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Imserba Webstore - Gourmet Today: More than 1000 All-New Recipes for the Contemporary Kitchen
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List Price: $40.00
Our Price: $23.40
Your Save: $ 16.60 ( 42% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.59
EAN: 9780618610181
ISBN: 0618610189
Label: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 1024
Publication Date: 2009-09-22
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Studio: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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Editorial Reviews:
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Product Description
In no other period of our country's history has the food scene changed so rapidly. Exciting new ingredients are available everywhere, expanding our culinary horizons. Even casual meals have globe-trotting flavors. We want memorable dishes, and we want them to be healthy for our families and our planet. And with our busy schedules, we want them on the table faster than ever. A new culinary world calls for a new cookbook. Gourmet Today responds to our changing foodscape with more vegetarian recipes, more recipes for popular dishes from every corner of the world, more recipes for stunning meals ready in 30 minutes or less, more simple ways to prepare all the vegetables in the farmers' market, advice on choosing sustainable fish, chicken, and beef, tips on throwing an easy cocktail party, more recipes for flavorful techniques like grilling, and more recipes for the new ingredients flooding our market. Each of the over 1,000 recipes was selected by editor in chief Ruth Reichl, a best-selling author in her own right, who wrote the introductions to each chapter. Every recipe has been tested and cross-tested in the Gourmet test kitchen so every cook, whether a first-timer or a veteran, gets impeccable results. With menus for holidays and other seasonal occasions, an authoritative glossary of ingredients (plus mail-order sources), and hundreds of sidebars on ingredients and handy techniques from the test kitchen, Gourmet Today is the indispensable book for today's cook.
Amazon Exclusive: A Letter from Ruth Reichl Dear Amazon Reader, These days you hear a lot of gloom and doom about the state of American food. It's certainly true that if you want to focus on the negative, there's a lot to despair about. On the other hand, the opposite is also true. I wrote my first cookbook in 1971, and when I see the difference between what was available then and the food that now fills my supermarket, it makes me want to go dancing down the aisles. Back then things were so different that my editor insisted that I call for ground beef instead of lamb in a classic Greek moussaka; she said not many grocers actually sold lamb. She also worried about the recipe for handmade pasta (too esoteric) and a simple Chinese stir-fry of chicken (what on earth was a wok). She worried when I called for freshly grated Parmesan cheese (most people still used the stuff that came in the green can), fresh garlic (frowned upon in many places) and chiles (too hot, too hot, too hot). What a difference a few years make! The American supermarket has turned into an international bazaar, offering us all the best flavors of the world. Whether you want to cook the foods of Asia, the Americas, India or Europe, the ingredients are there. And that's only part of the good news; the other is that the era of mindless eating is over. Good cooks everywhere are now aware of the consequences of their choices, and when they walk through the aisles, they think about sustainability. It's a wonderful time for people who care about food. But it requires a new kind of cookbook, one that takes advantage of the great modern marketplace. Gourmet's twelve test cooks spent five years exploring all the new ingredients available in the supermarkets--from frozen pizza dough to Thai chili pastes and eggroll wrappers--figuring out the best ways to use them. They haunted farmers markets too, so we could offer advice on cooking everything from ramps to celery root. They spent time in fish markets, snapping up new offerings like Arctic char and tilapia. Then they cooked each dish again and again and again, taking out unnecessary steps and ensuring that each was absolutely foolproof. The result is more than a thousand recipes that are absolutely guaranteed to work. I couldn't live without this book. I love cooking from it. I hope you will too. Best wishes, Ruth Reichl (Photo © Brigitte Lacombe)
Recipe Excerpts from Gourmet Today • Raspberry Lime Rickey
• Grilled Ceasar Salad
• Grilled Cumin Chicken Breasts with Avocado Salsa
• Chocolate Chunk Oatmeal Coconut Cookies
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Outstanding, exceptional...a truly wonderful wonderful cookbook
Comment: Gourmet Today is a really spectacular cookbook. In the intro they (she...R Reichl and crew) state that bascially the American food culture has changed significantly ("sales of salsa now top out catsup....") as has the American lifestyle, with more demands on people's time coupled with a greater interest in eating well, and eating better, healthier food. So in Gourmet Today they strive to provide a cookbook that addresses this. I think they do a fantastic job in their effort. I have a truly huge (nearly 300) and very well used cookbook collection and I do not offer my praise of this one lightly. They have presented a broad, diverse collection of recipes with extraordinary finesse. I only buy new cookbooks that have recipes that fascinate and intrigue me and maybe go beyond what I have. Was going to pass on this one at Costco (folks, it is 21.95 there!) but started reading it and couldn't put it down. Got it home and have been enjoying it now for several weeks both to cook from and to read.
I have the first Gourmet cookbook; I like it well enough and refer to it fairly often, but in my estimation, this one is way better. I will not belabor the various sections, which are pretty standard and listed in detail by another 5* reviewer. But I will say there is something for everyone. It has great recipes for the familiar including tuna noodle casserole, a fantastic recipe for turkey meatballs w/spaghetti from Lidia Bastianich, and simply a myriad of other favorite salads, soups, sides and mains. But there are also some fantastic yet accessible recipes for that go beyond: turkey tonnato (yep, a turkey version of the infamously elegant veal tonnato, making it more affordable,healthier, easier to get than veal, and also more ecoloigical and a tad more compassionate), salmon cannelloni with lemon cream sauce (you make the fresh crespelle for the cannelloni..but it is still elegant and simple); some fantastic vegetarian recipes that are very well presented including an excellent tempeh burger, and my favorite for the moment - Afghani scallion dumplings with yogurt and meat sauces (folks, the most exotic ingredient in this charmer is wonton wrappers), mushroom tamales, roasted vegetable panzanella and much more. I could go on, but I hope this gives a sense of some of the interesting contents. There are really well-selected recipes from at least 6 major cultural groups (sorry to group some of these together but for expediency...): India, Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern, African, Euro-Mediterranean along with classic American. Great preparation tips and hints. There is an assumption that you might be entertaining or prepping ahead so there are tips for that as well as a healthy batch of both alcoholic and non-alcohlic beverage recipes; good section on grilling. Good info on sustainable seafood/fish. There are some excellent bread recipes. There are some good stories that accompany some of the recipes. Excellent collection of vegetable recipes as well as starch/pasta/grains. The desserts are awesome.
I saw somewhere where a reviewer said these recipes were 'dumbed down'. Not at all...but they are expertly conceived and presented making them seem simple or at least accessible. I will absolutely stand by that. The 'ethnic' recipes are brilliant - they have managed to make them both very accessible and authentic. There are recipes that are really simple to assemble and others that are more sophisticated but all, even the more complex ones, seem to have an ease of preparation bacause they are well thought out.
For those who live in really rural areas...might be some ingredients you can't get ( but then, even in small towns there are often "ethnic" groceries that cater to local Mexican and Asian populations...might try there for some ingredients, or mail order.). For those who simply MUST have pictures...this is not the book for you, but it does have stellar graphic design.
i will just restate that this is truly an excellently crafted collection of recipes that will not disappoint. I am amazed with how well thought out it seems to be. While I respect and use some of Mr. Bittman's cookbooks I sometimes feel like he defaults to Asian cooking style/flavors a bit too often; I do not find that at all with the Gourmet Today collection. I do find the collection is what I would call 'well-grounded' which for me means it is food the way real people eat, at home that is and not how they eat at 3 Star restaurants in Napa Valley (yes, we love French Laundry...but who cooks like that at home!).
Probably not for a timid beginning cook, but if you know and like anything about Gourmet Magazine, then this is highly recommended for you. Yes, some of these recipes can be found online or in editions of the magazine; other not. But with Gourmet Mag now sadly defunctified by Conde Nasty, this collection seems somehow even more special. Hope you get it and enjoy reading and using it as much as I have. This is going to stay on my favs shelf. There is PLENTY to explore in this masterpiece.
Customer Rating:
Summary: As the best cookbook we've bought in 10 years, it will become a standard in our kitchen
Comment: This book, discounted as it is, is an absolutely SPECTACULAR deal.
We have tried several recipes - all perfected in the experimental kitchens of the sadly defunct Gourmet Magazine - and they have all been distinctive, relatively simple in terms of technique, and written with perfect economy and clarity. Each recipe we have tested are based on newly available ingredients in common grocery stores, and they add just that little twist of new flavor and combination to many standard recipes. Unlike the rather banal standards or overly complex yupped-up offerings in New Basics (excellent but you need about 40 recondite ingredients that you may never use for anything else), these recipes are accessible to busy parents who want to offer more than chicken nuggets every other night.
I am convinced that we will plumb the depths of this masterpiece over the next ten years - adding many standards to our cooking repertoire and educating the palettes of our children. We have looked for a cook book this excellent, with a density of ideas and step-by-step instructions for even novices, for several years; indeed, we have spent a lot of money in the process! This one is it, at long last.
Warmly recommended. It is a testament to the great mag that spawned it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Gourmet Today
Comment: I read about this book in my local newspaper. I saw that Amazon's price was way less than the list price and thought my wife might like the book. I was wrong. She loves it (and I get to eat the great meals she's already prepared from the book). Highly recommended.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I liked the first one, but I like this one better
Comment: The first gourmet cookbook that was published three(?) years ago has provided me with many excellent recipes, but this one looks even better. Particularly since the magazine has been discontinued, I know that I will rely on these two cookbooks even more.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Gourmet's Delight
Comment: We have subscribed to Gourmet magazine for years, so it was a no-brainer to purchase this cookbook. I have made any number of recipes from it, and have enjoyed them tremendously - a true gustatory delight!!
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