October 2006: Tom Valenti’s Welcome to My Kitchen

Baby, it's cooling down outside and that's when my kitchen starts really cooking again. Gone are the days of assembling meals from farmstands and the garden in the backyard. The grill is swapped out as my tool of the trade in favor of the braising pan. And when the cooking season starts up again, the first book I grab is Tom Valenti’s Welcome to My Kitchen (Harper Collins). Tom and I are old pals from NYC and his reputation as a master of the soup pot and braising pan had been established twenty years ago when we were both young cooks in NYC and he developed a reputation for genius running the best small kitchens around town.

Everyone was cooking gnocchi, sautéeing it, or saucing it like a pasta. Tom did his 'en brodo' with chard and parmesan. Everyone was into grilling secondary meat cuts low and slow, in the newly popular California style. Tom re-popularized the lamb shank, single-handedly restoring it to prominence at Alison on Dominick and creating what is still the best braised lamb shank on the planet . . . he still serves them at Cesca and Ouest, his globally regarded NYC restaurants. Tom has a rep amongst chefs as a flavor master, and his books (he also penned Soups, Stews and One Pot Meals) are more than recipe compendiums, they are cooking classes without peer, essay collections of the highest order, and encyclopedias of food style—a style that is ideally suited for the home cook.

While many chefs cook restaurant food, Valenti cooks great food that happens to be served in restaurants, but his technique and ingredient palette is user-friendly. If you have always wanted to own a book that the pros turn to for inspiration (Mario Batali, Joachim Splichal, Eric Ripert, etc., all are big fans of Tom's), this is the one.

Buy Welcome to My Kitchen at Amazon.com.