Cooking with the Seasons: A Year in my Kitchen

All about: Cooking With The Seasons: A Year In My Kitchen

By Monique Jamet Hooker and Tracie Richardson

This very personal culinary narrative cookbook is meant to help you learn to prepare meals using fresh, seasonal ingredients grown in your geographical area, whatever your level of expertise in the kitchen. It is also meant to entertain the casual reader with the experiences I shared with nine brothers and sisters while growing up on my family's 17^th century chateau farm in France.

Over 200 recipes are included in the book, all inspired by the dishes and techniques I grew up with in Europe. At the same time the recipes are uniquely American because they call for a wide range of ingredients easily available to us here in the United States. The recipes are seasonally based month by month to encourage cooks to learn about and use foods grown regionally. A convenient, easy to read harvest chart individually detailing the peak times for fresh produce in five growing regions of the United States is included. Following this chart makes understanding local growing seasons easy, and helps you understand when foods shipped from different parts of the country to their neighborhood market are at their flavorful best. The recipes I've created are beautiful to look at and simple to prepare, using basic cooking techniques. They play on seasonal characteristics of taste, texture and color, and are meant to spark the imagination and encourage your own creativity in the kitchen.

Cooking With The Seasons: A Year In My Kitchen is also the story of how families can enjoy the seasonal market by celebrations at the table. Taking that little extra moment to share, whether it's during a large holiday dinner or at a picnic enjoying the best of summer's bounty, is what binds us together. There are many ways of gathering around food. Let me show you how by telling of my childhood in Brittany through stories and recipes that celebrate the best food America has to offer each season. My family's daily life may seem to speak with the voice of another era, but it is only the echo of the joy I continue to find through sharing meals today. By bringing the seasons into the kitchen I know you, too, will soon find your own joy inviting family and friends to the table.

à bientôt and Bon Appétit

Monique

Best described as a culinary pioneer, Monique Jamet Hooker is a chef, teacher and author with a lifelong enthusiasm for food and travel. Trained in Europe, she moved to New York where she worked alongside of and made lasting friendships with chefs like Jacques Pepin, Pierre Franey, Andre Soltner and Madeleine Kamman. In the early 1970's, she moved to Chicago where she has operated a successful cooking school, catering company, and restaurant and written an Award-winning book, Cooking With The Seasons, A Year In My Kitchen, with Tracie Richardson. She also hosted a TV Show called "The Seasonal Kitchen." Currently, she lives in western Wisconsin. Monique has been guiding tours since 1978. She is a member of: Les Dames d'Escoffier, The Vatel Club, IACP, AIWF and The Chicago Culinary Historian, among other associations. She wants everyone to learn how to relax with food as well as experience the joy and satisfaction of preparing meals from fresh ingredients. She travels extensively, teaching and lecturing throughout the United States.

This book would not have been possible without Tracie Richardson. Tracie joined my class as a student of professional cooking. We both realized her love for food was best served by choosing a pen over a whisk. She urged me to sit down and put this book together, and from this began a long relationship nurtured by tea on the front porch and hot cider in front of the fire. I am appreciative of her everlasting pushing and setting of deadlines, as it is because of her that this book is here for all to read and enjoy.