The Happenings at Chez Bart

So today one of my objectives was to purchase a new cookbook for the Chez Bart library. Lately, I have been either grabbing recipes from Food Network, or using ones from my two Italian cookbooks by Giada de Laurentiis. I probably spent over an hour perusing the cookbooks at my local Barnes & Noble. In fact, it is really the only reason why I go to brick and mortar bookstores. It is very nice being able to actually look at the recipes, thereby making a judgement whether there are enough to satisfy the price of the book.

So there I was, flipping through cookbooks by many different authors. I spent considerable time leafing through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa line of cookbooks; just to name a few. In the end, I settled on Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home. 

I found ad Hoc to be the best fit for Chez Bart. It provided not just excellent - not to mention realistic (more on that later) - recipes, but also has sections devoted to teaching culinary techniques and skills. The recipes are also realistic for someone like me: 26 year old single male living in a decent-at-best apartment equipped with crap appliances and lame Cuisinart cookware. 

Thus, I don't want a cookbook whose recipes feature relatively hard to find ingredients, employ very sophisticated cooking and preparation techniques; and I don't want every end product to be something so fancy that I have to start dishing out Michelin stars to my apartment door. Usually, these are the "Restaurant" Cookbooks: Keller's French Laundry & Bouchon, Mario Battali's Babbo, Michael Chiarello's Bottega; and are full of recipes that require truffles and squid in its own ink. No thanks.

Contrast this with Ad Hoc: the first recipe I flipped to was crab cakes. There is a recipe for Beef Stroganoff. Hamburgers! There are also pages on how to properly deep fry, trussing and cutting a chicken, proper cooking utensils, etc. It just seemed so perfect!

So get ready for a few new dishes down the pike here at Chez Bart!