Nightly Specials: 125 Recipes for Spontaneous, Creative Cooking at Home

Executive chef and host of "Epicurious" on the Travel Channel Michael Lomonaco collaborates with veteran cookbook writer Andrew Friedman to present Nightly Specials: 125 Recipes For Spontaneous, Creative Cooking At Home, a cookbook celebrating the spirit and themes of a restaurant's special dishes: to take advantage of the catch of the day, or the time when certain fruits and vegetables are in season; to experiment with new ideas that may become menu staples; to enhance culinary creativity; and much more. Full-color photographs illustrate such vibrant dishes as Linguine with Manila Clams and Spicy Sauce; Maryland-Style Crab Cakes; The Best Fries You've Ever Made!; Gingered Green Beans, and a great many others. More than just a cookbook, Nightly Specials is a gateway to inspiration and imagination for any personal professional chef interested in trying something new.

`Nightly Specials' is written by Michael Lomonaco with an assist by ace New York City celebrity chef co-writer Andrew Friedman and with photographs by the Rothstein husband and wife team who also did Eric Ripert's `Return to Cooking' opus. Michael Lomonaco was the head chef at the Windows on the World recipe on September 9, 2001. By pure chance, he was not in the World Trade Center when the terrorist attacks occurred. The premise of this book is clear made clear in the title, as it focuses on the restaurant chef's practice of constructing daily specials from either what is especially good in the market today or ingredients which may be left over from a dish yesterday which did not move as well as expected. While this is a great lesson for home cooks, Lomonaco cannot take a lot of credit for revealing and elaborating on this practice, as Tom Colicchio did it brilliantly in his first book, `How to Think Like a Chef'. Colicchio's book did not impress me greatly when I first read it, but constant repetition of this principle by countless other chefs have revealed exactly how important this technique is to the professional chef. And, as my skill in cooking grows, I find myself going more and more to this way of thinking in deciding what to make for dinner today. Almost all celebrity chef books strive to either present the very best techniques from their fine dining restaurant or make a genuine attempt to adapt their favorite home and restaurant recipes to the skills and budget of a home kitchen. The very best of the first type are, for example, `The French Laundry Cookbook' by Keller and Ruhlman and `Tru' by Rick Tramonto. These books make no pretense that you will be able to duplicate their dishes. The purpose of these books is to show you how it is done in first class restaurants and possibly give you some ideas in general for improving home cooking. This is not to say that none of these recipes are possible at home, it is just that the author does nothing to simplify them, and makes no apologies for that fact. The very best of the second type of book are, for example, `Wolfgang Puck Makes it Easy' and `Charlie Trotter Cooks at Home'. Lomonaco's book is much closer to the second type than to the first, as he is teaching a common professional practice to the amateur cook with recipes they should have no difficulty in doing in the home kitchen. Lomonaco adds to the utility of the book to the home chef by providing several recipes for `Snacks, Sandwiches, and Pizzas'. This seems to be a trend, as Wolfgang's new book does exactly the same thing. When I was an information systems professional and just as much an inveterate book buyer as I am now, I would consider a $50 book on a programming language, database system, or design technique worth the cost if it had but a single technique capable of improving what I did in some systematic way. My attitude towards cookbooks is very similar in that all it takes to turn my opinion from `ho hum' to `oh boy' i

Many great restaurants have their wait staff announce when taking orders: "Tonight's special are ....." I'm one of those that attentively listens and asks questions and frequently orders from specials. Turns out my thinking is like Lomonoco's: this is where chef's creativity is being experimented with, usually to highlight an ingredient just found, or use up ingredients that are around, or to try something new to see how it catches on before making it on permanent menu. He believes this nightly special concept is an important intersection for the home chef, since the restaurant chef has little time to get too exotic with the line chefs and must provide clear and not-too-detailed steps to get these specials out. Here in this creative and sizeable collection Lomonaco of TV fame (FoodNetwork and Epicurious) and 21 Club and Windows on World has had background and experience to let his imagination and zest for food to be displayed in over 125 "spontaneous and creative" recipes for the home chef. They are nicely broken into usable groupings, i.e. soups, salads, fish, beef, etc. What is nice and usable is the concept being adapted by lots of wonderful chefs such as Ming Tsau and others is that of basic recipe with tradeoffs and substitutions of both ingredients and techniques. These options make it superb for home chef who wants to do more with food than simply micro or heat up in pan, but wants to minimize labor over stove and prep area. These still take some time to prepare and only addition would have been nice is estimates provided of prep time and baking/cooking time. What is provided are creative, scrumptuous food that we have come to expect and appreciate from Lomonaco: "Roasted Summer Vegetables with Blue Cheese"; "Open Faced Swordfish Portobello, and Pancetta Club"; "Alpine Baked Pasta"; "Toasted Barley and Butternut Squash"; "Ceviche of Bay Scallops and Blood Oranges"; "Pan Roasted Halibut with Asparagus, Fava Beans, and Thyme Broth" (here is example of his options: not wild about fava beans, substituted french green beans with great results); "Grilled Whitefish Salad with Yellow Tomato and Tarragon Vinaigrette"; "Grilled Pork Chops with Coffee Barbecue Sauce"; "Triple Berry And Pecan Crunch Pie." A beaut that many will not find if they are not familiar with this exceptional chef, who has a flair and energy for great food which certainly has caught my menus. I have stacks of his recipes from TV and now am delighted to have this sizeable, beautiful collection with nice size and great color photos.