About the Author:
Andrew Friedman has made a career of getting to know the heads and hearts of professional cooks and athletes. For more than ten years, Friedman has collaborated with many of the nation’s best and most revered chefs on cookbooks and other writing projects. His writing career began in 1997, when Alfred Portale, asked him to collaborate on the Gotham Bar and Grill Cookbook. The book received wide acclaim and since then he has worked as a cookbook collaborator on more than twenty projects, helping a number of the nation’s best chefs (Alfred Portale, David Waltuck, Tom Valenti, and many others) share their unique culinary viewpoints with readers. As coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Breaking Back, the memoir of American tennis star James Blake, he took readers inside an athlete’s mind during training and competition, and he does the same as a frequent contributor to Tennis Magazine. In KNIVES AT DAWN: The American Team and the Bocuse d’Or 2009, Friedman combines these two personal passions to tell the story of the premier cooking competition in the world. Friedman has contributed articles to O—The Oprah Magazine and other publications and websites. He has been profiled in The New York Daily News and New York Magazine, and interviewed for, or featured in articles in, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as on NPR’s Taste of the Nation and WOR Radio’s Food Talk. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Columbia University, and is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute’s “La Technique” cooking program. He lives in New York City with his family.
From Publishers Weekly:
Valenti (chef/owner of Ouest and another Manhattan restaurant slated to open later this year) would seem particularly well-suited to write a cookbook (with the apparently indefatigable Friedman) on homey one-pot meals. After all, he made his name with a lamb shank cooked gently until it falls off the bone (presented here with a slight variation as Moroccan-Spice Braised Lamb Shanks). There's a slackness here, however, not in the recipes themselves, which are uniformly tight and well-written, but in the dishes, which run along the very familiar lines of Classic Braised Beef Brisket and Pasta and Bean Soup. It's a shame, too, because when Valenti perks up a recipe with imagination he scores big: Turkey Soup with Stuffing Dumplings makes ingenious use of Thanksgiving leftovers, and the technique used in Olive-Oil Poached Red Snapper with Tomato and Scallions will be new to many. Valenti employs a snappy tone that sometimes slips into snide, as in a headnote for a very simple Silken Corn Puree in which he rails against writing that describes "food as a season on a plate or in a bowl." He also takes a refreshingly home cook-oriented approach in his introduction. A foreword by Mario Batali adds little, aside from informing the reader that both chefs find dish-washing odious.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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