Description:
"To me," says chef-author Jesse Ziff Cool, "restaurants as well as home kitchens should be places where food is simply as pure as it can be, and always served with love." In Your Organic Kitchen, Cool has culled 160 recipes from her 25 years in the restaurant business and from her food-loving family to share with the public. Cool is an unabashed believer in organically grown and raised foods: pure foods equal healthier bodies, she says, plus foods raised without pesticides or hormone enhancements simply taste better. Cool divides her cookbook into eight seasons, distinguishing, for example, between the first juicy strawberries of early summer and the bounty of fresh tomatoes and peppers in midsummer. Each section contains recipes for appetizers, main and side dishes, and desserts. She balances savory vegetarian options like Roasted Root Vegetables with Apples and Mustard with nonvegetarian dishes like Lamb Burgers with Caramelized Shallots. Clear and straightforward, many of the recipes contain ingredients that you will already have on hand or that are easily purchased at your local market. To help you build an organic kitchen, Cool gives suggestions on how to begin stocking your pantry with organic spices, pastas, and grains. Essays on organic farms and companies crop up throughout the book--although they read rather like product advertisements and would work better if simply represented in the list of organic food providers in the back of the book. While Your Organic Kitchen is intended for organic cooks, you can still make the recipes if you don't have all organic ingredients, and you should--these recipes are too delectable not to try. --Dana Van Nest
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