The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution

I bought this book to add to my collection of other Chez Panisse books. It's very well written and has some good ideas for both the novice and the experienced cook. The only main gripe that I had with the book is that all of the recipes are scaled to feed 4 persons -- not a problem in itself but if one doesn't pay attention one could accidently double or triple a recipe and end up with an obscene amount of food. It appears as though the quantities were not completely well thought out or Ms. Waters is advocating that we eat larger portions of protein than one actually needs to.

I have been cooking regularly for about 18 years now, and for about the last 9 years or so it has become a real passion for me. I also have a personal library of hundreds of cook books. But I still found this book to be both an enjoyable and an educational read. The book has filled in some gaps in my cooking knowledge that I didn't even realize were there, or maybe more exactly, crystallized my thinking about some cooking ideas and techniques that I was somewhat fuzzy about. Reading this book also made me realize that somewhere along the way I had unconsciously developed the belief that if preparing my food was too simple, it wasn't "real" cooking. This was starting to take a lot of the fun out of cooking for me and turning it back into a chore. Ms. Waters has given me permission to explore all the ways that delicious food can be prepared with just a few steps and top notch ingredients. Cooking is fun again.

More concretely, as a result of reading this book I find that I am wasting much less food, and finding much more creative ways to use the things that I have in my refrigerator and pantry, which is translating into spending less money at the grocery store.

For me, the real value of the book was not the recipes, but the discussion of ingredients, cooking techniques and Ms. Waters' personal approach to preparing delicious food for her family and friends.

I am so sorry to give your cookbook such a low review Ms. Waters, but I was very disappointed with it. At first read, the book seemed very informative with a clean, new layout. But when you read the text closely, you will find that the information is not that groundbreaking and the organization of the book is a bit confusing.

But more importantly, I was underwhelmed with the recipes in this book. I have so far cooked 3 recipes and they both needed a bit more zing. The author has at least stuck to the title of the book and provided us with recipes for "simple food", with very few ingredients and steps (a big contrast to the other Chez Panisse book I own) but the results of the recipes really needed a lot of help from sharp spices. I just read through the first few 5-star reviews and it didn't seem to me that any of those reviewers had actually cooked out of the book.

This is a good book for people who want good food with normal, everyday ingredients. Roasting vegetables is quick, easy, simple and tastey. Salt , paper. oil. No crazy expensive ingredients. Simple meat preperation, that gives yummy results. Life is complicated enough. A good book for a gift for someone who needs to learn, but a good book for people who have been cooking for years,too.

The author's underlying philosophy echos some things I always thought myself, with the main one being that cooking requires good ingredients which includes taking into account when certain foods work better (meaning the food is in season).

There is a good overview of the concepts that re-occur for good cooking, proper equipment, herbs, spices, etc.

Some of the things are obvious, the fresher the ingredients in the food the better the taste, but regardless having the guide and some very nice recipes that can be put together to make dishes (at least the ones I have tried so far) that you can be happy with (and which others will enjoy) makes the book worthwhile to have.