Originally a peasant dish, polenta is now showing up on the best restaurant menus in the country -- and plenty of home cooks are following the lead. Easy to prepare and marvelously versatile, polenta can be enjoyed plain and simple or embellished with a wide range of tasty fillings, spreads, and toppings. This beautifully photographed and wonderfully inspirational volume includes 40 tempting recipes for breakfast treats, appetizers, entrees, and even desserts. Complete with tips on preparing the golden grain, Polenta is a glorious celebration of one of Italy's most popular dishes.
Author or co-author of twenty-five cookbooks and editor of many others, Brigit has collaborated with some of the country's most respected chefs, including New York's Michael Psilakis and Los Angeles' Joachim Splichal. She has not only written over two thousand recipes, she's translated countless non-user-friendly restaurant recipes into language (and results) the home cook can be proud to present to friends and family.
Meat has been much on her mind of late--not that it was ever far from the forefront. The Cook & The Butcher, her eleventh book for Williams-Sonoma, has just gone into wide release after six months exclusive to Williams-Sonoma stores and online. Her collaboration with San Francisco's "King of Meats," the rock-star butcher Ryan Farr, Whole Beast Butchery, comes out hard on its heels at the end of September. And, she foresees another sausage compendium in her future. (The first, 1997's Jody Maroni's Sausage Kingdom Cookbook, remains fresh and snappy to this day.)
Another recent collaboration, Mr Sunday's Soups (with Lorraine Wallace), topped the Amazon cookbook rankings for many, many months. Michael Psilakis's book How to Roast a Lamb, earned a James Beard nomination.
A Little Back-story: During ten years living in Europe, Brigit graduated from England's Tante Marie cooking school, owned a catering business in Spain, and edited the Costa del Sol's English-language magazine. She now divides her time between California's Central Coast wine country and New York's Hudson Valley. She has a black-and-white dog named Stella and an incredibly wonderful husband named Casey (aka "Paso Wine Man"--see the viral video on Youtube!). Together, they make Brigit's life most eminently worth living.
Television:
In addition to three appearances on the Today Show and various visits to regional television news programs, she developed the concepts and wrote 90 shows for the second season of Food Network's series Too Hot Tamales. At the time, the two hosts felt they had exhausted the Mexican repertoire and wanted to feature other Latin cuisines. Brigit brought Brazil, Cuba, Peru, Spain, and Portugal into their kitchen, thus helping to launch their pan-global explorations.
Teaching, Training, Travel:
Brigit has taught cooking classes for adults and children all over the country.
She earned a B.A. in Chinese Studies from Lewis & Clark College (additional coursework at Georgetown University, Soochow University, Taipei, and Monterey Institute of International Studies).
She has traveled extensively in Italy, France, Spain, Britain, and the interior of the U.S.A. Her irreverent driving-and-eating blog, Roadfoodie, became a cult classic and was named one of the "Best Food & Drink Websites" by the Huffington Post.
