Tom Colicchio, chef/co-owner of New York’s acclaimed Gramercy Tavern, offers inspriation to cooks of any skill level with 140 simple recipes and technical tips. Realizing that his own culinary style had grown increasingly unembellished, and gambling that New York diners were experiencing that same kind of culinary fatigue (brought on by too much “fancy food”), Colicchio set out to prove that the finest food didn’t have to be the most complicated. So in March 2001 he opened a new restaurant, Craft, that offered diners simple, soulful dishes centered around single ingredients that went on to shake up many people’s ideas of what “restaurant food” should be like. Craft of Cooking leads you through Colicchio’s thought process in choosing raw materials—like what to look for in fresh fish, or how to choose the perfect mushroom—to show that good food is available to anyone with access to a good supermarket, farm stand, or gourmet grocery. The book also features “Day-in-the-Life-of-Craft” portraits, which offer a fascinating, behind-the-scenes glimpse at areas of the restaurant beyond the dining room. These segments allow you to peer into the fast-paced prep kitchen, to witness the high drama of reservations, and to get a taste of the humor and empathy necessary to serve New York’s colorful visitors and foodies. Using Tom’s straightforward and friendly voice, Craft of Cooking offers recipes suited to any purpose—from a quick family meal to a festive dinner party for twelve.

Plating exposes a chef's deepest beliefs about what food is, and how food should be. This book provides the prerequisites to cultivating a professional viewpoint, to investigate these deeper meanings, by considering the different ways a chef looks at food. The goal of the text is to provide a map of how a chef creates a plate of food by considering common questions such as: Where in the menu is this food item to be placed? And how will it be served? Structured as a design process, this book outlines how personal creativity and professional traditions fuse to create successful plated presentations of food.

This is a book of more than two dozen essays about eating, food, the meaning of coming together at the table, and the pleasures of home cooking. Greg Atkinson, chef and writer, brings the perspective of one who has harvested shellfish with fishermen in Puget Sound, walked the rows during harvest at Oregon vineyards, as well as sourced ingredients at the local big box retailer. According to Atkinson, the measure that’s most valuable is the amount of heart that brings people together for a meal--less important is the pedigree of the extra virgin olive oil that's used. In this book, Atkinson brings memorable meals to life, shares the special experience of making borscht, reveals tips and tidbits on cooking that he has garnered from foodie royalty that have passed through his kitchen, even about his aversion to fishing for trout and his pleasure in preparing them on camping trips to favorite mountain lakes. At the Kitchen Table is about the meaning of eating, the broad culinary web we enter with every bite we take, and the special sanctuary that is the home kitchen. Each essay is concluded with several recipes--more than 70 total.

We often hear that selves are no longer formed through producing material things at work, but by consuming them in leisure, leading to 'meaningless' modern lives. This important book reveals the cultural shift to be more complex, demonstrating how people in postindustrial societies strive to form meaningful and moral selves through both the consumption and production of material culture in leisure. Focusing on the material culture of food, the book explores these theoretical questions through an ethnography of those individuals for whom food is central to their self: 'foodies'. It examines what foodies do, and why they do it, through an in-depth study of their lived experiences. The book uncovers how food offers a means of shaping the self not as a consumer but as an amateur who engages in both the production and consumption of material culture and adopts a professional approach which reveals the new moralities of productive leisure in self-formation. The chapters examine a variety of practices, from fine dining and shopping to cooking and blogging, and include rare data on how people use media such as cookbooks, food television, and digital food media in their everyday life. This book is ideal for students, scholars, and anyone interested in the meaning of food in modern life.

The field of professional, academic and vocational qualifications is ever-changing. The new edition of this highly successful and practical guide provides thorough information on all developments. Fully indexed, it includes details on all university awards and over 200 career fields, their professional and accrediting bodies, levels of membership and qualifications.It acts as an one-stop guide for careers advisors, students and parents, and will also enable human resource managers to verify the qualifications of potential employees.