Cat Cora's Kitchen: Favorite Meals for Family and Friends [Paperback]

Cat Cora (Author), Ann Krueger Spivack (Author), Maren Caruso (Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 12, 2004

What could be better than family and friends gathered around a table laden with laughter and good food? The Food Network's Cat Cora is the perfect companion in the kitchen to help create meals and memories to share and remember. With recipes inspired by Cat's Greek heritage and her roots in the American South, honed by her experiences in restaurants in France and California, Cat Cora's Kitchen shines with simplicity and flavor. Organized by menu, these dishes tempt palates with specialties such as freshly baked Spana-kopita, the traditional Greek favorite of spinach, dill, and feta in pastry, and savory chicken stew, redolent of wine, garlic, and cinnamon. Desserts are also not-to-be-missed, with treats such as the Orange-Scented Almond Cookies or an unusual rolled version of Baklava. The pantry offers basic recipes for homemade stock and a resource section gives suggestions for finding unusual ingredients. With gorgeous photographs throughout, these approachable, elegant dishes will leave everyone asking for the recipe.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Cat Cora is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America. She was Chef de Cuisine at Napa Valley's Bistro Don Giovanni and went on to be executive chef of Postino in Lafayette, California. Cat has been featured on the TV Food Network's Melting Pot and Date Plate and she writes a biweekly food column for the Contra Costa Times . She lives in Northern California.

Ann Krueger Spivack wrote the series Michael Chiarello's Napa for public television. She lives with her husband and two children in Berkeley, California.

Maren Caruso is a San Francisco-based photographer whose work also appears in The New Complete Coffee Book (0-8118-2867-0).

Product Details

• Paperback: 204 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books (August 12, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811839982
• ISBN-13: 978-0811839983
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #249,103 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #12 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Regional & International > European > Greek

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some flaws, October 1, 2005

By 

dek (Oakland, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cat Cora's Kitchen: Favorite Meals for Family and Friends (Paperback)

This is an engaging book, with some interesting variations on a number of basic dishes. It is limited in its ambition, a niche book. I have enjoyed using it as inspiration for a number of meals. However, one recipe that was appealing was a total failure. Her Olive Oil Cake turned out to be a soggy mess, dumped in its entirety. I suspect the amount of flour called for, 1/2 cup, was wrong. If I were a better baker, I might have caught that, but then I believe in giving a recipe by a distinguished chef a fair try before changing it. This one will be changed. Nevertheless, I really enjoy this book.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My slim but delicious Greek cookbook. Highly recommended, October 8, 2004

By 

B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Cat Cora's Kitchen: Favorite Meals for Family and Friends (Paperback)

Cat Cora and her very southern American accent always presented something of an anomaly when she appeared on the Food Network with Rocco DiSpirito doing the Greek half of the Mediterranean food segments paired with Rocco's Italian dishes. This book fills out the explanation given on TV that Cat (Catherine) was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi to Greek parents embedded in a strongly Greek neighborhood with all that entails, as seen in detail in the movie `My Big Fat Greek Wedding'.

Cat has been working several different Food Network shows as well as several of her own California culinary shows and appearances on network talk shows for the last few years, establishing herself as a culinary celebrity staple equal to Tyler Florence and Sara Moulton, and just a notch below fast cooking diva Rachael Ray and super food nerd Alton Brown. This is her first book of recipes / memoirs and she has matched the quality of her equals, Tyler and Sara, and has made a very worthy contribution to the literature on Greek cooking.

This is not a reference book on Greek food like Diane Kochilas' `The Glorious Foods of Greece' nor is it a popular survey of Greek cooking such as the recent `The Olive and the Caper' by Susanna Hoffman. It is a personal history of Cat's food experiences in her childhood Jackson home, in the ancestral home of her family on the Aegean island of Skopelos, Greece, in her California restaurant kitchens in northern California, and in her modern home kitchen. This orientation with the liberal notes on the niceties of Greek ingredients, her experiences with famous influences such as Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, Thomas Keller, and Alice Waters, and stories of her US and Greek family members make this a more than usually entertaining personal cookbook.

Although the recipes are divided between four different venues, there is not a lot of differences between, for example, the dishes prepared in Jackson and the dishes prepared on Skopelos. They are all Greek recipes, methods, and ingredients. The Jackson recipes are the least Greek, as there is some Johnny Reb influence in some barbecue recipes, but every single recipe has both an English main name and an Greek name. Extra points to Cat for consistency in uniformly providing both names. Makes things much easier when comparing her recipes to standard works such as Kochilas' book.

The first overall impression is the omnipresence of lemon as an ingredient. It is so pervasive that I wonder why Nancy Harmon Jenkins did not feature lemons in a chapter of her excellent `The Essential Mediterranean'. Another oddity is that the recipes from the island of Skopelos contain no fish. While Cat makes no note of this fact, it confirms an observation I saw in a book on Greek island cuisine that all the good Aegean fish is carted off to Athens to be sold. Little of it is eaten at home.

Menus of dishes that typically go together organize all the recipes in the four sections. This enhances the use to which books of this type are most commonly put, as sources for themed entertaining. If you want to do a Greek dinner, this book is an excellent resource.

Cat has the usual litany of praise for fresh ingredients and the usual tips for finding them. She has some special comments on important Greek ingredients such as feta. Apparently, most non-Greek Feta is bland when compared to the real thing, and, Dutch feta seems to be especially off the mark, but Cat does not elaborate. She is also especially fussy about getting red pearl onions instead of white for several dishes.

I have made several dishes from this book and these I have found uniformly tasty and relatively easy to make. As all recipes are organized by dinner menu, there are a roughly equal number of appetizer, main dish, salad, and dessert recipes. The star of many of the dessert recipes, of course, is phyllo dough. I wish she had not mentioned that our freezer staple phyllo dough is a pale, fragile product compared to fresh phyllo, but I'll live, and may even seek out a local source for fresh phyllo.

Like the Italian cuisine, there are lots of recipes for wild and bitter greens, beans, artichokes, tomatoes, bread, shellfish, and sardines. There are also plenty of recipes for chicken and lamb, some recipes for pork and rabbit, and not many for beef, although veal stock does play an important role as a pantry item. There is a really super lamb and cheese sandwich recipe and a fair number of grilled food recipes.

This is very much the kind of cookbook you want to get if you just happen to be in an adventurous culinary mood, but don't want to spend a lot of loot. The book has just the right mix of easy recipes, showoff recipes, and unusual tastes.

Highly recommended for a good read and a very good culinary change of pace.

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The rest of the story..., September 16, 2004

By 

Mom (Jackson, MS) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cat Cora's Kitchen: Favorite Meals for Family and Friends (Paperback)

Cathy was in the kitchen - a lot! "I'm cook'en, Mommy!" she'd exclaim as she banged spoons on the bottoms of empty pots. As a young girl, we always knew when Cathy was having breakfast - by the aroma of burning toast wafting through our house.
But that was before CIA and France and California. Now Cat really does catch the flavor of our Southern Greek family and our simple, flavorful meals. Greek-American food is good and good for you. The ingredients are fresh, inexpensive, and nourishing - especially for a growing family. Gather your family and friends and make some memories with Cathy's recipes in your kitchen; that's what life is all about, and you'll "Be cook'en" too.