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Alice Waters is one of America's best known chefs. First noticed in the 1970s, she inspired a generation of food lovers with her passion for freshness and the best ingredients. Her influence helped infuse menus all over the US with dishes rooted in Mediterranean cooking, often with a sunny, Californian twist. Dishes at the casual café, located upstairs in the same enchanting house as Chez Panisse, her more formal restaurant in Berkeley, California, include Wood Oven Baked Porcini Mushrooms, Tuna Confit and Meyer Lemon Ãclairs. Waters suggests making the mushrooms in your fireplace if you can, although recipe directions are for a conventional oven. Typical of the ingredient-driven cooking Waters encourages, the stunning tang of the éclairs requires Meyer lemons: a cross between a lemon and an orange, which are now exported beyond their native California. However, the fresh tuna steak gently simmered in olive oil with garlic, fresh thyme, and fennel seeds and served with barely cooked green beans and aïoli, a pungent garlic mayonnaise, is sublime even made in an apartment kitchen. Her point is that you should use her recipes as guides, letting them inspire you to make the most of locally produced, seasonal foods in your area. Alice Waters is an enchanting raconteur and an activist as well as a chef. In The Chez Panisse Café Cookbook, she weaves her beliefs about food as pleasure, sustenance, art and politics with over 200 recipes. Bringing you into the community she has been instrumental in creating to preserve the earth's resources as well as to provide great ingredients, Waters tells about the producers who share her passions. They respect the environment, using only sustainable production methods while delivering the freshest possible product, be it free-range poultry and eggs, acorn-fed pigs, impeccable oysters or organically grown fruits and vegetables. Jewel-coloured Art Nouveau-style illustrations by David Goines give this book the same distinctive look as earlier Chez Panisse cookbooks. --Dana Jacobi
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