My husband gave me two cooking books for Christmas.

The first book (and the one I’ll focus on for now) is The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters. My husband and I have read the first 40 pages together. This beginning provides a great introduction to simple cooking and the local food movement. Much of the rest of the book is guidelines to some important cooking basics and recipes for simple dishes. For example, the first cooking basic she covers is “vinaigrette.” I really appreciate her suggestions for tweaking the basic vinaigrette, and I look forward to trying them out with my husband, as well as the other recipes.

I appreciate Alice Waters’ call to return to the basics when cooking: food should taste like itself. However, I’m not particularly convinced of the “eat local” movement, and I don’t see myself searching for a farmer’s market. I live in suburban Chicago, and right now it’s cold and snowy. Sorry, Alice Waters! I’m avoiding time on the roads these days, so I don’t anticipate searching for a “local” source for my produce.

I have discovered a grocery store that has better variety, cheaper prices, and better quality produce. I’ll stick with that for now. It’s my new favorite.

What about you? Do you “eat local” and why? Do you think farmer’s market food is superior to supermarket food?

Related posts:

1. The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters
2. Where Do You Get Your Recipes?
3. Parsley Butter

Tags: Alice Waters, Alice Waters: The Art of Simple Food

This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 12:45 pm and is filed under books and cookbooks, where I am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.