Ten Speed Press/Sara Remington

The New Persian Kitchen

On Sunday, May 19, Cortez in Echo Park is hosting a dinner featuring recipes from Louisa Shafia's The New Persian Kitchen from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. The menu is based on dishes from the cookbook, but the process of selecting which ones to include was collaborative. Shafia sent a list of suggestions to Cortez co-owner and chef Marta Teegen, who then added input on what would work best with what's available at the farmers market. The two share an appreciation for seasonal ingredients -- an element echoed throughout the cookbook.

"Persian cooking has always been taking the bounty of the garden and making it the center of the meal," says Shafia. "The word for paradise comes from the Persian word for a walled garden in the desert."

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Bantam

Nancy Harmon Jenkins

For many of us whose idea of good food is a bowl of olives, a plate of mezze, a huge dish of paella or Catalan soup or lamb with couscous, Nancy Harmon Jenkins' cookbook The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, or her newer The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, is one of the basic books of the kitchen. First published almost twenty years ago, Jenkins' book was groundbreaking in its simplicity, with the book's subtitle -- "A Delicious Alternative for Lifelong Health" -- a promise that recalibrating what we eat away from fast and processed food to the ingredients of Mediterranean cooking could not help but yield healthful and delicious results.

Filled with recipes that read more like Yotam Ottolenghi's idea of food than WeightWatchers, Jenkins' book meant "diet" in the basic sense of the word: what we eat, what we should eat, what we used to eat, at least if we lived along the shores of the Mediterranean, where olives and vegetables and fish and grains and wine were once basic, ordinary fare.

When the results of a 5-year study were published recently by the New England Journal of Medicine, showing that 30% of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from heart disease could be prevented in people at high risk if they switched to a Mediterranean diet, Jenkins' book came into focus again. We caught up with her by phone in Maine this week, where she was happy to talk about her book, the new findings, her upcoming book on olive oil and whether her views have changed. (They have not.) She was also pretty happy to be decamping for Italy from her native Maine, where it had been snowing for much of the last week. Buon appetito! Turn the page.

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B. Rodell

Nigella Lawson with her new cookbook, Nigellissima

As always, Nigella Lawson has a lot of balls in the air. Her new show The Taste with Anthony Bourdain, Ludo Lefebvre and Brian Malarky, has turned out to be quite a hit. At the same time, she's just released her 9th cookbook, Nigellissima, which celebrates the flavors of Italy. We sat down with her on Valentine's Day in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont to chat about cooking, cookbooks, television and typeface.

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If you're not otherwise occupied this Sunday afternoon -- which would mean what, two questionable NFL games or maybe recounting some more votes in Florida -- then maybe you should consider heading over to Domaine LA for a wine and fried chicken pairing. OK, it's really a book signing in disguise, but this is hardly any book signing. And hardly any wine and fried chicken. The fried chicken will be from Ludo Lefebvre, who will be there signing his recently published book LudoBites -- with his food truck parked conveniently nearby.

And the wine will be courtesy of New York Times wine columnist and author Eric Asimov, who won't be there in real life signing his new book, How To Love Wine, but will be there in the form of flights of wine and shipped-in autographed copies of said book.

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A. Trachta

Whole chicken from Lindy & Grundy

See also: The Martha Stewart Cooking School archives.

It's time for a confession: I have never butchered a chicken. Why? Well, mostly because raw chicken gives me the willies. I like chicken, I eat it all the time, and I don't get that same skin-crawly feeling around raw beef or pork, but raw chicken is something I've just never really been fond of handling. (Side note: I often find when I admit this to people that I'm not alone. Raise your hand if you share my irrational fears!) So anyway, in the past, when I've needed my chicken in pieces (as opposed to a whole roaster) typically I buy it that way. Shameful, I know.

Therefore, this butchering-themed episode of Martha Stewart's Cooking School was the one I was dreading the most, on one hand, but on the other, I knew it was the kick in the pants I needed to finally buck up and, well, cut up.

And I was so full of confidence until ... the feet. But more on that later. First, a lesson from Martha.

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via CalEndow

Mark Bittman

Cookbook author and New York Times columnist Mark Bittman will be coming to town on Nov. 14 to give a free lecture titled "Behind the Scenes of What We Eat" at Chinatown's California Endowment Center for Healthy Communities.

Bittman, who penned the best-selling cookbook How to Cook Everything, will discuss how to be aware of issues in food culture as a consumer, addressing topics such as fair treatment of agricultural workers, sustainable farming practices and the carbon footprint of modern food.

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Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia

Eggs Benedict with hollandaise

Squid Ink is going back to basics with Martha Stewart's Cooking School, airing every weekend through the end of the year on PBS. Join us.

See also: Martha Stewart's Cooking School: Episode 1, Eggs

Martha Stewart believes in studying the classics, she says, as images of Einstein, Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln (what?) cross the screen, and this logic, of course, applies to cooking. That's the whole basis of what she's doing with Martha Stewart's Cooking School, and it's the theme behind the sauces she chose to teach the masses (or at least we PBS-loving geeks) over the weekend. These are her classics: hollandaise, beurre blanc, béchamel and marinara, all of which work as either a dressing for entrees and vegetables, as well as for the bases of less textbook sauces.

First up, Hollandaise.

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Cooking Channel

Ching-He Huang diplomatically avoids ranking U.S. cities when it comes to best Chinese eats, but will allow that San Gabriel Valley (and New York's Flushing) gives San Francisco serious competition for what she calls tastes of home. She'll even name examples available in the neighborhood: chou doufu (stinky tofu), jianbing (fried pancake), and daoxiao mian (knife cut noodles). It's genuine praise coming from the 33-year-old host of Cooking Channel's Easy Chinese and Chinese Food Made Easy whose background alone criss-crosses the world several times over.

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from the LudoBites cookbook

For all of you who constantly check Los Angeles chef Ludo Lefebvre's Twitter feed and LudoBites website for updates on his latest pop-up, who surf the Sundance Channel and drive by Gram & Papa's to check for rooster paraphernalia, who DM the chef and his wife offers of babysitting, soon you can thumb through the LudoBites cookbook instead. Cook some of Ludo's recipes. It's even more fun than stalking!

Ecco won't publish LudoBites: Recipes and Stories From the Pop-Up Restaurants of Ludo Lefebvre until early October, but you can pre-order the book on Amazon if it'll make you feel better.

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D. Solomon

Diana Kennedy signs The Essential Cuisines of Mexico at LACMA

Diana Kennedy, the Mexican cuisine authority and cookbook author, doesn't often travel outside of Mexico, where she lives in rural Michoacán a few hours from Mexico City. For the past 65 years, Mexico has been her home, and a laboratory for her studies and writings about Mexico's regional cuisines. So her appearance last Sunday at the L.A. County Museum of Art for a brief talk and book signing presented a rare opportunity for Angelenos to meet the woman who's often called "the Julia Child of Mexican food." Like Child, Kennedy has shared her vast knowledge on a topic that had previously been both exotic and esoteric in the United States. Her latest book, Oaxaca al Gusto from 2010, is much more than a cookbook. The 450-page tome presents a study of Oaxacan cultural history illuminated by glorious photographs, many taken by Kennedy herself.

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