Nancy Silverton - Quick Flavorful Meals with Ingredients from Jars, Cans, Bags, and Boxes: A Cookbook

While writing this book, I felt as if I were on a mission. It came about as the result of a sort of reality check on my part, an awakening that started a few years ago, after I read a review by Amanda Hesser in the New York Times of a cookbook in which the author used packaged ingredients to create quick, easy meals. As Amanda pointed out in the review, the authors premise was to get people in and out of the kitchen as quickly as possible so they could do something enjoyablelike talk to their husbands or play with their children. Anything but cook! I happen to enjoy cooking and feeding the people I love, so I was disappointedalthough, I admit, not terribly surprisedto realize that this was where Americans heads were in terms of cooking. It was as if we were back in the fifties, before women were liberated from the kitchens that enslaved them.

The truth is that many peopleat least the majority of the people I know really dont cook much at all. Home Meal Replacement (HMR), better known as takeout, is the fastest-growing segment in the food industry. I see it in L.A., among my friends, for whom stopping by the grocery store to pick up a piece of fish that was grilled twelve hours ago or roasted vegetables that have been sitting out half the day has become the modern version of cooking at home. Weve moved so far from the kitchen that I felt that what people needed was a gentle, realistic way back.

Enter the jar! And enter A Twist of the Wrist, a collection of recipes that takes advantage of quality premade ingredients to create entres that have the same complexity of flavors and textures as ones youd be served in a restaurant. Not that a meal always needs to be complex. Theres nothing wrong with a simple grilled fresh fish fillet on a bed of arugula finished with a squeeze of lemon juice and sea salt. Its just that eating that way night after night could get a bit boring. And besides, its so easy to make it better than that nowadays.

About the same time that I read the New York Times article I had begun to take note of the abundance and variety of quality jarred, bottled, canned, and otherwise packaged goods available these days. In the past (even the not-so-distant past) canned food in America meant soggy tamales, mushy ravioli, and overcooked, tinny-tasting vegetables. And cookbooks touting jarred or other packaged products were terribly compromised because the products they used in their recipes were really substandard and, as a result, so were the dishes made with them.

But today its a whole different story. Many delicacies are imported from Europe that werent available even ten years ago: marinated tuna from Italy and Spain; marmalades, jams, and butter cookies from France; and tapenades, capers, pesto, and pasta (not to mention a million wonderful olive oils) from Italy. And things have also changed here at home, where many American chefs bottle the same pasta sauces, salsas, and dessert sauces that they serve in their popular restaurants. By using these products in the right way in these recipes I was able to layer different flavors and textures in delicious, satisfying ways without having to make every component from scratch.

I realize that for many people, preparing a dish of pasta that takes advantage of jarred tomato sauce or a chicken salad that starts with jarred mayonnaise and a rotisserie chicken or a dessert in which neither the cookie nor the ice cream is made by hand might not seem like a big deal, but for me, it was a total anomaly. Some might even say a fall from grace. I come from a school of cooking in which anything that is viewed as less than fresh from the farm; anything that is not straight from the earth; anything prepared, frozen, packaged, or preserved; anything not made with the very best ingredients, by loving hands, is considered if not downright evil, a total cop-out. Which means that in the past, if I were writing a recipe for chicken salad, the first step would be roast the chicken, followed by make the mayonnaise. For me to write a book in which a jar of mayonnaise is even mentioned is revolutionary. But its a revolution that I felt had to happen.

The goal of my so-called mission is to show people a way to create satisfying meals with a minimum of effort and time so that they will be encouraged to cook at home more often. I think theres a level of satisfaction and pride that comes from preparing a meal for yourself and your family and friends even if it is helped along by premade ingredientsthat you cant possibly get from dumping a container of food out on a plate. (The simple act of squeezing the orange juice for my youngest son, Oliver, to drink with his cereal every morning before school makes me feel like Im contributing something to his day and to him.) If I had to use packaged foods to help make everyday cooking a reality, it was a compromise I was willing to make, and to promote.

I dont want you to get the wrong idea. A Twist of the Wrist is not meant to offer an antidote to cooking from scratch. At the height of summer, when basil is at its peak and you have the time, I still recommend that you break out the mortar and pestle and make pesto the old-fashioned way. I still believe in making a tremendous effort when you have the time to entertain, and in preparing elegant, labor-intensive desserts when the inspiration hits, and, of course, that theres nothing like warming the house with slow-cooking meats on a winter weekend afternoon.

But this isnt a book for those times. Its a book for typical evenings when you get home from work, dont feel like going out, but want (or need) to have dinner on the table within an houror lessof walking in the door. It is a book for when youre hungry and even a trip to the grocery store is more than you can bear, and for dinner parties when you want to have friends over but you dont have the half a day it takes to go all out in preparing the food. Thus, dressing up a store-bought corn soup with a homemade bacon and Cheddar crouton, composing a Nioise salad using canned tuna and jarred potatoes, or serving dinner guests a dessert of jarred prunes doctored with brandy and served with premium vanilla ice cream is not the alternative to slow cooking. Its the alternative to