The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters

Chez Panisse Chef and Locavore Advocates Eating Organic and Local

Oct 23, 2008

Environmental awareness increasingly means for many that what goes into a great meal is just as important as where the meal comes from. Celebrate simple, local food.

There are few things more satisfying than a great meal. Whether you’ve been cooking since you could push a stool to the stove or you need a primer on how to boil water, The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution will help you get great meals to the table. Locavores everywhere will cheer this celebration of socially and environmentally conscious dining.

Long time sustainable agriculture advocate, Executive Chef and Chez Panisse Restaurant owner, Alice Waters has given fresh food lovers another tool to make simple, yet satisfying meals. Her latest offering honors her long held commitment to eating locally, and in season. Waters also uses her book to encourage cooks to let the real taste of the foods they are preparing come through, rather than be hidden in heavy spices and sauces. You’ll find some great ideas in this book for the fruits (and vegetables) of your labor in the garden or farmer’s market haul.

What Else is Alice Waters Up to?

That Waters values pure, fresh ingredients is evident not only in her cookbooks but also in her California based restaurant and café where the menu changes daily. Waters relies on local farmers and ranchers, not refrigerated trucks, for her culinary creations such as Fior di latte with tomatoes, roasted peppers and grilled eggplant or grilled yellowfin tuna with wild fennel, shell beans and chanterelles. In keeping with the slow food tradition, meals at Chez Panisse feel more like dinner parties; occasions to savor the bounty of the season and the company of dining companions.

Waters’ food activism is also at work through the Chez Panisse Foundation. The Foundation was launched in 1996 to commemorate her restaurant’s 25th year. Through projects such as the Edible Schoolyard (introduced throughout the Berkeley, CA school system) and the School Lunch Initiative, the Foundation works to help children understand how their food choices impact their health, their communities and their world.

Want to get your children in on the action Waters also has written Fanny at Chez Panisse: A Child’s Restaurant Adventures with 46 Recipes (not coincidentally, Waters’ daughter is named Fanny).

Other books by Alice Waters include Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should be Good Clean and Fair, with Carlo Petrini; A Slice of Organic Life, with Daphne Lambert and Ericka Bower; and Fresh from the Farmer’s Market: Year Round Recipe’s for the Pick of the Crop, with Janet Fletcher and Victoria Pearson.

The copyright of the article The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters in Food Trends is owned by Barbara Gibson. Permission to republish The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.