Product Description

America’s best-known chefs—in a stellar gathering—recall the dishes that warm their hearts in a collection benefiting one of the nation’s leading antihunger organizations.

Cooking from the Heart features one hundred of the country’s most beloved and well-known chefs, who each contribute not only a superb dish—whether a holiday tradition, comfort food, cross-cultural innovation, or family classic—but also the story of why that dish means the world to them. The chefs speak as parents, children, partners, neighbors, husbands, wives, and friends. Cooking from the Heart is a joyous collection of recipes in which love is always the first ingredient. Here are Ming Tsai and his family wrapping potstickers on the Ping-Pong table in his grandmother’s house; Gale Gand and her son making pie crusts with a rolling pin that’s been in their family for five generations; Seth Bixby Daugherty improvising a mulberry crisp on a cross-country peace march; Marcel Desaulnier recounting the Christmas his mother sent him her chocolates and cookies while he was serving in Vietnam; and Lidia Bastianich crushing herbs under her infant grandchildren’s noses to awaken their senses to rich aromas. From Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s grandmother’s Alsatian Lamb Stew to Rick Bayless’s hometown Orchard Peach Cobbler, from Sara Moulton's Grilled Fish discovered on a magical trip to Greece to Emeril Lagasse’s favorite Bolognese Sauce for Sundays with friends, Cooking from the Heart presents an inexhaustible range of recipes you’ll want to make your own. These are stories to cherish; they will remind you of—and even inspire—your own family’s mealtimes and traditions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1875001 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-09
• Released on: 2003-09-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Amazon.com
Since 1984 Share Our Strength has targeted hunger in this country. Of the 33 million people who live with hunger in the US, 40% are children. Most of the adults have jobs. So there's more to Share Our Strength events like Taste of the Nation or the Great American Bake Sale than chefs and food enthusiasts meeting to display taste treats and stuff their faces. This ongoing process raises the millions of dollars that Share Our Strength delivers to programs that combat hunger. Cooking from the Heart is another element is this grand scheme. One hundred chefs have contributed some recipes and their own reminiscences about food in their life. Chefs are often distant, mysterious beings, some with celebrity status, many simply working out their creative demons back in the kitchen. Cooking from the Heart is an outsider's opportunity to peek inside, to get as close as family--if only for a page or two, a recipe or two. But it is telling and worthwhile.

This is a warm book. Heartfelt warmth. And the recipes are terrific for being so personal. Seattle's Tom Douglas, for example, provides Shrimp Remoulade on Molasses Toasts, while explaining that his mother's idea of spicy seasoning was a silver-dollar size piece of onion cooking in a pot roast for 12. Chpaters covering "Starters," "Brunch and Lighter Dishes," "Soups and Stews," "Pasta and Rice," "Seafood, Poultry, Meats," "Salads and Side Dishes," "Desserts"--they are all here. So too are Seeger, Van Aiken, Schlesinger, Boulud, Traunfeld, Milliken, Waters, Bastianich, Yan, Lagasse, and many many more. Like all Share Our Strength projects, a portion of the cover price of Cooking from the Heart will end up feeding the hungry. --Schuyler Ingle

From Publishers Weekly
To support the Share Our Strength anti-hunger agency, 100 of the most notable American-based chefs have contributed recollections and recipes to this fundraising volume. A whiff or taste of food evokes love, hate, comfort or amusement as food heritage and memories are intertwined. Whether of Italian, Jewish, Chinese or any of the other cultures that form the American melting pot, a mother's or grandmother's cooking has always been a display of love. Drawing on the reminiscences of many American food notables, such as Emeril Lagasse, Alice Waters, Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller, the book offers a format for each chef to provide a dish and its corresponding memory: Gordon Hamersley brings to the table Slow Roasted Duck, in honor of his own wedding; Martin Yan's Home-style Clay Pot reminds him of China before the Cultural Revolution; and Nancy Silverton bakes Coconut Cupcakes for her third-grade son's birthday. Ranging in complexity from Lisa Schroeder's simple Moroccan Poached Halibut to Joyce Goldstein's more complex Chocolate-dipped Custard-filled clairs, many of the dishes are made up of several parts. While sometimes challenging for the inexperienced cook, these components provide additional recipes that are excellent in themselves, for example the aromatic Curried Tomatoes that goes with Susan Feniger's Bombay Chicken. The book's quality recipes will fill the stomach and inspire the inner chef, while providing a delightful read.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will benefit SHARE OUR STRENGTH, one of the nation's preeminent antihunger agencies. Its programs include Taste of the Nation® and the Great American Bake Sale, a nationwide fund-raising event that targets childhood hunger. Since 1984, Share Our Strength has distributed more than $68 million to fight hunger worldwide.