What makes a good dish?
For David Tanis, it could be as simple as a bowl full of paper-thin radish topped with a dollop of crème fraiche and a sprinkling of salt and pepper.
Tanis’s latest cookbook, One Good Dish, proves that if you’re working with fresh, seasonal ingredients, they don’t need much dressing up to be delicious.
The New York City-based chef, author of A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes and Heart of the Artichoke and Other Kitchen Journeys, explained in an interview that he wanted to write a book of simple recipes that would encourage people to cook more at home.
“My main intent was to provide a collection of recipes that look good, sound good, and are easy to make. In a way, it’s the way I ordinarily cook anyways,” Tanis tells Cityline.ca.
“I didn’t want a cheffy kind of book that was too fancy for people to want to use. I want to encourage people to cook at home, but I also want to illustrate that it’s not that difficult. We all think that we don’t have time, but we do. I’d rather spend the 15, 20, 30 minutes, even an hour, putting a few things together, than ordering in, because it’s going to take that long to get there anyway, and it won’t be as good as what you can make.”
One Good Dish marks a shift for Tanis, whose previous two cookbooks focused on three-course meals instead of singular recipes. And rather than divide his book by mealtime, as many do, he structured his differently to stoke the reader’s creativity.
“We all have these ideas about what to eat at what time of day, and I know people who have always embraced the idea of breakfast at dinner – but there are a lot of things to have at breakfast besides bacon and eggs,” he notes. “A plate of vegetables can be very satisfying [in the morning].”
A chapter titled, ‘Eating with a Spoon,’ describes the “primal comfort of wrapping your hands around a warm bowl.” In it, Tanis includes recipes for ‘Very Green Fish Stew,’ ‘Spanish Garbanzo Bean Stew,’ and ‘Winter Minestrone.’ Another chapter, ‘Strike While the Iron is Hot,’ tempts with ‘Wok-Fried Lamb with Cumin,’ ‘Fragrant Sea Scallop Cakes,’ and ‘Crispy Potato Galette.’
The book’s 100 recipes are beautifully photographed and prove that simplicity is often best.
Tanis has overseen many a professional kitchen, and cooked at Alice Waters’s legendary Berkeley, Calif. restaurant Chez Panisse for nearly 20 years, so it’s no surprise market-fresh vegetables play a starring role.
“I’m a big vegetable fan. Learn to love your vegetables,” Tanis says. “You can make either one good dish or you could put a few together and have a fine feast. I like to think of it as indoor picnicking.”
Tanis encourages home cooks to use the book as a springboard for developing their own sense of adventure behind the stove.
“You don’t want a recipe to strangle you, you want it to inspire you,” he says. “Maybe you use chicken in a dish, instead of rabbit. Maybe you’ve got a particular fish dish from a favourite cookbook, but you get to the fish store and they don’t have it. Do you change gears and do something completely different, like clams? Or do you go with another kind of fish that could work in the recipe? It’s giving up control a bit, and letting your market experience guide you.”
David Tanis’s One Good Dish is available now.
Our friends at Thomas Allen & Son have shared two (2) copies of David Tanis’s One Good Dish for giveaway on Cityline.ca. For your chance to win, submit a comment below telling us your favourite ingredient to cook with. Good luck. Contest ends 04/05/2014, 11:59pm. Cityline contest rules