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Fostering fine fast food
REVIEWS BY SYBIL PRATT
By Sara Foster Potter, $35 256 pages ISBN 9780307339997
Sauce it up!
By Pamela Sheldon Johns Andrews McMeel, $14.95 112 pages ISBN 9780740761782
Avocado Watercress Dip Makes about 2 cups 1 bunch of watercress, tough stems trimmed
Pat the watercress dry with paper towels. Put it in a blender or food processor with the avocados, yogurt, mustard, scallions, lime zest and juice, and garlic and purée until smooth. Season with salt and pepper to taste and refrigerate in an airtight container until ready to serve. Recipe from Sara Foster's Casual Cooking reprinted with permission of Clarkson Potter Publishers.
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There's a lot of advice in a lot of cookbooks about getting decent dinners on the table in breakneck time—20 minutes, 30 minutes, sometimes less. But I've come to think that home cooked "fast food" is more about attitude and approach than beating the clock. Sara Foster's latest, Casual Cooking: More Fresh Simple Recipes from Foster's Market is big on both attitude and approach and it's packed with over 100 inventive, flexible recipes that back up Sara's belief that you can "pull together delicious, satisfying meals in whatever brief time you have." Her supper-savvy ways don't follow the outmoded meat, starch, green, plus salad model; salads can be meals, so can sandwiches, quesadillas and eggs. In fact, there's a chapter on each of those categories, as well as a healthy helping of more conventional dinner dishes featuring chicken, beef, lamb, shrimp, fish and ever-popular pasta, all meant to be everyday one-dish wonders, plus a sprinkling of quick-to-fix, full-flavored extras (see recipe below). Sara garnishes the recipes with her insider's info—ways to trim time with packaged ingredients, suggestions for adding and altering ingredients, ideas for what to serve with what, and her special tips, the tricks of the trade that make you a smarter cook.
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When I picked up this cute little square book, my first thought was, "Oh, do I really need another pasta book?" But after looking through 50 Great Pasta Sauces, the answer is a resounding and unequivocal Sì. Having all these sauces together under one roof, as it were, is handy and timesaving. Pamela Sheldon Johns, an author of many cookbooks, has lived for 20 years in the glorious Tuscan hills, where she hosts Italian culinary workshops from her family home and farm. Here, she's gathered 50 nifty sauces, from basic to a bit beyond, from Italy's 20 regions, stretching from the cooler north where dairy products are a mainstay to the sun-drenched south with its long growing season and abundance of tomatoes, garlic and eggplant. Pamela divides the recipes into four groups—vegetable, dairy, meat and seafood—emphasizing the seasonal, and encouraging you to substitute, add and subtract to please your own palate. You'll find the classic favorites, Basil Pesto, Carbonara, Bolognese, Arrabiata, among them, and new sauces to expand your pasta repertoire. Arugula and pancetta sauce is fast, fresh and flavorful; ricotta sauce with grilled vegetables is specially suited to summer; hearty rosemary-lamb sauce warms in winter; and snapper and herb sauce will make you happy any time of year.