Showing titles in Culinary

Long considered a culinary renegade and a pioneering chef, Van Aken is an American original who chopped and charred, sweated and seared his way to cooking stardom with no formal training, but with extra helpings of energy, creativity, and faith. After landing on the deceptively breezy shores of Key West, Van Aken faced hurricanes, economic downturns, and mercurial moneymen during the decades when a restaurant could open and close faster than you can type haute cuisine.

When the world becomes overwhelming, Ella Risbridger focuses on the little things that bring her joy, like enjoying a glass of wine when cooking, FaceTiming with a friend whilst making bagels and sharing recipes that are good for the soul. One night she found herself lying on her kitchen floor, wondering if she would ever get up - and it was the thought of a chicken, of roasting it, and of eating it, that got her to her feet and made her want to be alive.

Ian Purkayastha is New York City's leading truffle importer and boasts a devoted clientele of top chefs nationwide, including Jean-Georges Vongerichten, David Chang, Sean Brock, and David Bouley. But before he was purveying the world's most expensive fungus to the country's most esteemed chefs, Ian was just a food-obsessed teenager in rural Arkansas - a misfit with a peculiar fascination for rare and exotic ingredients. The son of an Indian immigrant father and a Texan mother, Ian learned to forage for wild mushrooms from an uncle in the Ozark hills.

The heart of Generation Chef is the story of Jonah Miller, who at age 24 attempts to fulfill a lifelong dream by opening the Basque restaurant Huertas in New York City, still the high-stakes center of the restaurant business for an ambitious young chef. Miller, a rising star who has been named to the 30-Under-30 list of both Forbes and Zagat, quits his job as a sous chef, creates a business plan, lines up investors, leases a space, hires a staff, and gets ready to put his reputation and his future on the line.

A lovely discussion between Judith Jones and Alex Prud'homme on their new books, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food and My Life in France (co-authored by Prud'homme with Julia Child). As a young editor at Knopf, Jones edited Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and a relationship blossomed between her and Child. Since then, Jones has worked with a glorious lineup of cookbook writers from Madhur Jaffrey to Marion Cunningham, and has become an editorial legend.

From his first apprenticeship in France to his Michelin-starred restaurant empire, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s cuisine is inspired by the freshest ingredients, the simplest techniques, and the drive to make the ordinary perfect. It all started at home. JGV is an invitation into the kitchen with a master chef. With humor and heart, Jean-Georges looks back on success and failure, sharing stories of cooking with legendary chefs Paul Bocuse and Louis Outhier, traveling in search of new and revelatory flavors, and building menus of his own.

It all began when Pat LaFrieda’s great-grandfather Anthony LaFrieda decided to pack up and move his family from Italy to New York in search of a better life, setting up the family’s first retail butcher shop in 1922 in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Almost 100 years later, Pat LaFrieda, a fourth-generation butcher and third-generation meat purveyor, is at the helm of a family-run business that has been providing meat to customers for decades.

No Lucks Given, by Chef Brother Luck, is a powerful reflection on the most vital parts of the human experience: identity, community, and work. Packed with pain, passion, honor, and hope, No Lucks Given is an encouragement to everyone who has ever doubted themselves or God, whether they grew up on the streets or not—life is hard, but there is hope.

During a 30-year boom period in France between the end of World War II and the 1974 oil crisis, Paris was not only the world's most delicious, stylish, and exciting tourist destination; it was also the world capital of gastronomic genius and innovation. The Gourmands' Way explores the lives and writings of six Americans who chronicled the food and wine of this era, paying particular attention to their individual struggles as writers, to their life circumstances, and to their particular genius at sharing awareness of French food with mainstream American audiences.

Why do we cook? Is it just to feed ourselves and others? Or is there something more revolutionary going on? In Small Fires, Rebecca May Johnson reinvents cooking—that simple act of rolling up our sleeves, wielding a knife, spattering red hot sauce on our books—as a way of experiencing ourselves and the world. Cooking is thinking: about the liberating constraint of tying apron strings; the transformative dynamics of shared meals; the meaning of appetite and bodily pleasure; the wild subversiveness of the recipe, beyond words or control.

Issu d'une famille pauvre, avec un père violent, Anthony se retrouve très jeune à la rue. Pour autant, il refuse de tomber dans la victimisation et reste persuadé que n'importe qui peut réussir en respectant des valeurs essentielles : travail, passion, ambition, détermination, résilience. En quelques années seulement, il devient multimillionnaire, investisseur dans plus de 40 start-up et fondateur de Feed., une marque de nutrition pour tous les moments de la journée, valorisée à des dizaines de millions d'euros.

Cosmopolitan: A Bartender's Life is a memoir of the bartending life structured as a day in the life at Passerby, the bar owned and run by Toby Cecchini. It is, as well, a rich study of human nature, of the sometimes annoying, sometimes outlandish behavior of the human animal under the influence of alcohol, lust and the sheer desire to bust loose and party. It's not a pretty picture, but it's always compelling through the gimlet-eyed gaze of the author.

Hannah Selinger chronicles her rise and fall in the restaurant business, beginning with the gritty hometown pub where she fell in love with the industry and ending with her final post serving celebrities at the Hampton’s classic Nick & Tony’s. In between, listeners will join Selinger on her emotional journey as she learns the joys of fine fine dining, the allure and danger of power, and what it takes to walk away from a career you love when it no longer serves you.

In this book, Nom Wah’s owner, Wilson Tang, takes us into the hardworking kitchen of Nom Wah and emerges with 75 easy-to-make recipes: from bao to vegetables, noodles to desserts, cakes, rice rolls, chef’s specials, dumplings, and more.

In Arbitrary Stupid Goal, Tamara Shopsin takes the listener on a pointillist time-travel trip to the Greenwich Village of her bohemian 1970s childhood, a funky, tight-knit small town in the big city, long before Sex and the City tours and luxury condos.

This is the story of one woman's journey to find herself. Armed with nothing but a love of food and the words of the 20th-century food writer M.F.K. Fisher, she travels from France to Italy, then the Congo, and back again. Along the way, she goes to pastry school in Paris, eats the most perfect apricots over the Tuscan hills, watches a family of gorillas grazing deep in the Congolese brush, has her heart broken one last time on a bridge in Lyon, and, ultimately, finds a path to life and joy.

Camas Davis was at an unhappy crossroads. A longtime magazine writer and editor in the food world, she'd returned to her home state of Oregon with her boyfriend from New York City to take an appealing job at a Portland lifestyle magazine. But neither job nor boyfriend delivered on her dreams, and in the span of a year, Davis was unemployed and on her own. Disillusioned by the years she’d spent mediating the lives of others for a living, she had no idea what to do next. She did know one thing: She no longer wanted to write about the real thing; she wanted to be the real thing.

What happens when the life you’ve always dreamed of disappears in the blink of an eye? For Inez Ribustello, that day came twenty years ago on September 11th, 2001. Ribustello grew up in the small town of Tarboro, North Carolina but found her way to The Big Apple to attend culinary school in 1998. In New York City, her love for wine, food, often enjoying both at the same time, was born. She knew that working at Windows on the World - on the top floor of the Twin Towers - was where she was meant to be.

For Amy Ettinger, ice cream is not just a delicious snack but a circumstance and a time of year - frozen forever in memory. As the youngest child and only girl, ice cream embodied unstructured summers, freedom from the tyranny of her classmates, and a comforting escape from her chaotic, demanding family. Now as an adult and journalist, her love of ice cream has led to a fascinating journey to understand ice cream's evolution and enduring power, complete with insight into the surprising history behind America's early obsession with ice cream.

Born and raised in New York to a food-phobic mother and food-fanatical father, Elissa was trained early on that fancy is always best. After a childhood spent dining everywhere from Le Pavillion to La Grenouille, she devoted her life to all things gastronomical, from the rare game birds she served at elaborate dinner parties in an apartment so tiny that guests couldn’t turn around to the eight timbale molds she bought while working at Dean & DeLuca, just so she could make tall food.