Product Description

This is the way we love to eat -- slowly braised, cut-with-a-spoon-tender meat resting in aromatic juices just waiting for the perfect piece of bread to come along and sop it up; a steaming bowl of chowder filled with chunks of fish and potatoes in rich broth laced with the smoky-sweet-salty flavor of bacon; a casserole that's spent some serious time in the oven as layer upon layer of creamy, soft cheese, pasta, herbs, and meat meld into a delectable whole.

And as luck would have it, this is the way celebrated New York City chef Tom Valenti loves to cook. Considered Manhattan's grandmaster of comfort food, Valenti has made this beloved cooking his trademark. In fact, on any given night, you'll find him in his wildly successful Upper West Side restaurants Ouest and 'Cesca feeding the world's A-list -- Bill Clinton, Steven Spielberg, Charlie Rose, Jerry Seinfeld, Judy Collins, Joan Didion. Because, of course, this is the food they love to eat, too.

In Tom Valenti's Soups, Stews, and One-Pot Meals, Valenti and coauthor Andrew Friedman dish up the flavor we've come to expect from a New York chef, without any of the fuss. This is food that gets better a day or two after it's made, food to make on the weekend and savor throughout a busy week, food that is perfect for dinner parties and family celebrations.

Here are 125 realistic recipes for the home cook -- most made in one pot -- and all based on the fact that the right ingredients, left alone to cook in a single vessel with virtually no intervention from the cook, steadily build glorious flavor and leave far fewer pots to clean.

The book includes "Variations" and "Tomorrow's Table," tips on ways to embellish a dish by adding vegetables or meats or provide economy by stretching it into another satisfying meal by simply adding another ingredient. Valenti and Friedman embrace what they term "cooking in the real world," encouraging home cooks to use canned stocks and beans whenever appropriate. They discuss key ingredients; offer a section on condiments, garnishes, and accompaniments; provide a list of mail-order sources; and recommend cookware (though you won't need a lot).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #102004 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Valenti (chef/owner of Ouest and another Manhattan restaurant slated to open later this year) would seem particularly well-suited to write a cookbook (with the apparently indefatigable Friedman) on homey one-pot meals. After all, he made his name with a lamb shank cooked gently until it falls off the bone (presented here with a slight variation as Moroccan-Spice Braised Lamb Shanks). There's a slackness here, however, not in the recipes themselves, which are uniformly tight and well-written, but in the dishes, which run along the very familiar lines of Classic Braised Beef Brisket and Pasta and Bean Soup. It's a shame, too, because when Valenti perks up a recipe with imagination he scores big: Turkey Soup with Stuffing Dumplings makes ingenious use of Thanksgiving leftovers, and the technique used in Olive-Oil Poached Red Snapper with Tomato and Scallions will be new to many. Valenti employs a snappy tone that sometimes slips into snide, as in a headnote for a very simple Silken Corn Puree in which he rails against writing that describes "food as a season on a plate or in a bowl." He also takes a refreshingly home cook-oriented approach in his introduction. A foreword by Mario Batali adds little, aside from informing the reader that both chefs find dish-washing odious.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
Bobby FlayChef-owner of Mesa Grill and Bolo and host of the Food Network's Boy Meets Grill and FoodNationI crave the lusty and gutsy flavors of Tom Valenti's food twelve months a year. Now, instead of trying to steal his dishes from his menu, I have them all right here in Tom Valenti's Soups, Stews, and One-Pot Meals.

Lidia BastianichChef-owner of Felidia, Becco, and Lidia's and host of Public Television's Lidia's Italian-American Kitchen and Lidia's Italian TableIf you enjoy the mellow, velvety, complex, and succulent flavors that come from one-pot meals cooked slowly, this is the book to have.

About the Author
Tom Valenti is the chef-owner of Ouest and in 2003 opened 'Cesca, his second New York City restaurant. He was named one of the country's "Ten Best Chefs" by Food & Wine magazine and deemed a "national hero" by CNN for establishing Windows of Hope, a nonprofit organization that provides aid to the families of food-service workers killed during the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001 (www.windowsofhope.org). To date, the foundation has raised more than $24 million. His website is www.ouestny.com.

Customer Reviews

Very Good Versions of Standards All Very Accessible
If I only bought cookbooks to cook from, this would be my most desirable type of book. First, because one can go to this book when you know you want an easy one pot meal instead of wading through lots of restaurant chef and Italian cuisine and French cuisine books. Second, because the recipes in this book are good.

There is little need to summarize the content of the book, as the title pretty much tells the story. You also should believe the statement on the cover that these are 'home recipes' and not the kind of recipe Tom Valenti typically makes at his restaurants, or, at the very least, he does not make them in the same way at his restaurants.

The cover says there are 125 recipes which, on the face of it is a tad thin for the $30 tariff. These are broken down by:

Hearty soups and chowders: 18 including classics such as 'pasta fazool', clam chowder, and lobster bisque
Casseroles, stews, and chilis: 28 including risottos, fish stews, sausage and cabbage stew, and venison chili
Large Cuts and catches: 29 including leg of lamb, beef brisket, pork shank, and hunter style chicken
Accompaniments and additions: 10 including pastas, rice, potatoes and polenta
Condiments and Garnishes: 9 including pesto, aioli, roasted tomatoes, and croutons

Oops, that is only 94. The remaining recipes are variations on main recipes plus recipes for chicken and beef stocks. Since almost recipe in the first three chapters has one or more variations, the effective total may be closer to 200. The bottom line is that these 94 basic recipes are worth the higher toll than you may find in some other books.

One way I recognize a superior book is when they illuminate properties in ingredients (as in Paul Bertoli's Cooking by Hand book) or make fine distinctions in technique to achieve superior results. Valenti does a double service in this book by endorsing the use of supermarket stocks for most recipes and the use of an immersion blender for most recipes, yet he makes a point of indicating which recipes would come out a lot better by using homemade stocks or a bar blender or food processor. An additional feature of several recipes is where the authors present alternatives for dishing out the meal on the day after on 'Tomorrow's Table'.

It is important to not assume this is a book on quick cooking or that you will not have more than one pot to clean at the end of the day. As the authors freely admit, there is a lot of moving stuff back and forth from the central pot used in the preparation and there may be some supplementary heating up, but most of the action takes place in the center ring. The main thrust of this statement is that there are no auxillary preparations such as making a fish stock for bouillabaisse or making a lobster shell broth to make lobster bisque. The authors do not guarantee that the techniques in this book will produce results which rival the recipes with separate steps. What they do promise is that the results will be very good with somewhat less active time and one or more fewer pots to scrub. Be warned that some of the recipes will take very long indeed. Witness the name of the recipe 'Seven Hour Lamb'.

It is no surprise that Tom Valenti is very fond of bacon, as this is a very common ingredient in the classical preparations of soups, stews, and braises. He uses it in many of the recipes and freely admits he is very fond of all things pork. One curious statement he makes in this regard are when he lumps Canadian bacon together with American / English style bacon and pancetta. The latter two are from pork belly while the former is sliced pork loin, and is very lean. Another curiosity is when he states that prociutto rather than pancetta can be substituted for bacon in a recipe. I am not sure if these are misstatements or represent a deeper understanding of these products than I have.

The foreword by Mario Batali originally attracted me to the book, as Molto Mario is my culinary hero, although the dust jacket blurbs from Mario, Bobby Flay, and Lidia Bastianich probably relate a lot more to Tom Valenti's founding the 'Windows of Hope' program than they do with the innate quality of the book. And, I rarely trust blurbs anyway, since these people are paid to offer these statements. My reward for following Mario's lead is that I find that one of his nicknames is 'beefy cheeks', due to his love of beef jowls. And here I thought he only cared about pig jowls.

If you like one pot meals with no rare or expensive ingredients (aside from a little saffron here and there) and relatively easy techniques, then this is the book for you. It may not be the very best book on the subject, but it is very good.

A great resource
In this great book, Chef Tom Valenti (named one of the country's "Ten Best Chefs" by Food & Wine magazine!) gives us 125 recipes for meals that are slow-cooked and cooked in one pot. The recipes themselves are broken down into 1) Hearty Soups and Chowders, 2) Casseroles, Stews and Chili, and 3) Large Cuts and Catches. Each recipe has a list of ingredients, a very good set of step-by-step instructions, and (often) some suggested variations on the recipe. Also, this is definitely a book that you want to read all of. The section on accompaniments and additions has some great additions as does the section on condiments and garnishes.

Overall, my wife and I found this to be a great resource. The recipes range from the exotic (Baked Sea Bass, Papillote Style with Lemon and Olives) to the familiar (Beer and Beef Stew), but all of them have the spices and ingredients necessary to make them a taste treat. So far we have made the Slow-Cooked Chicken in a Pot, the Chicken Braised with Mushrooms and the Beef Stroganoff, and we loved them all. My wife and I highly recommend this book to you.

a real-life "go to" cookbook
Several cookbooks I own are great for use maybe 3 or 4 times a year--when I have the spare time and energy. This one I seem to be pulling off the top of my refrigerator about once a week, for dinner without the extensive forethought or special trips to the market. And so far (I've tried about 6 of the recipes now), it's batting a thousand.