Home Cooking Around the World: A Recipe Collection

In this intriguing collection of recipes, food journalist David Ricketts offers an international riff on home cooking. Starting with basic recipes that are familiar to all American home cooks, he presents variations of these dishes as they are prepared in other cultures. Chicken noodle soup becomes Vietnam-ese Chicken Noodle Soup with Fresh Herbs; beef stew, African Beef and Kale Stew with Pumpkin Seed Sauce; and rice pudding, Asian Black Rice Pudding. The resulting dishes-from Peru, Thailand, Greece, Scandinavia, and Morocco, among other countries-are tantalizingly familiar, yet enticingly exotic, with new flavor combinations that make each recipe a delicious adventure into another cuisine.

Many of the wonderful comfort-food recipes in Home Cooking Around the World are ideally suited to our hectic pace of living. They are prepared in one pot or skillet and can often be left unattended while simmering. Beginning cooks can use the book with ease, while experienced cooks will find new variations on familiar themes to expand their repertoires.

DAVID RICKETTS has written about food for more than twenty years-first as a staff editor for Food & Wine magazine and now as a contributing food editor to Family Circle, recipe editor for McCall's, and freelance food writer. Through his culinary travels, he has explored cultures and home cooking from Vietnam to Peru and places in between.

MARK THOMAS's photographs appear regularly in magazines such as Bon AppÈtit and Better Homes & Gardens. He has photographed many books, including Sweetie Pie by Richard Simmons, Mary Engelbreight's Outdoor Entertaining and Let's Party!, and the Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook.