Aliza Green - Starting with Ingredients: 100 Delicious Ways to Make Use of What Youve Got

Fourteen years after it was first published, I have had the privilege of choosing the best of Starting with Ingredients for this new edition. These are recipes that I cook and serve to friends, colleagues, and catering customers to rave reviews and requests for seconds. The original Starting with Ingredients, published in 2006, was quite an ambitious book, bringing together my love and in-depth, hands-on knowledge of a slew of ingredients paired with the imaginative yet well-rooted and workable recipes I developed through many years of wide-ranging culinary experiences. What was true then is certainly still true today: the best ingredients, treated with the respect they deserve and prepared with care and understanding, are still the foundation of great food.

For this new, easy-to-handle, reader-friendly edition, Ive selected a diverse collection of more than one hundred of my favorite recipes including soups, salads, vegetable sides, main dishes, baked goods, and desserts. The flavors and techniques here are inspired by a world of culinary traditionsSicilian, Mexican, Spanish, Greek, Iranian, Thai, Tunisian, Tuscan, Colombian, Ashkenazi Jewish, Korean, and American regional for starters. Dotted throughout are handy chef tips and trucs (tricks) and suggestions to make it all work in the real world, where nothing is perfect, and adaptability and resourcefulness are key.

The best doesnt mean the fanciest; often the lumpy-looking misshapen vegetable or fruit is the one with the best flavor and headiest fragrance. It means using, whenever possible, ingredients that are in season and even better, purchased directly from the farmer, helping to support your local food economy at the same time. The best produce is often the least expensive because prices go down when vegetables and fruits are in season and most abundant. The best beef or lamb may be a flavorful cut from the shoulder that calls for marinating and slow-cooking rather than expensive middle meats, a less common cut like tasty tri-tip from the sirloin, or even high-quality ground lamb. The best fish will be the freshest one with translucent flesh and pinkish tone, not the priciest one, so I include a variety of possibilities for each recipe.

Sidebars, recipes, and headnotes explain how to cook fabulous, full-flavored dishes that will result in satisfying meals and great leftovers. Ive cooked professionally for more than four decades in every kind of kitchen from a dark dungeonlike warehouse, to a makeshift kitchen set-up on a table, to a perfectly appointed hotel kitchen. Ive seen food trends sprout, flourish, take over, and recederemember sun-dried tomatoes in everything, Buffalo wings on every menu, endless Caesar salads, and lots and lots of bad pizza and overcooked pasta?

Ive seen the unfortunate proliferation of food allergies and sensitivities from nearly nonexistent to sadly becoming so pervasive that I received an entire spreadsheet listing food allergies from one bride for her wedding guests. To make things easier for readers who may follow special diets, Ive indicated vegan, vegetarian, and gluten-free recipes.

The welcome mushrooming of culinary influences from exotic locales has meant that foods once considered weird or even nasty like hot chiles, fermented sauces, and pungent cilantro are now craved. Due to the wonders of online ordering, almost any ingredient, especially if non-perishable and packaged, can arrive at your kitchen overnightmaking it far easier to cook dishes calling for Yucatan achiote paste, Lebanese pomegranate molasses, Moroccan preserved lemons, Indian chickpea flour, North American black walnuts, or Italian pancetta without a special trip to the market.

Starting with Ingredients is the product of my endless culinary curiosity and years of working to perfect my recipes. The headnotes are replete with stories from my lifelong travel from Morocco to Mexico and India to Israel, working stints in kitchens from Bologna, Italy to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and from my experiences as a pioneering female chef in Philadelphia who always insisted on cooking from scratch and buying local and independent. My culinary inspiration has come from knowing my ingredients: how and where theyre grown or produced, who uses them and how, their roots in culture and history, and their individual character. The recipes come from my years as a chef and food consultant; from newspaper and magazine columns that I wrote, from the many cooking classes Ive taught, and from recipes shared by friends, generous colleagues, food producers, and gifted home cooks.

My goal in this book is to draw readers of every experience level into the kitchen to explore familiar ingredients as well as new ones and learn about them on every level from visceral to cerebral. Cooking can be as therapeutic as massage or meditation and stimulating to all five senses. Actions like paring apples, pulling off the small hard bit of muscle called the sweet meat from the side of scallops, shredding ginger thereby releasing its pleasing sharpness, dicing onions with a well-balanced sharp knife, and zesting lemons and oranges to open fragrant oil pockets all create their own rhythm. The satisfaction that follows from hands-on preparation of ingredients provides joy, and that pleasure is imbued in the dish.

There is nothing like preparing food from scratch to understand and appreciate the essence of an ingredient and its full potential. The broad range of recipes in this book can be successfully prepared by real-life home cooks working in the less than ideal kitchen that most of us have to work with. Starting with Ingredients is a book for food lovers; those who cant wait to get into the kitchen, not those who cant wait to get out. In fact, the hardest thing may be to choose which dish to make!

Starting with Ingredients