Geoffrey Zakarian is a busy man. He runs restaurants, is Chairman of City Harvest’s Food Council, cohosts a weekly radio food show, and is on TV as judge or contestant on shows like Chopped and The Next Iron Chef.
With all that time on his hands, what would a man do to occupy himself? Oh, sure, write a cookbook. Write a book for the foodie masses where he applies his skills to make our daily culinary efforts much easier. This is a practical book. There are 150 recipes here described, at the start, as easy. Easy does not mean less than delicious, as you will see. Those recipes come from using a pantry with 50 basic ingredients. I mean really, really basic ingredients like:
- Baking soda
- Black beans
- Bread crumbs
- Instant espresso powder
- Ketchup
- Mustard
- Pecans
- Raisins
- Tabasco
From simple things can come complex, delicious things. The black beans become part of a Smoky Black Bean Bisque. The pecans are part of Pomegranate-Ginger Sweet Potatoes with Pecans and Pumpkins Seeds. The raisins go into Veal Rib Chops with Golden Raisin Sauce.
The recipes here are direct, perhaps 6-8 ingredients. The directions are four paragraphs long, but each paragraph is just one or two short sentences. I believe every recipe appears in picture so you can see how to plate the dish to make it brilliantly attractive — remember, we eat first with our eyes and our noses.
The result of this recipe design is important: these are dishes that can give you total week-night cooking relief. You don’t have to order pizza or bring home a box of chicken or tacos. Your fridge and your pantry right now probably have the makings for a dozen of these recipes. You could easily shop over the weekend and have all you need for Monday through Thursday night. On Friday, go ahead, order that pizza.
Zakarian is food maven, a man whose life is culinary and competitive. It’s charming that he can take that worldly experience and orient it towards the non-professional home foodie. We want great food, but we don’t always want to slave over a list of 23 ingredients. My Perfect Pantry is just the book for us. You’ll see it prominently on display in book stores now. Do pick it up, take a tour, and think about what treasures your pantry could offer.
Those three recipes I highlighted above? Look for them on this blog in the coming weeks. Well, the Pomegranate-Ginger Sweet Potatoes with Pecans and Pumpkins Seeds is surely a fall charmer so I’ll post that in October. Of course, by then, you’ll already have your own copy of My Perfect Pantry.