McEwan - Great Food At Home: Family-style Recipes For Everyday

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First published 2010

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Copyright General Purpose Entertainment Inc., 2010

The photo credits on page 273 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Cover and interior design: Mary Opper
Cover photo: Nikki Leigh McKean

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

McEwan, Mark
Great food at home / Mark McEwan.

Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-670-06456-4

1. Cookery. 2. Entertaining. I. Title.

TX652.M3644 2010 641.5 C2010-902121-5

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Contents

Introduction

This is my first cookbook. Why now? you might reasonably ask. It's been more than thirty years since I walked into the Regal Constellation Hotellong gone, nowout near Toronto's Pearson Airport, applied for a job in the kitchen, and had the good fortune to fall under the guidance of a European-trained Swiss chef named Joseph Vonlanthan, who saw fit to mentor me. I promise that it didn't take the three decades since to come up with 100 good recipes for a cookbook. But it did take a lot of time and a professional journey to get to the right place and the right culinary philosophy, and to arrive at the sort of thinking that I believe is genuinely useful to share.

My cooking is different now than it was in the 1980s and 90s. I'm proud of the elegant plates I used to prepare at the Sutton Place Hotel, Pronto, North 44, and chefs venues like James Beard House, but nowadays I prefer simpler fare. Even back then I would never have pretended that I ate at home the sort of food that I cooked at work. I don't want or expect you to either. Eating well but unpretentiously at home is what this book is all about.

There are plenty of cookbooks out there chock full of studio-lit culinary fashion shots attached to elaborate recipes that no one ever cooks, and I never wanted to add a book to that list. Even when I first started thinking about my own cookbook, I knew that I would feel like a failure if I dropped by a friend's house and saw my book open on the coffee table, with a photo spread on display. In my mind's eye my book's success would be measured instead by the time it spent on the kitchen counter, a badly creased binding, oil-splattered pages, and an abundance of bookmarks and margin notes.

I had books like that, books I trusted, back when I was learning to cook. And what I set out to do here with my chefs and other collaborators was to create a volume like that, something for the catalogue of the well thumbeda book home cooks would look to all the time, a book full of recipes for any occasion, a book they could count on for guidance on how to make anything from the simplest chicken stock to the most exotic risotto.

On that note, the range of recipes included here is substantial. Basics aside, a lot of the recipes reflect the sort of simple, rustic fare that I like to toss up at the cottage, from a mid-summer's plate of seared perch fillets with charred tomato risotto to a wintertime venison stew with mashed potatoes for eating fireside after a day's skiing. These are the sorts of things that I hope you will enjoy family-style, sharing them out unceremoniously from big serving plates at the table.

Other dishes were plucked directly from our restaurant menus at North 44, Bymark, and One, simplified some for the home cook, but nonetheless more appropriate to the sophisticated dinner party than a casual night in the countryside. I've included some of these for two reasons. First, it's natural to want to squeeze a bit of everything into your first book. And second, there were favourites from the restaurants over the years that I just had to include. To be frank, I didn't want anyone interrupting me at the bar at One to say, How the hell could you put out a cookbook without including the halibut with the banana leaf?

Whatever you choose to cook from these pages, and from whichever end of the spectrum of difficulty, I have the same few words of advice for you. First of all, be assured that all these recipes work as written, and work wellbut all the same, your stove and your pans and your olive oil are all different from mine, so do keep in mind that even a well-written recipe is no substitute for experience and only the foolhardy cook tries out a new recipe for the first time for a dinner party.

Something else: always remember that good cooking is not a paint-by-numbers activity. When a food critic writes of a chef that his cooking has passion or soul, the compliment means this: Chef made it up as he went alongand what great instincts! You should never be afraid to exchange one ingredient for another, or use a little less of one thing and a little more of something else, according to your taste, what looks best at the market, and what you find in the fridge when it's snowing out and you don't want to trudge to the store. You should relax and have fun with it.