Pressed for time but still searching for comfort from your kitchen? Ready When You Are offers more than 200 recipes for dishes that are easy on the cook and a joy for eaters.
Drawing on her many years of cooking for friends and family, Martha Rose Shulman shares her favorite recipes for simple yet sophisticated, hearty but not heavy one-dish meals. Most can be made hours or even days in advance and, because they are cooked and brought to the table in the same dish, serving, cleanup, and storing leftovers is no trouble at all.
Based on traditional home cooking from around the world, this is comfort food at its best—Tuscan White Beans with Sage and Sausage, Chicken Pot Pie, Vietnamese Beef and Noodle Soup, savory gratins and ragouts, creamy risottos, and “The Easiest Chocolate Mousse in the World.” Many of the most flavorful and satisfying dishes in the book are vegetarian, including Turkish Summer Vegetable Stew and Zucchini, Potato, and Artichoke Moussaka. Each of the recipes includes information about how long leftovers will keep, along with ideas and companion recipes for transforming them into something new. Yesterday’s bouillabaisse, for example, becomes today’s pilaf, while diced beef from a pot-au-feu forms the base for a delicious salad for the next day’s lunch.
Whether you’re cooking a hearty family meal, planning a dinner party, or making a simple after-work supper, Ready When You Are is filled with exceptional, undemanding recipes and strategies for getting the most satisfaction from your time in the kitchen.
Shulman (author of Mediterranean Light and Proven‡al Light, among other books) has reinvented comfort food in this excellent collection of one-dish meals. Shulman makes comfort food multiethnic and modern with dishes like Tunisian Chick Pea Breakfast Soup and Stewed Chicken with Chipotles and Prunes. Bold flavors meet innovative treatment in dishes such as Wild Mushroom Ragout & Cobbler, which includes a recipe for a topping that can be used to make a savory pie out of any stew. Even familiar dishes are revisited in new ways, like a Fast Lemon Chicken with Honey Glaze and Sweet Potatoes that both speeds up an old favorite and turns it into a full meal with the sweet potatoes roasting in the same pan. Shulman has heavily annotated each recipe regarding advance preparation, although occasionally these hints go overboard. The layout, which places such indications in a second column next to the recipe steps, is unnecessarily distracting. More helpful are easy instructions for making most of these recipes vegetarian (Shulman got her start with vegetarian cookbooks) and suggestions for leftovers, which combine to make this an eminently useful and universal book. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From the Inside Flap
Pressed for time but still searching for comfort from your kitchen? Ready When You Are offers more than 200 recipes for dishes that are easy on the cook and a joy for eaters.
Drawing on her many years of cooking for friends and family, Martha Rose Shulman shares her favorite recipes for simple yet sophisticated, hearty but not heavy one-dish meals. Most can be made hours or even days in advance and, because they are cooked and brought to the table in the same dish, serving, cleanup, and storing leftovers is no trouble at all.
Based on traditional home cooking from around the world, this is comfort food at its best—Tuscan White Beans with Sage and Sausage, Chicken Pot Pie, Vietnamese Beef and Noodle Soup, savory gratins and ragouts, creamy risottos, and "The Easiest Chocolate Mousse in the World." Many of the most flavorful and satisfying dishes in the book are vegetarian, including Turkish Summer Vegetable Stew and Zucchini, Potato, and Artichoke Moussaka. Each of the recipes includes information about how long leftovers will keep, along with ideas and companion recipes for transforming them into something new. Yesterday's bouillabaisse, for example, becomes today's pilaf, while diced beef from a pot-au-feu forms the base for a delicious salad for the next day's lunch.
Whether you're cooking a hearty family meal, planning a dinner party, or making a simple after-work supper, Ready When You Are is filled with exceptional, undemanding recipes and strategies for getting the most satisfaction from your time in the kitchen.
For over 30 years I have been writing cookbooks devoted to eating well. A pioneer in vegetarian cooking, I began my career in 1973 at the age of 23. This was long before well-educated people from upper middle class backgrounds fantasized about becoming the next Food Network star or owning a successful restaurant. I was then a student at The University of Texas at Austin. I changed my major every semester, but my passion for cooking and for giving dinner parties was unwavering. I also had an interest in health, and combined the two in my approach to food, drawing upon many of the world's cuisines to create vegetarian dishes that were much better than the standard brown rice fare of the early 1970s. Culturally I was very much a product of my era, but as far as my cooking was concerned, I have always been way ahead of my time. Once I'd had my epiphany about my calling, I developed a series of vegetarian cooking classes that I taught through the University of Texas Extension, and I opened a private "supper club" in my home. Every Thursday for two years I prepared a sit-down 3-course dinner for 30 people. My cozy "home restaurant" allowed me all the fun and few of the headaches of running a public restaurant, and at the same time gave me a place to experiment and develop a repertoire of dishes to showcase. I also learned to cook for a crowd. Soon I had a vegetarian catering service; I catered everything from breakfasts in bed and dinners for two to wedding receptions and conferences for two hundred. I had also been, all along, a writer in search of a subject. I knew that I would write a cookbook, and when The Vegetarian Feast came out in 1979, my career had evolved from cook/caterer to food writer and cookbook author. The Vegetarian Feast won a 1979 Tastemaker Award (a precursor of the prestigious James Beard Awards) for Best Book, Health and Special Diets category, and remains in print. I was never doctrinaire about vegetarian cooking; I just felt that I'd had my quota of meat by the time I reached the age of 21. I admired all good cooks, especially Julia Child, with whom I corresponded. In my first letter to her, a fan letter dated September 2, 1976 in which I described my cooking classes and my supper club, my catering service and the book I was trying to get published, I told her I was "trying to shed a new light on vegetarianism, to present it as an unmysterious, classical, and memorable cuisine. The art of cooking with an emphasis on nutrition as well as flavor is my interest, and because I am a vegetarian my cuisine is a meatless one." Two years after the publication of The Vegetarian Feast I moved to Paris, where I continued to write cookbooks and articles, revived my Supper Club, and became a much better cook. During the twelve years I lived in France I traveled extensively in the Mediterranean to research its many cuisines. My book Mediterranean Light was published in 1989, just as the benefits of the Mediterranean diet were coming to light in the United States. The region continues to be my richest source of culinary inspiration. To date, I have 27 cookbooks to my name. My work has been of a piece; not all of my books are vegetarian, but they all have a healthy focus. Several of my books have been nominated for cookbook awards and three have won them. In addition to the 1979 Tastemaker Award for The Vegetarian Feast, I've received the following nominations and prizes for my work: *2001: International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP), The Best Vegetarian Recipes, Nominee, Single Subject category *1995 James Beard Awards, Great Breads, Nominee, Bread and Pastry category *1994 Bertolli Olive Oil Award, Provençal Light, First Prize, Health and Special Diets category, Julia Child Awards *1991 International Association of Culinary Professionals, Entertaining Light, First Prize, Health and Diet category *1991 James Beard Awards, Entertaining Light, Nominee, Entertaining category *1989 Tastemaker, Mediterranean Light, Nominee, Health and Special Diets category *1988 Tastemaker, Supper Club chez Martha Rose, Nominee, Entertaining category
My cooking continues to evolve, as I hone and simplify my recipes to make them accessible to a wide range of cooks. I feel that I have played a role in improving the eating habits of many Americans, particularly since I began writing a daily recipe feature called Recipes for Health for the health section of The New York Times on the Web, in 2008. Its purpose is to empower people to cook healthy meals every day by giving them straightforward, delicious recipes. Each week's column is themed around a fresh ingredient from the market, a pantry item or a type of dish, with a new recipe posted every day. The reader response has been enthusiastic; my recipes regularly appear in the "10 Most Emailed" list on the health page. It has been extremely satisfying to know that I am reaching so many people and having an impact on their cooking.
This review is from: Ready When You Are: A Compendium of Comforting One-Dish Meals (Hardcover)
I highly recommend this book if you a) like to cook and b) are suffering from the average working parent's harried and chopped up schedule. This is not a slowcooker cookbook or a "make it in minutes" cookbook. Many of these recipes take some time investment. However, the recipes clearly state when a portion of the prep can be done ahead (sometimes even a day) and most of the recipes "hold over" well, ie. they can be eaten for 3-4 days mostly getting better with time. The author is clearly used to implementing fat shaving techniques and successfully balances a light cooking approah with GREAT ethnic influenced home cooking. Many of these recipes I would consider refined enough to serve to company. And we are not restricted to stews here. There is a great section on pies, tortas and galettes. I made the potato and greens pie last night, using the yeasted olive oil dough. I made it with swiss chard and spinach (2 pounds), there was lowfat cottage cheese in there, 2 eggs, sauteed onions and garlic and a few ounces of various cheeses. It made a whopping 10" springform pie and was delicious. I plan to try the italian brisket later this week. I have already made the white beans and sausage with sage dish that is on the cover. I have made the veal paprikash with great success, the leftovers of which I froze succesfully for a meal another time. There is a section on rices and grains, there is winter fare and summer fare. If you are in to freezer cooking or make ahead meals then you will not want to miss out on this book! I plan on looking at other cookbooks by this author...
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This review is from: Ready When You Are: A Compendium of Comforting One-Dish Meals (Hardcover)
Every summer, when our farmer's market is brimming with tiny eggplant and zucchini, I turn to Martha's recipe for Ratatouille. In this book she offers two recipes, one long-cooking and another, quicker version. Let me save you some time--the quick-cooking version is terrific. But what keeps this book on my limited-space shelf in the kitchen (as opposed to all the cooking tomes I keep in the library) is her recipe for "Vinaigrette to keep in the refrigerator". It's a revelation--sherry wine vinegar, a splash of balsamic, some Dijon mustard, a large garlic clove (sliced and impaled on a toothpick) salt, and EEOV. Simple but sublime. P.S. I get my sherry wine vinegar at Williams Sonoma. Get the real thing, made in Portugal. Good cooking is not difficult when you have professional help.
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This review is from: Ready When You Are: A Compendium of Comforting One-Dish Meals (Hardcover)
This really is a lovely, inspirational cookbook. The photographs are beautiful and the text is fun to read. The recipes all look very good. But my favorite aspect of this book are the instructions. Not only are they clear but they break down how far in advance you can make each part of the recipe. Many recipes include ideas on how to turn leftovers into another dish.
As a stay-at-home-mom I have time in the morning to cook dinner, so the recipes in this book are perfect for me. I love to cook, and the recipes are pretty challenging, which I like. This is not a fast and easy cookbook by any means, so if you don't enjoy spending hours in the kitchen don't bother with it.
So far I've made the "Soup au Pistou" which was just ok. (This is one of the reasons why I've given the book 4 stars instead of 5.) But the "Catalan chick peas with sausage" and the "Macaroni with tomato sause and goat cheese" were fabulous. The "Szwchuan braised tofu with pork and broccoli" was also very good, but this leads me to my one complaint; there's a whole section on stir frys and risotto. I'm not sure why these last minute kind of dishes are included in a book dedicated to advance cooking.
Overall this is a beautiful book filled with wonderful looking recipes. If you like to cook and you have a bit of time on your hands throughout the day, then you will like this cookbook.
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