Twenty-Five Years of Liquid Gold in the Santa Ynez Valley

 (Theo Stephan, left, and Lisa Thompson, at a Global Gardens cooking class)

Twenty-five years since beginning Global Gardens, Theo Stephan is no less passionate about her mission to preach the glories of good olive oil. With all of her business — the crucial club membership work, retail, product development, tastings, cooking classes — unified under one roof in a bright Santa Ynez cottage, Stephan seems pleased. Ever an educator, she says she’s achieved her goal “when people taste real food and realize how simple and easy it is, especially where we are in California. It’s far reaching — the story of olive oil goes back; you can see olive leaves pressed in Paleolithic stones.”

Want to read the rest then do so at the Independent's site. 

Samin Nosrat on Fame, Food, and Writing

The James Beard Award–winning author and Netflix star Samin Nosrat needs no introduction. To call her thought- and taste-provoking. Salt Fat Acid Heat a cookbook is like saying Hamlet is a ghost story — except Shakespeare didn’t have such nifty infographics.

It’s our great fortune that she will be part of an UCSB Arts & Lectures virtual talk on Sunday, February 28, at 11 a.m. Moderated by Santa Barbara’s own restaurateur Sherry Villanueva, owner of The Lark, La Paloma, Loquita, and other hotspots, the chat also features Israeli-English author/chef Yotam Ottolenghi — remember when his book Plenty would be set dressing on television shows as a symbol that characters had hip taste?

Want to read the rest, then do so at the Independent's site.

And, yes, she's as warm and funny and self-deprecating and engaged as she seems on the Netflix show in real life, if a 35 minute phone interview is real life.

The Lark’s Love Letter to Santa Barbara: Acme Hospitality Releases ‘Around the Table,’ a Cookbook and Much More

We can argue about whether The Lark is Santa Barbara’s answer to The French Laundry in Napa ​— ​if nothing else, it’s less expensive and easier to get into ​— ​but the just-published Around the Table: Recipes & Stories from The Lark in Santa Barbara is certainly as amazing as The French Laundry Cookbook. With more than 160 recipes, gorgeous photos by Macduff Everton, and tales of Santa Barbara past and present, it’s no surprise to learn that this accomplishment was part of Acme Hospitality founder and managing partner Sherry Villanueva’s dream before she even opened The Lark.

Want to read the rest then do so at the Independent's site.

Loving ‘Les Légumes:' Pascale Beale’s Very Veggie Cookbook

“The whole way meals are structured has changed a lot. A meat with two vegetables — that’s something that’s old-fashioned,” said Pascale Beale, who is just releasing her eighth cookbook, Les Légumes: Vegetable Recipes from the Market Table (M27 Editions). “Now people recognize they should have more of a plant-based diet.”

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Pascale Beale Roots for Fruit

In the introduction to her latest lovely cookbook, Pascale Beale writes, “What could be more tempting than a perfectly ripe fruit?” Turns out the answer is to have that fruit in one of the recipes from this mouth-watering book, Les Fruits, photographed by Mike Verbois and published by Santa Barbara’s own M27 Editions.

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Salad At Its Savory Best

People generally think of a salad as a lighter bite, but if they consider Pascale Beale’s new cookbook, Salade, they’ll have to think heavy — the book weighs almost three pounds.

Want to read the rest--plus get one of Beale's recipes--go to the Indy site.

The Evening SB Dining Got Goin

It hurts even more now, that Suzanne Goin and Caroline Styne’s restaurant project rumored to be coming to Montecito isn’t. That’s because Goin and Styne brought their acclaimed Los Angeles hotspot a.o.c. to Santa Barbara for an evening on December 2 and that dinner was a total delight. Of her many going concerns now, from Lucques to the Tavern to the Larder, a.o.c. is where she helped birth the small plates revolution. I like to think of Goin as an ascetic sensualist with enough talent to make that seeming contradiction not just work, but illuminate, refreshing a diner’s jaded mind and palate. There’s never an ingredient wasted on a plate, but what is there adds up to a whole beyond her always market-driven ingredients.

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Cooking with the Pros

You know an author is prolific when his book jacket can’t even keep up with his publishing. Though the blurb on Santa Barbara Chef’s Table touts James Fraioli as the “award-winning author of 17 cookbooks,” Fraioli himself explained, “This one makes it number 20.” Whatever the count, the latest Fraioli book is a handy compendium of the state of area dining, featuring 70 recipes — written so that a home cook has an actual shot of making them (no need to buy a sous vide machine, for instance) — from 40 Santa Barbara County restaurants. In fact, the book works so hard to earn its subtitle, Extraordinary Recipes from the American Riviera, with gushy prose and glossy photos that it might leave locals a bit embarrassed by the immodesty of it all.

Want to read the rest then do so at the Indy's site.

Learning to Love Vegetables

Suzanne Landry has been teaching cooking for 35 years, frequently at adult ed for SBCC, and the accumulated wisdom of that time is now available in her attractive book The Passionate Vegetable (Health Inspired Publishing 2012, thefreshfoodchef.com). She recently answered some questions by phone.

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A Dish for Every Day

One doesn’t have to be a fan of Vivaldi or Frankie Valli to admire Pascale Beale’s release of the beautifully presented box set of all four A Menu for All Seasons cookbooks. Beale finished the cycle with the rerelease of Spring: Actually, all but three recipes in the collection are different from the now out-of-print 2004 edition that she co-wrote with Ann Marie Martorano-Powers, and even those are revised. But don’t ask her if that feels odd, for she explained, “People go, ‘Oh, you’re done,’ and I say, ‘What do you mean I’m done? I haven’t finished writing.’”

Want to read the rest then do so at the Indy's site.

A Dish for Every Day

One doesn’t have to be a fan of Vivaldi or Frankie Valli to admire Pascale Beale’s release of the beautifully presented box set of all four A Menu for All Seasons cookbooks. Beale finished the cycle with the rerelease of Spring: Actually, all but three recipes in the collection are different from the now out-of-print 2004 edition that she co-wrote with Ann Marie Martorano-Powers, and even those are revised. But don’t ask her if that feels odd, for she explained, “People go, ‘Oh, you’re done,’ and I say, ‘What do you mean I’m done? I haven’t finished writing.’”

Want to read the rest then do so at the Indy's site.

Peeling Things Back

Cookbooks teach you all kinds of things, but nothing more than how to read cookbooks. It's a real mistake, for instance, to take them at face value, or even title value. Of late I've learned this lesson with Mark Peel (the chef at the wonderful Campanile and Tar Pit) and his Classic Family Dinners. With a title like that, you'd assume he assumed you had, like, a family, and you wanted to feed them. And, one might even go so far as to surmise he'd think you had to do other things for them, like spend time with them not in the kitchen (as you're busy straining, with cheesecloth, your bechamel), or save for their college education. But, despite the recipes in the book usually delivering, it's not clear Peel had those ideas in mind.

Take his macaroni cheese. It does end up delicious, the day after you start making (or the day you take off to make it). But one reason it does is it contains a good $40 worth of dried and fresh mushrooms. Sure, you get to eat it for a couple of days, too, as it make a lot, but for a vegetarian meal, that's a hefty price tag. (And, to tell the truth, it seems more a mushroom-noodle casserole by the end, which isn't a bad thing, just a bit of a dodge.)

Then the above lovely dish is his (well, even better, my) linguine with clams. Even buying clams on sale, this calls for 48 littlenecks, and 4 dozen is about 8 pounds of shell-heavy bivalve. Which is a painful cash register ca-ching of about $40. That pain was mollified once I started eating the dish, as it is quite possibly the best linguine and clams I've ever had. You end up making just enough juice and then give the pasta a quick pan braise in that after cooking it, so all the clam-brothy goodness gets sucked right into the semolina. One of my weaknesses as a both a chef and eater is I prefer a hefty saucing (LA Times critic Irene Virbila, ever on the alert for too much sauce, would probably find me horribly gauche), but this recipe cures me of that problem. Just get the darn sauce to hide inside the food!

So, should you buy this book? Depends upon how much time and money you have. And, I have to admit, not all the dishes are intensive/expensive. He's got a pan-fried trout that's already become a go-to staple in our kitchen.

But I'm still looking for that perfect mac 'n' cheese recipe.