Southern Heat: New Southern Cooking Latin Style Lamas, Anthony and Pratesi, Gwen

This debut cookbook from Anthony Lamas, Food Network Extreme Chef winner, and Gwen Pratesi is hot. Caliente (hot) because the 140 delicious, inspired recipes featured throughout pay homage to Chef Lamas’ Latin roots. He grew up working in his family’s restaurant and was influenced by his mother’s home cooking, based on traditional Latin and Mexican dishes. Growing up in central California and living on a farm, he learned the farm-to-table philosophy before it became a movement. Today, Lamas is known as a top chef to watch. He’s a multiple James Beard Best Chef nominee and the owner of the highly regarded restaurant Seviche, located in the emerging culinary hotspot of Louisville, Kentucky. But Southern Heat is also trendy-hot because it celebrates a culinary shift known as “new Southern” – where traditional Southern ingredients and flavors are infused with modern attitude.

If you love Southern cooking…if you have a sense of cooking adventure…and if you just want to stay on top of the latest cooking trends…then you’ll love Southern Heat. From Boston to Brooklyn, East Coast to West, city slickers to rural dwellers, there’s big love surrounding the melting pot of ingredients, methods, and seasonings of Southern dishes. But Southern Heat takes the ya’ll in Southern cooking and spices it up with contemporary, infused, and inspired flavors that reach a whole new level of deliciousness.

Southern Heat features over 140 innovative recipes including:

• Nuevo Latino Shrimp and Grits
• Apple and Bourbon Pecan Bread Pudding
• Indiana Sweet Corn and Country Ham Chowder
• Macadamia-Crusted Halibut with Passion Fruit[en]Habanero Sauce

Among the many sections nestled between Nips and Nibbles and Sweet Endings, you’ll find recipes for spiced-up Southern sides; seviches; meat and poultry; fish and seafood; plant-based dishes and preserved foods; and sauces, seasonings, and rubs. Over 150 stunning photographs set the foundation for the more than 140 recipes.

The perfect conversation starter at your next dinner party. As you display and devour the magnificent meals you’ll create from Chef Lamas’ cookbook Southern Heat, you might want to leave the book on the table, too. Southern Heat tells a story – it reflects on Lamas’ appreciation for his heritage, mentors, and local farmers…his dedication to using sustainable ingredients…and his passion for layering flavors to achieve the perfect balance between brightness, citrus, acidity, heat, and spice.

ANTHONY LAMAS has received high accolades from the culinary community and his restaurant, Seviche, has received awards and rave reviews since it opened in 2005. He is a three-time James Beard Award semi-finalist and a seasoned television personality. He has won Food Network’s “Extreme Chef”, appeared on “Moveable Feast with Fine Cooking,” and was featured in “Back Home,” a documentary by Diego Luna that explored his culinary connections to Mexico. In 2011 Lamas received a “Seafood Ambassador Award” for his continued efforts to support the use of sustainable seafood. Anthony lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

 

Co-author GWEN PRATESI is co-owner with her husband (and Southern Heat’s photographer) of On the Road Culinary Adventures, a culinary travel business. She has been featured on numerous websites and newspapers including Gourmet.com, FineCooking.com, BonAppetit.com, the LA Times, and Atlanta Journal Constitution. Pratesi is a James Beard Award finalist in journalism and chronicles her love of international travel and experience as a self-trained professional cook on Bunkycooks.com.  She resides in Smyrna, Georgia.