Your Place or Mine: Cooking at Home With Restaurant Style - Hardcover

Novelli, Jean-Christ

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0609604368 ISBN 13: 9780609604366

Publisher: Clarkson Potter, 1999

Synopsis

Jean-Christophe Novelli is one of London's most-celebrated new Michelin-starred chefs, renowned for his striking combinations of flavors and artisitc presentations.  But at the heart of many of his signature dishes are easy and accessible recipes perfectly suited to the home cook. In his restaurant kitchens Jean-Christophe adapts and combines these core recipes in a varietyof innovative ways suivant son humeur--according to his mood--adding an unusual vegetable here, a highly flavored oil or an exotic garnish there, to produce the dazzling creations for which he is so well known. Now adventuresome home cooks can re-create these spectacular effects in their own kitchens.

Your Place or Mine: Cooking at Home with Restaurant Style follows Jean-Christophe's building-block approach to cooking, offering more than 100 recipes along with dozens of ideas for variations. In sections on Fish and Shellfish, Poultry and Game, Meat, Vegetables, and Desserts, he demonstrates how to build on simple recipes to discover a range of from his repertoire of oils, powders, juices, and reductions. For example, a simple eggplant caviar becomes an integral layer of a luscious Goat Cheese Terrine with Eggplant and Red Pepper Caviar. A straightforward hearty beef daube becomes the stuffing for an elegant sweet glazd onion. Transform fresh pan-seared  scallops, Fava Beans, Orange, Vanilla, and Cardamom. Or let the pure flavors of the basic recipes speak for themselves--the choice is yours, according to your mood.

Lavishly  illustrated with  full--color photographs of both  simple and more complex dishes, including the chef's whimsical dessert  sensations, along with  step-by-step photographs of more  intricate culinary techniques, Your Place or Mine will  inspire you  to experiment,  improvise,  and be as bold and creative as the chef himself.

About this title

Review:

For cooks who have at least the basics of kitchen craft under their apron strings, London chef and Michelin star owner Jean-Christophe Novelli offers a guide to the next level. In Your Place or Mine, Chef Novelli takes the adventuresome cook to the core of his exciting, eye-catching work, where some pretty simple techniques for enhancing flavor team up with whimsy. Any home cook who works from one end of Your Place or Mine to the other can't help but come out the other side with a better grip on the creative spark that ignites culinary fireworks. "Suivant son humeur," Chef Novelli is inclined to chant--"According to his mood." Your Place or Mine will show the home cook how to translate mood into stunning meals.

The text opens with a section called "Jean-Christophe's Box of Tricks." These include various flavor-infused oils, dressings, reductions, and powders of such ingredients as orange peel, carrots, and cèpes. There's nothing revolutionary about these tricks--they have been knocking around restaurants for the last decade. But Chef Novelli encourages the reader to take them home, stand back, and enjoy the results.

As for building a dish, Chef Novelli will take a core ingredient and build with it, like using blocks. The construction changes according to mood and whimsy. Confit of Rabbit Leg with Vanilla-Seed Risotto, for example, moves right along to the more elaborate Rabbit and Vanilla-Seed Risotto with Confit of Rabbit Leg, Rabbit Loin, and Vanilla Sauce. The initial dish demonstrates the basic technique. The second dish shows the reader how to take that technique on up to the restaurant production level.

Chapters follow a traditional path: Fish and Shellfish, Poultry and Game, Meat, Vegetables, and Desserts. Chef Novelli moves from Pan-Fried Scallops with Orange, Vanilla, and Cardamom to Broiled Lemon Sole with Bibb Lettuce and Ginger Sauce, from Roast Quail with Broiled Pancetta to Sweet Glazed Onion Stuffed with Beef Daube, from Spicy Eggplant Salad with Parmesan Crackling to Coconut Crème Brûlée. Not only will a home cook who tackles these recipes put stunning meals on the table, that same cook will also be sure to view the world of food a little differently as a result. "Suivant son humeur" may well become such a cook's catchword. --Schuyler Ingle

About the Author:

Jean-Christophe Novelli opened his  first restaurant, Maison Novelli, in Clerkenwell, London,  in 1996,  gaining a Michelin star in 1997.  In 1997 he opened  two other restaurants bearing his name,  and he has recently taken over Les Saveurs restaurant in London's Mayfair district,  garnering another Michelin star almost  immediately. In 1998, he was voted AA Chef's Chef of the year in Great  Britain.

About this edition

• Publisher: Clarkson Potter
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0609604368
• ISBN 13: 9780609604366
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160