Product Description

At last–the first cookbook from the hugely popular star of the Food Network’s Cooking Live and the new Sara’s Secrets, whose down-to-earth style draws hundreds of thousands of viewers each week.

Sara Moulton is a professional chef by training and a gifted on-air teacher with a warm and winning style. On Cooking Live, she deftly answered viewers’ questions while juggling tricky cooking maneuvers.

She brings the same unruffled attitude to cooking for her own family, and in this very warm and personal book reveals her secrets to making easy, elegant meals day in and day out.

Filled with more than 200 recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, this book not only highlights Sara’s own culinary creativity but is also a treasury of Sara’s family favorites–from her mother, grandmother, and others. Dishes are geared largely to everyday meals, with loads of child-friendly recipes such as Ruthie’s Famous Chocolate French Toast, Carrot “Fettucine,” and Pasta Pizza. There are fabulous quick dishes–Blasted Chicken and Sauteed Pork Loin with Mustard and Grapes, and a tempting selection of vegetarian main courses. Throughout, Sara’s time-and-work-saving tips provide ingenious shortcuts.

Sophisticated yet simple dishes, such as Rosemary Scallion Crusted Rack of Lamb, make entertaining effortless. Desserts include some of Sara’s childhood favorites, among them Summer Blueberry Pudding and Vermont Apple Crisp, along with adult discoveries–Mocha Cookies and an irresistible rum-soaked holiday cake made from mixes. Michael Green of Gourmet provides a chapter on pairing wine that goes well beyond the recipes in the book.

In the tradition of blockbuster cookbooks by Emeril Lagasse, Mario Batali, and Lidia Bastianich, Sara Moulton Cooks at Home is a bestseller-in-the-making from one of America’s favorite television food personalities.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #346049 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-15
• Released on: 2002-10-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

From Amazon.com
Sara Moulton is a very, very busy woman: Food Network host and personality, executive chef for Gourmet magazine, food editor for Good Morning America, and the mother of two children. Now add to that author of her first cookbook Sara Moulton Cooks at Home, in which Moulton delivers easy-to-prepare recipes as well as plenty of timesaving tips. If you wonder where Moulton draws her inspiration from, this book is all about family, including her extended family of friends and professional associates. Her recipe introductions read like an autobiography. She shows how it is done, and then she challenges the reader to do much the same with his or her own family of recipes. Moulton's 200-some recipes break down into standard sections such as hors d'oeuvres, soups, salads, meat, pasta, and so on. But she also pays homage to vegetarian main courses, light lunches, and breakfast and brunch. Look for Gingery Chicken Broth with Wonton Ravioli, Blasted Chicken (it's about roasting at high temperature), Sautéed Pork Loin with Mustard and Grapes, Roasted Salmon with Warm Lentil Salad, Andrea's Blackberry Crumble, and her own daughter's contribution, Ruthie's Chocolate French Toast with Raspberry Sauce. Sara Moulton Cooks at Home is about real food for real people. Sometimes it's homey, sometimes it's homely, and sometimes it puts on a string of pearls. --Schuyler Ingle

From Publishers Weekly
The food media juggernaut Moulton (executive chef for Gourmet, food editor for Good Morning America, and Food Network host) has designed an all-purpose working cookbook for a wide audience. That means lots of chicken, pork and beef. Most recipes are fairly straightforward (spinach salad, chicken tarragon, parsnip puree); a few are elaborate, like the weirdly multicultural Fontina-and-Prosciutto-Stuffed Wonton Ravioli with Porcini Sauce and the Seared Sea Scallops with Celery Root Puree, Parsley Oil, and Lemon-Caper Brown Butter. The book is filled with helpful tips, anecdotes (told in the unflappable, all-American Moulton style) and photographs of Moulton as a young girl, gradually working her way up through restaurant kitchens-hard at work, eyeing the camera with a determined grin. The book does lack focus, and there isn't much that differentiates it from other homestyle cookbooks. But Moulton's thousands of fans will certainly flock to it, leaving their Joys and Fannie Farmers on the shelf for a while as they tackle such dishes as Roasted Ratatouille Crepes with Goat Cheese.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Moulton is the host of the long-running Food Network series Cooking Live with Sara Moulton, along with a newer show called Sara's Secrets, and she is food editor for Good Morning America and executive chef for Gourmet magazine as well. Her big new cookbook, with 250 of her favorite recipes, reflects the engaging, down-to-earth style that has made her shows so popular. Many of the recipes are tied to food memories, whether of her apprenticeship at a Michelin-starred restaurant in France, the first time she ate soft-shell crabs (at the 1964 World's Fair), or the "wonderful recipes Granny used to make." In fact, Moulton writes, at one point she realized that her cookbook was becoming a "kind of piecemeal autobiography," and her family and friends are an important part of it (candid snapshots are scattered throughout the text). Though many of her recipes-including her children's top choices-are easy enough for everyday cooking, she uses the others for dinner parties and other such occasions. She also includes dozens of useful tips and shortcuts, and wine recommendations and suggestions from her Gourmet colleague Michael Green round out the text. An essential purchase.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Very good recipes, especially well suited for the home cook
As the title of her book indicates, Sara Moulton's recipes are aimed precisely at what one would want to cook at home if you enjoy cooking, have the time to spend on longer procedures, and do not wish to chase after a lot of special ingredients. In a way, that sounds like a very retro scenario, predating the current popularity of fast cooking, the renaissance of gourmet cooking of the seventies and eighties, the convenience product / soup can cooking of the fifties, and the dark days of the thirties and forties. If you ignore the cosmopolitan sources of many recipes, this a refurbished look at the kind of cooking your first generation American grandmother or great grandmother did at home.

That is not to say these recipes are especially easy. Many are not. However, I have made several dishes from this book and I have gotten more personal favorites from this book than from all my Italian cookbooks combined. That doesn't mean these are the very best recipes either, but they work. When you compare Sara's recipes for chicken stock with those in 'The Best Recipe', you find many differences, but I will bet on Sara's recipe or even James Beard's recipe over the 'Best Recipe'.

Sara's book includes several things I love to find in a cookbook.

First, it's very chatty and informative about how she arrived at the recipe. Outside of the kitchens of Thomas Keller, Tom Colicchio, and Charlie Trotter, for example, there are probably very few genuinely new recipes being created even today. Almost all are variations on traditional classics. How many ways, for example have you seen tomato, basil, and mozarella combined. You will see at least five more variations on this very old theme on the Food Network over the next year.

Second, Sara revels in her roots, and she has very interesting roots to celebrate, as her mentors are three of the most distinguished culinary writers of the last fifty years, including Jean Anderson, Jacques Pepin, and the incomparable Julia Child, for which Sara was an assistant for many years.

Third, the book begins with a feature which should be manditory in all cookbooks. The notes on how to use this book give the meaning of a large number of common ingredients such as eggs meaning large eggs, flour meaning general purpose flour, and butter meaning unsalted butter.

The book includes a wider variety of dishes than you may find in restaurant or speciality cuisine cookbooks. It also contains a lot of classics such as crab cakes, fried green tomatoes, apple strudel, rice pudding and oven fried chicken. While these are classics, there is usually some twist to make them fresh.

I would recommend this as a very good second cookbook, after the 'Joy of Cooking', 'James Beard's American Cookery', or Mark Bittman's 'How to Cook Everything'. The recipes will be fresher and have greater cachet by being able to announce that they are from a celebrity chef.One caveat is that this will not teach great technique, so your third book should be the excellent books on cooking technique by Jaques Pepin or James Peterson.

Not Home Cooking 101, but she is Gourmet's Exec Chef
This is a terrific cookbook and while I feel that the title might lead some to believe that the food prepared here is more basic than what is prepared on her Food TV shows, the opposite is actually true. That said, it's important to note that these recipes, while not primer-simple are still straight-forward, well written and very user friendly.

Menu/accompaniment suggestions are included as well as wine suggestions and from my experience, they work beautifully together. The combination of Tarragon Chicken,Lemon Roasted Potatoes and Provencal Tomatoes is one of my personal favorites.

There is a great variety of recipes here that can be used for family meals as well as entertaining. A very "able" book - usable, doable, reasonable recipes. This one will not collect dust on a shelf.

Excellent cookbook
One of the things that I've always liked about Sara Moulton's shows was that the recipes used were fairly easy to follow and not too difficult to prepare. I'm not the greatest cook in the world and tend not to bother with a recipe if it's overly long or too difficult. Most of the recipes in this book are suitable for even cooks with limited skills like myself. They are not at all intimidating (much like Sara herself)and don't require ingredients that can only be found in specialty shops in New York or Chicago. The instructions are real easy to follow. The book also has a lot of nice photos. If you like Sara Moulton's style on TV, you'll enjoy this book.