F&W's excellent features intern, Kaitlyn Goalen, recently got her hands on an advance copy of the forthcoming cookbook from Grant Achatz (an F&W Best New Chef 2002). Here's her review:

Grant Achatz and his team at Chicago's avant-garde Alinea will release the restaurant’s first cookbook on October 15th.  Simply titled Alinea Book and priced at a relatively accessible $50 (and sold at a reduced price of $30 at Amazon.com)  it contains hundreds of recipes and more than 600 photos detailing the fantastical Alinea dining experience—revealing the secret, for instance, behind dishes accented with lavender vapors.  Those who buy the book also get an exclusive first look at its online counterpart, Alinea Mosaic, with chef interviews, videos, more recipes and forums in which Achatz and his team respond directly to questions. 

Curious to know how the recipes work? Check out alineaathome.com, from blogger Carol Blymire. Blymire already cooked her way through Thomas Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook, then described her mishaps and successes in her hilarious frenchlaundryathome.com.   I, for one, can’t wait to see what hilarity ensues when she takes on Hot Potato Cold Potato, a famous Alinea dish in which Achatz suspends a tiny spear holding a small potato, a super-thin slice of black truffle, and tiny chunks  Parmesan cheese over a bowl of warm potato soup.  She launches the blog this fall.

I love cooking whole grains like wheat berries, quinoa and bulgur. But I find that after a busy day, some grains take too much time to cook. Luckily Lorna Sass, the author of Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way, has a new cookbook coming out in January called Whole Grains for Busy People that features ingredients such as quick-cooking barley and brown rice. She also offers recipes for grains and whole-grain foods I'd never thought much about before, like whole-wheat couscous, popcorn and whole-wheat tortillas. Her recipes remind me that with a little thought I can surely eat my grains every day.

BBQ guru Ray Lampe partnered with the NFL to author the just-released The NFL Gameday Cookbook. In addition to delicious recipes (many would pair well with the 32 pork dishes in F&W’s ultimate NFL package, Lampe recommends a great steak house, barbecue joint and local brew for each of the NFL team cities. Though he’s based in Florida, Lampe is a devoted Chicago Bears fan and a tailgating fanatic. Here, snippets from our recent conversation on his new book, tailgating etiquette and why he doesn't believe in using recipes from players.

On the concept of his book: “I tried to write Joy of Cooking for tailgaters. When you take on the job to be tailgate cook, you’ve obligated yourself to feed people for the day. It’s an important job.”

On Pre-Game Etiquette: “Put the food out right away. Folks are hungry, and if you don’t put food out, they’ll bug you while you’re cooking. I find people usually like a little something sweet to start. If it’s an early game, something like my sticky fingers cinnamon bread would be nice.”

On Post-Game Cooking: “You’ve been in the stadium for three hours, so you’re going to be hungry. I like to wind down afterward with something like my tropical pork chop sandwiches, which can marinate during the game. And if you stick around to eat, you don’t have to fight the traffic.”

On why he didn’t solicit recipes from players for the book: “If it’s a Green Bay Packer soup, I’m never going to make it. This book is for the fans, and they don’t want to eat a recipe from a player or team they don’t like.”
 
On exciting tailgating equipment: “Eastman Outdoors’s 22-inch carbon steel work kit with Eastman's Big Kahuna burner is bad-ass cool. It’s like a turkey fryer with huge BTUs, and the thing gets really hot. I’d use it to make my parking-lot pork fried rice recipe.

Coleman’s insta-start grill/stove is like a mini toaster oven and can fit a 9x13-inch pan. It runs on a one-pound propane cylinder and is freestanding, so you can actually bake in the parking lot.”

© Chronicle Books
The NFL Gameday Cookbook

Anytime I get to eat at home when I'M not cooking is a huge treat, not to mention extremely rare. So naturally, when my 11-year-old daughter, Pia, called me at work in the kitchen to inform me that dinner would be ready at 6:00, I was more than a bit excited. To sweeten the deal even further, she told me that afterward, my 6-year-old son, Malcolm, would be performing a puppet show. How much better could it get? I felt like queen for a day!

Now for dinner, which was no surprise, really, since Pia called back several times for help locating ingredients. She asked if we had basil and oregano, both of which grow in our backyard. When she wasn't quite sure what either looked like, she assured me that she knew the smells and would refer to Cooks' Ingredients.

Dinner was spaghetti with meat sauce, and it was absolutely delicious—a thick, meaty and flavorful ragù—and the pasta was cooked perfectly. (She needed a little help from her dad draining it.) A hit of pecorino cheese and crushed pepper flakes finished it off nicely. No matter that there were no green vegetables or salad.

The after-dinner puppet show was also a big hit. It was about four friends (finger puppets of a tiger, a horse, a bear and an abominable snowman) who went to a party and ate too much dessert. One friend, the bear, got a bellyache—a cautionary tale, or simply wishful thinking on Mal's part? Either way, it was adorable, and I savored every morsel.

Yesterday, I went to a panel on sustainable fish hosted by chef Rick Moonen of RM Seafood in Las Vegas and the Environmental Defense Fund. We received a preview of Moonen's first-ever cookbook, Fish Without a Doubt (Houghton Mifflin)—challenging fish recipes with a sustainable bent—and learned some enlightening news from Moonen and the Environmental Defense Fund's experts:

—According to a 2006 study led by marine biologist Boris Worm, if nothing is done to protect our ocean's current fish stock, ALL the wild-caught fish we see in our supermarkets will be gone in 50 years.

—Most farmed salmon should be avoided, as it takes an average of three to six pounds of wild-caught fish to feed every pound of farm-raised salmon.

—Moonen advocates eating small fish on the bottom of the food chain, like anchovies and mackerel, since they're high in healthful omega-3 fatty acids and low in environmental contaminants.

—Canned tuna lovers should opt for "light" tuna, which tends to be lower in mercury than larger albacore "white" tuna.

—While Moonen shies away from advocating any one type of fish (he wants to avoid the kind of overfishing that happened after Julia Child called monkfish the poor man's lobster), he's currently hot on cobia, also known as lemonfish, a sustainably farmed fish from Belize.

© David Loftus
Jamie Oliver's next project: home cooks.

It was definitely one of the strangest wake-up calls I’ve ever received. Jamie Oliver called at dawn, a couple of hours before our scheduled phone interview. We were supposed to discuss his newfound green thumb and the American release of his latest cookbook, Jamie at Home. But the conversation quickly turned to politics (namely food politics, American politics and clashing of the two) and Jamie’s next project, which he hopes will kick off a viral, back-to-basics home-cooking movement in the U.K.

More details—and some choice sound bites—from our chat:

-Having revolutionized school lunch programs and empowered young, aspiring chefs in the U.K., Jamie focuses on adults for his next project: “At the moment I’m filming a documentary in the north of England. It’s the story of 10 regular families and how food doesn’t have a place in their lives. I teach these 10 people a recipe each week. They each have to teach two of their mates, and them two of their mates. I don’t know what to call it really. It’s like a pay it forward, pass it on, pyramid scheme thing. Cooking shows aren’t good enough, cookbooks aren’t good enough. It has to be hand-and-hand, a community coming together. These 10 recipes can literally save the world. That’s my belief.”

-Jamie on American politics: “Your election process is much more painful than ours. Have they ruled out Hillary yet? You need to put in someone who’s inspirational, charismatic and has the ability to make really good moral decisions. It’s amazing to me that one of the most important countries in the whole wide world is also one of the most unhealthy. I haven’t heard one [candidate] talk about what they’re going do transform the nation’s health. I’m not talking about insurance, I’m talking about proactive programs.”

-Jamie on how to fix America’s school lunch program: “It’s going to take a top network, like ABC, and someone incredible, like Oprah, to gather the trust of the American public and get them to stand up. After that it’s pretty damn simple. Once you start spreading the word, sh*t happens in government. In England the government told me they had no money [to improve school lunches], then three days after my documentary came out they found $300 million out of f*&#ing nowhere. Something’s going to happen in America. And when it happens, it will be big and it will get dealt with quickly. The question is how much longer the people will have to wait.”

With Memorial Day weekend approaching, I’ve been finalizing my summer reading list. These new or soon-to-be-released books will most certainly be packed in my beach bag:

Montreal-based author Taras Grescoe chronicles his nine-month search for a humane plate of seafood and delivers a fascinatingly frightening look at the seafood industry in his new book, Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood.

Jen Lin-Liu’s forthcoming book, Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China, is part memoir, part travelogue and part cookbook (more than 20 recipes are interspersed throughout the chapters). It follows the Chinese-American as she attempts to connect to China by enrolling in cooking school, apprenticing at a noodle stall and dumpling house and interning at a chic Shanghai restaurant.

Capitalizing on the current obsession with drama-filled reality food shows on TV, Kate Jacobs has penned Comfort Food, a chick-lit-ish new novel about a female celebrity chef trying to reinvent her cooking show as she approaches her 50th birthday.

Monday was the 70th birthday of our untoppable—and unstoppable—contributing editor Paula Wolfert. Tina Ujlaki and I put together a care package for her from chefshop.com (you know how to tell if someone is quality? If you want to send them salt-packed anchovies for their 70th birthday). Then I gave Paula a call. I recently moved to Brooklyn, so we got to talking about what it was like when Paula grew up in Flatbush in the 1940s and '50s. Surrounded back then by Irish Catholics and Ashkenazi Jews, Paula says the only Protestants she knew were the Rockefellers she read about in the newspapers. Then one day she and some friends were playing in a Dutch Reformed churchyard when she met a nice Protestant girl from Red Hook named Loretta. The two became fast friends, and ended up attending Columbia together ("she took classes in computer science; I was supposed to be getting my ‘MRS’—a husband," Paula says). They roomed together, but neither could totally afford the rent, so they decided to host a weekly poker game. This was in 1956. The two would cook for the card players, and at the end of the night, they collected their percentage of the pool. "The house always wins!" Paula laughs. Just three years later, Paula would be in Morocco—with her husband—where she would gather the recipes for her first cookbook, Couscous and Other Good Food From Morocco. Nice to think it was all in a small way made possible by a little illicit gambling.

The wine bar has lately been transformed by high-profile chefs like Daniel Boulud and Luke Mangan, whose new "bars" (Bar Boulud, South Food + Wine Bar) offer such delicious food that they very nearly qualify as restaurants. In our April wine issue out now, we report on the trend and offer 9 of our favorite wine bar recipes, from Bar Boulud's exquisite Gateau Basque to South's addictive lamb chops with mint chimichurri sauce. But you don't have to stop there. Check out Tony Mantuano's forthcoming cookbook, Wine Bar Food, which he wrote with his wife Cathy, the wine expert in the family. For their forthcoming Enoteca Spiaggia in the Todd Oldham-designed Fairfax South Beach hotel in Miami, the pair (who also run Chicago's Spiaggia) traveled all over the Mediterranean coast from Lisbon to Athens (with much of Italy in between). If any of you are intimidated by the idea of pairing foods and wines, you couldn't ask for a more approachable guide than Tony – he has all the bonhomie (and the nearly identical hangdog expression) of Babe Ruth in chef's whites.

Norway’s Andreas Viestad is slowly gaining global star-chef recognition as he continues to embrace diverse new culinary projects. His likable persona on public television’s New Scandinavian Cooking with Andreas Viestad has earned him comparisons to Jamie Oliver. His adventurous travels are reminiscent of a PG–rated Anthony Bourdain. And he’s also channeling a bit of Harold McGee in The Gastronomer, his new monthly column for the Washington Post, which explores how “scientific cooking” can be applied in the home kitchen. Viestad recently took a break from filming his new PBS series Perfect Day, airing this fall, to fill me in on two of his latest projects:

1) Viestad owns a farm in Elgin, South Africa, about an hour outside of Cape Town, where his focus is crop variation. This season he had about a hundred different types of tomatoes and just planted an extensive orchard that he hopes will start to bear different types of citrus (more than 50 varieties), peaches (25 varieties), figs (10 varieties), pomegranates (12 varieties) and almonds (eight varieties) by next year.

2) Having tackled the Indian Ocean Spice Route for his most recent cookbook Where Flavor Was Born, Viestad is contemplating doing his next book on the foods and ingredients found in harsh climates and fragile ecosystems. His  latest travel plans will take him to the Arctic: Northern Canada, Alaska, Siberia and even possibly the North Pole.