Valley Performing Arts Center

Jacques Pepin

Recently Jacques Pépin, the acclaimed French chef, veteran of PBS cooking shows, friend of Julia, author of many brilliant cookbooks, Dean of of Special Programs at the French Culinary Institute in New York City and general culinary living legend, took the stage at Cal State Northridge's Valley Performing Arts Center to give what turned out to be a cooking demo.

Pépin's sous chef for the evening was his daughter Claudine, herself a veteran of cooking shows with her father, and for almost two hours the pair showed the surprisingly small audience how to properly cut up vegetables and fruit and truss a chicken. The demo was as much a comedy show, with knives, as it was a tutorial in classic cooking techniques. And to say it was a joy to watch is a vast understatement, rather like saying that Pépin once made snacks for Charles de Gaulle. Which of course he did.

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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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Abrams Books

Bake It Like You Mean It

Really, April is the ideal time to Bake it Like You Mean it, as we could probably all use a little post-Spring Break malakofftorte à la raymo (chocolate ladyfinger cake, here filled with Kahlua cream) kitchen therapy.

This is the third in a recent series of pastry books from Gesine Bullock-Prado (among her previous titles is the fantastic candy book, Sugar Baby). She again gets brownie points for not referencing her celebrity sister, Sandra Bullock, on the book jacket, press release or elswhere, as so many cookbook authors with pedigreed genes seem to blare through loudspeakers today. Nor does Bullock-Prado need to, as she has more than enough talent of her own. So much, that we will forgive her/the publisher for the self help book-worthy subtitle: Gorgeous Cakes From Inside Out.

Bake It Like you Mean It is filled with the sort of entertaining-worthy cakes and pastries that will have you wishing for a rainy spring weekend. Two words: Creamsicle cheesecake.

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Ten Speed Press / Deborah Madison

Vegetable Literacy

Today's cookbook market is flooded with vegetable-focused books from every vegan, sustainable and backyard-grown perspective. But when Deborah Madison promises Vegetable Literacy, we listen.

We weren't disappointed. As with Madison's other cookbooks, Vegetable Literacy is an incredibly fresh perspective on a food category we thought we knew so well. Until now.

Full disclosure: On a quick read, we misinterpreted the subtitle, Cooking and Gardening With 12 Families From the Edible Plant Kingdom, With Over 300 Deliciously Simple Recipes. Hey, it's long. And we've seen a lot of cookbook subtitle stories about family farmers and urban farming families. A good thing we read it again.

And we saw that chive and saffron crepe recipe (whole wheat or spelt flour, a generous two pinches of saffron) that is now on our weekend brunch list -- for Easter, even, if that's your holiday, though we have a feeling this recipe is religion-neutral. Get more on the book, and the recipe, after the jump.

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Ten Speed Press

Modern Art Desserts

San Francisco pastry chef Caitlin Freeman's new baking book, Modern Art Desserts: Recipes for Cakes, Cookies, Confections and Frozen Treats based on Iconic Works of Art, is an edible reflection of the museum curator's constant challenge:

Finding the balance between popular exhibitions (and pastries) that will draw a large enough crowd to keep visitor attendance (and book sales) up, versus those without mass appeal but of equal, and at times, greater, value.

Freeman is the pastry chef for Blue Bottle Coffee, which has a satellite outpost at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. At the SFMOMA, she and her baking partners, Leah Rosenberg and Tess Wilson, craft artwork-inspired pastries for several years.

Despite the book's press release, and that Mondrian look-alike cover, this is hardly a book for "hobby bakers," or any baker looking for a literal art history interpretation. From our curatorial perspective, that makes it all the better.

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Flammarion Books

The Complete Bocuse

As Easter approaches, we repent. Late last year, The Complete Bocuse, a nearly 800-page tribute to Paul Bocuse's modern French cuisine, went straight from our desk to our permanent cookbook shelf without a weekly cookbook feature. Too many end-of-year cookbooks, too much holiday ham, too much wine.

And so this week, we bring you all three. The holy Trinity of consumption, one might argue. The Bocuse compendium is a must-have cookbook for anyone interested in tracing our (French) gastronomic roots. The authentic way to make fish à la Lyonnaise, à la crème, au buerre noisette, meunière, en croûte. You get the idea.

As Easter remains a classic ham sort of holiday, there are plenty of recipe options here beyond honey-glazed. Among them: Ham cooked in hay, which seems rather holiday appropriate, actually.

Which begs the question: what to pair with hay? Get that recipe, as well as a few ham and wine pairing tips, after the jump.

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Chronicle Books

Hand-Crafted Candy Bars

If you're looking for a Sunday kitchen project that doesn't involve corned beef and cabbage, how about a little St. Patrick's Day candy making? For that, we suggest Hand-Crafted Candy Bars by local authors Susie Norris, a reformed television exec turned former baking and pastry instructor (specializing in chocolate) at Le Cordon Bleu in Pasadena, and Susan Heeger, a lifestyle journalist and co-author with Jimmy Williams of From Seed to Skillet. A pretty solid layer of co-authors for a candy book.

Turn the page for more on the book, plus the authors' soft chocolate nougat recipe. Because really, a good chocolate nougat is all you need on any given Irish Sunday -- or any other day of the week.

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Abrams / Yvette van Boven

Home Made Summer

If the recent weather has you already craving a fantastic Home Made Summer, good news: Yvette Van Boven's latest book is almost here. Van Boven is a Dutch food stylist and illustrator who owns a popular café in Amsterdam; her husband, Oof Verschuren, is an award-winning photographer (for the Dutch version of this book, actually) -- quite a handy resume combo. Van Boven is the author of two previous cookbooks, both great: Home Made and Home Made Winter. And now, it's time for zomer ("summer" in Dutch).

Van Boven has a knack for taking basic recipes and making them more appealing, yet hardly fussy. A summer tomato salad gets a sprinkle of homemade coriander-speckled goat's milk ricotta, a classic crumb cake takes on a new look with fresh berries and a coconut crumb topping; she serves a country Italian chicken stew with generous triangles of grilled polenta amplified with goat cheese (the polenta has a little cheese stirred into it).

Revolutionary? Perhaps not. But a revolution is not what most of us want for breakfast, a lazy weekend supper or when we are craving those "Cakes and Sweet Things for Tea Time" (an entire chapter). A rhubarb pie charged with hazelnuts and almond paste, cinnamon-laced banana crumble muffins, or that simple bundt cake with lemongrass syrup sound just fine, though. Get more, and that negroni ice pop recipe, after the jump.

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Oxmoor House / Southern Living

The Way To Fry

Disclosure: We have a secret crush on Norman King, author of The Way to Fry. The Southern Living editor has that old school, nerd next door charm. Meaning he looks like he has decades of plaid shirt and button down collar experience (a compliment), not merely a fleeting hipster vintage obsession. And did we mention that the man fries everything? Yes, including pecan pie and sweet tea.

Sure, there is a glossy Southern Living veneer about the recipes, each perfectly scripted with overtly enhanced food stylist shots (a photo of pecan-crusted chicken tenders looks so "done up" it would fit right in at a Southern hair salon). A few recipes call for ingredients long ago banished from our pantry, like self-rising flour (flour, baking powder and salt work just fine), quick-cooking grits (How can one not use fantastic stone-ground grits today?), and banana liqueur, quite possibly the worst flavored liqueur idea ever.

We're going to go out on a limb and suggest that the definition of what constitutes Fresh, Fabulous Recipes for the Modern Southern Cook, as per the book's subtitle, is still a few decades behind the California definition. But we're still going to try that fried Jack (Daniels, of course) and Coke recipe. You know, out of deep fried everything state fair solidarity. Get more, and that fried cocktail recipe, after the jump.

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Phaidon

Sicily Cookbook

The upside of the current trend of hyper-localized cookbooks: You can go to Sicily over the weekend without leaving your kitchen. The latest from Phaidon, Sicily: A Culinary Journey through Sicilian Cuisine, due on stands in about a month, is a compilation of fifty traditional recipes from the editors behind The Silver Spoon cookbook.

This is not a packed, straightforward recipe compendium like The Silver Spoon. Think of it as more of a travelogue, albeit one peppered with 50 recipes and intimate shots of chickpeas and garlic drying in the Palermo sun. The font is noticeably larger type than other recent Phaidon publications -- we have a short recipe attention span these days. Even the Introduction opens with plenty of contemporary cuisine buzzwords like local, foraged and fusion (here, meaning layers of flavor added to dishes from different cultures gradually over the centuries). It's certainly accurate, as historically cuisines relied on those principles we idolize today simply as a matter of necessity.

In other words, if you're looking to delve into a Gran Cocina Latina-type extensive exploration of Sicilian cuisine, this isn't the book for you. Looking for a traditional Sicilian coffee granita that you might make for years to come, no trend du jour bells and whistles? Get more on the book, and the granita recipe, after the jump.

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