texasmesquite

source:www.nynews.com

This fall's lineup of cookbooks reflects our passion for cooking real
food. Classic dishes reworked to suit the busy American lifestyle are
coming from experts in their field. Alice Waters and Martha Stewart
are helping us develop skills, while others are teaching us to add
more spice to our foods, and our lives.

Here's a look at some of the new offerings:

- Alice Waters always has been a champion of eating local, organic
and sustainable ingredients. In "The Art of Simple Food: Notes,
Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution" (Clarkson Potter,
$35), Waters created recipes that bring out the best in high-quality
ingredients with a minimum amount of time spent in the kitchen. Her
book is a great resource for using seasonal foods, with an array of
year-round options.

- "The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The Original Classics"
(Clarkson Potter, $35) is a reference book with more than 1,100
recipes published in Martha Stewart Living from 1990 to 2000. This is
certain to be the book that will be kept on the kitchen counter,
right next to your Joy of Cooking.

- "A Passion for Baking" by Marcy Goldman (Oxmoor House, $29.95)
takes cooks on a baking adventure. Goldman asks readers to consider
the book "a coffee klatch between friends who meander through many
topics of sweet things, pausing to chat and lingering over what we
bake and enjoy." Best tips: Shred cold butter with a box grater if you forget to take the butter out to soften. You also can shred apples for a quick-and-easy fruit pie. And you can shred frozen pastry dough for an easy alternative to a lattice pie topping.

- The women who wrote the popular "Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker"
series have a new book for entertaining. "Not Your Mother's Slow
Cooker Recipes for Entertaining" (Harvard Common Press, $18.95)
includes brandied chicken with hazelnuts and bittersweet chocolate-
coconut fondue. Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann said they can help you serve a great meal to friends and family, even if you're an occasional cook with little tolerance for the kitchen.

- Cook's Country asked home cooks from across the country to send in recipes that had been in their families for generations. The
publication chose five prize-winning recipes, and they put 116 more
of the best old-fashioned recipes in "America's Best Lost Recipes"
(America's Test Kitchen, $29.95). In some cases, the editors tweaked
or updated the recipes to make sure the recipes really work in
today's modern kitchen. Recipes include mile-high bologna pie, Tennessee stack cake, hot milk cake, corn oysters, nine-day slaw and beef rouladen.

- An entire book devoted to bacon is one few people can turn
down. "The Bacon Cookbook" by James Villas (Wiley, $35) has more than 150 recipes as well as chapters on the history of bacon, curing and smoking, buying and storing, cooking with bacon fat, and bacon and health, as well as a list of mail-order sources for artisanal bacon
products.

- Isabel Cruz wanted to cook simple Latin comfort food when she
opened Isabel's Cantina in a Los Angeles neighborhood. She's now
owner of five restaurants along the West Coast. Her first
book, "Isabel's Cantina" (Clarkson Potter, $27), features an array of
dishes flavored with ingredients common to both Latin and Asian
cuisines.