Your Place or Mine: Cooking at Home With Restaurant Style (Hardcover)

~ Jean-Christ Novelli (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For cooks who have at least the basics of kitchen craft under their apron strings, London chef and Michelin star owner Jean-Christophe Novelli offers a guide to the next level. In Your Place or Mine, Chef Novelli takes the adventuresome cook to the core of his exciting, eye-catching work, where some pretty simple techniques for enhancing flavor team up with whimsy. Any home cook who works from one end of Your Place or Mine to the other can't help but come out the other side with a better grip on the creative spark that ignites culinary fireworks. "Suivant son humeur," Chef Novelli is inclined to chant--"According to his mood." Your Place or Mine will show the home cook how to translate mood into stunning meals.

The text opens with a section called "Jean-Christophe's Box of Tricks." These include various flavor-infused oils, dressings, reductions, and powders of such ingredients as orange peel, carrots, and cèpes. There's nothing revolutionary about these tricks--they have been knocking around restaurants for the last decade. But Chef Novelli encourages the reader to take them home, stand back, and enjoy the results.

As for building a dish, Chef Novelli will take a core ingredient and build with it, like using blocks. The construction changes according to mood and whimsy. Confit of Rabbit Leg with Vanilla-Seed Risotto, for example, moves right along to the more elaborate Rabbit and Vanilla-Seed Risotto with Confit of Rabbit Leg, Rabbit Loin, and Vanilla Sauce. The initial dish demonstrates the basic technique. The second dish shows the reader how to take that technique on up to the restaurant production level.

Chapters follow a traditional path: Fish and Shellfish, Poultry and Game, Meat, Vegetables, and Desserts. Chef Novelli moves from Pan-Fried Scallops with Orange, Vanilla, and Cardamom to Broiled Lemon Sole with Bibb Lettuce and Ginger Sauce, from Roast Quail with Broiled Pancetta to Sweet Glazed Onion Stuffed with Beef Daube, from Spicy Eggplant Salad with Parmesan Crackling to Coconut Crème Brûlée. Not only will a home cook who tackles these recipes put stunning meals on the table, that same cook will also be sure to view the world of food a little differently as a result. "Suivant son humeur" may well become such a cook's catchword. --Schuyler Ingle

Product Description

Jean-Christophe Novelli is one of London's most-celebrated new Michelin-starred chefs, renowned for his striking combinations of flavors and artisitc presentations. But at the heart of many of his signature dishes are easy and accessible recipes perfectly suited to the home cook. In his restaurant kitchens Jean-Christophe adapts and combines these core recipes in a varietyof innovative ways suivant son humeur--according to his mood--adding an unusual vegetable here, a highly flavored oil or an exotic garnish there, to produce the dazzling creations for which he is so well known. Now adventuresome home cooks can re-create these spectacular effects in their own kitchens.

Your Place or Mine: Cooking at Home with Restaurant Style follows Jean-Christophe's building-block approach to cooking, offering more than 100 recipes along with dozens of ideas for variations. In sections on Fish and Shellfish, Poultry and Game, Meat, Vegetables, and Desserts, he demonstrates how to build on simple recipes to discover a range of from his repertoire of oils, powders, juices, and reductions. For example, a simple eggplant caviar becomes an integral layer of a luscious Goat Cheese Terrine with Eggplant and Red Pepper Caviar. A straightforward hearty beef daube becomes the stuffing for an elegant sweet glazd onion. Transform fresh pan-seared scallops, Fava Beans, Orange, Vanilla, and Cardamom. Or let the pure flavors of the basic recipes speak for themselves--the choice is yours, according to your mood.

Lavishly illustrated with full--color photographs of both simple and more complex dishes, including the chef's whimsical dessert sensations, along with step-by-step photographs of more intricate culinary techniques, Your Place or Mine will inspire you to experiment, improvise, and be as bold and creative as the chef himself.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Clarkson Potter (May 18, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609604368
• ISBN-13: 978-0609604366
• Product Dimensions: 11.5 x 10 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #476,690 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Your Place or Mine?, May 3, 2001

By A Customer

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.

4.0 out of 5 stars Definitely Your Place!, April 16, 2006

By	S. Ilkay "Perfectionist" (California, United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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!!

1 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Helpful and interesting, March 30, 1999

By A Customer

This book was the mother!