Customer Reviews

Your Place or Mine: Cooking at Home With Restaurant Style

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Definitely for the more experienced cook but wonderful, insightful recipes! Lots of great sauces and oils. A lot of the recipes inspired me to make up recipes of my own. Great instructions and pictures showing stages of cooking. Beautiful pictures of the food! Not the kind of food you would make after a busy day at the office but you could really show off for a special dinner or meal. Highly recommend to the adventurous.

The food has always been an important focal point in my family. My grandparents used to love gathering the entire family on festive occasions around a grand dinning table, providing all sorts of sumptuous delicious dishes that used to take hours if not days to prepare. As a child I used to look forward to those occasions. They used to spare no expense in entertaining the entire family, cousins, aunts, uncles, etc. in the grandest Turkish fashion. That tradition was embraced by my own parents who loved throwing dinner parties where every single detail was not overlooked. They used to hire waiters and additional cooks to help my mother to work her magic in the kitchen for our guests. My parents' dinner parties and my mothers cooking are legendary among their circle of friends and acquaintances; so much so that if there is a long gap between their dinner parties, their friends will remind them that it's about time that they threw another one.

Now away from all that grand dining that I have been brought up with, I am trying hard to keep the same tradition alive in a modest way in San Francisco despite our busy lives. Every night we try to prepare different menus and sit down to a dinner table with at least three course meal. It is a hard process, since we work long hours in investment banking. We like eating well but don't like spending too much time in the kitchen as my mother, grandmothers and aunts used to. Thus we look for cooking books that will guide us in that process. But Your Place or Mine: Cooking at Home with Restaurant Style by Jean-Christ Novelli which was given to me as a present and is not such a book. It is not a cookbook for a beginner; the recipes are very time consuming and detailed. This is a book for a seasoned cook such as my mother, who will use it to prepare stylish impressive food on very special occasions. It is about top notch restaurant style food preparing at home, written by one of London's most-celebrated Michelin-starred chefs. The dishes in this book are of extremely high quality and are of kind of food that you would like others to prepare it for you or you would expect to have it served at award winning top restaurants. Having said that, the book is full of well illustrated photos that will guide seasoned chefs or home cooks to prepare those exceptional dishes. I wish my cooking skills were such that I could use this book to prepare sumptuous meals each night! We prepared Confit of Rabbit Leg with Vanilla-Seed Risotto with Mandarin Brul?e after many hours in the kitchen one Saturday and the end results were such that it sent our taste buds craving for more! Absolutely fabulous cookbook if you have the skill. For less seasoned cooks such as myself, I would urge one to use The French Laundry Cookbook by Thomas Keller to prepare those exceptional dishes. Jean-Christ Novelli's stunning cookbook will be on display on our coffee table to impress our guests, it will not be a book that we shall use often. Your Place or Mine? Lets me to say, definitely yours!!

This book was the mother!