliver, little ingenuity Comment: This cookbook does not deliver on its premise.
Often the only "larder" ingredient is a single box of pasta, can of tuna, or a jar of roasted peppers. The olive oil or mayonnaise may also come from a jar, but that's hardly revolutionary. I would have preferred the book to include classic larder cooking, old family secrets, and novel twists on larder cooking. If you are an experienced cook, and you already know that you can make a dinner out of tuna, capers, and some olives, and this book will provide you with little insight. As in many Nancy Silverton books (I have several), many recipes have a feeling of "I just slapped this together for dinner, and I thought it was good enough to publish."
The book also fails to include any Asian, or specifically Japanese dishes, which are renowned for springing to life from simple ingredients like noodles, miso, nori, etc. Dried ingredients, such as seaweeds, mushrooms, beans, or rice and mung bean noodles are not addressed. Frozen ingredients, a secret to many kitchens, are ignored. Coconut milk and peanut butter, staples of asian and african cooking are neglected.
Mostly, this cookbook provides a suite of FRESH food, with garnishes made from jars, cans, bags and boxes.
As a point of contrast ... An entire restaurant (Quimet i Quimet, a tapas bar) has been based on conserva, or preserved food. Silverton's book does NOT cover conserva, but if you are interested, see article "Canned Heat" by Amanda Hesser, in the New York Times (September 1, 2002).
Customer Rating:      Summary: A Twist of the Wrist Comment: Really disappointing. Boiler plate in almost every recipe, almost all of which is way below the author's usual standard.
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