She has a spiky platinum ‘do and a wild persona to match.
But Chef Anne Burrell also has cooking chops as vast as her outsized personality. After all, this is a woman who’s cooked at Lidia Bastianich’s Felidia in New York, Peter Hoffman’s Savoy in New York and was executive chef at Centro Vinoteca in New York. She’s also battled alongside Mario Batali on “Iron Chef America,” and now hosts her own Food Network show, “Secrets of a Restaurant Chef.”
Her new cookbook, “Cook Like a Rock Star” (Clarkson Potter) with food writer Suzanne Lenzer, is all about getting food on the table without any drama. The book, of which I recently received a review copy, is full of 125 enticing recipes such as rack of lamb crusted with black olives, “Cheater’s Duck Confit and Bitter Greens,” and “Juicy, Jammy, Jelly Tart.”
The book is also a hoot, as Burrell’s breezy, no-nonsense voice comes through in all the recipes, such as this one for “Rockin’ Porchetta,” in which she instructs, “Remove the pork from the oven, cut off the twine (you don’t want to floss and eat at the same time), and remove the pork skin — it will probably come off in one large, lovely crispy piece like a helmut!”
Or in the book’s promotional materials, in which she explains her approach to simplifying things in her cookbook as compared to other books that might “tell you to brown a piece of meat and then deglaze the ‘fond.’ But what the hell is ‘fond’? It’s the crud on the bottom of the pan—the flavor, the stuff you want to scrape up and use to develop your rich brown food! By ditching the fancier cooking terms and speaking in plain English, I’m going to help you to understand why you brown the crap out of things (because brown food tastes good), and how to get the crud off the bottom of the pan (deglazing).”
I couldn’t resist trying my hand at her twist on the usual basil pesto: “Orecchiette with Broccoli Rabe Pesto & Sausage.”
Her version is much richer and more substantial, as broccoli rabe is pureed with pistachios, Parmigiano and mascarpone to make a thick pesto that gets mixed with the cute ear-shaped pasta and crumbled Italian sausage.
This pesto has a pleasant bitter edge and a real luxuriousness because of the addition of the creamy, slightly sweet Italian cheese.
This dish cooks up about half an hour, too.
The only omission in the recipe is that the directions call for mixing 2/3 of the pesto into the hot, drained pasta, but never says what to do with the remainder of it. But you could easily refrigerate the leftover pesto and slather it on grilled bread the next night for delicious crostini.
You can meet Burrell when she does a book signing at 5 p.m. Oct. 14 at Williams-Sonoma at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto. Books to be signed must be purchased at Williams-Sonoma. The following day, Burrell will host a cooking demo and book-signing 1:30 p.m. Oct. 15 at Sur La Table at Santana Row in San Jose.
Contest: Three lucky Food Gal readers will each receive a free copy of Anne Burrell’s “Cook Like a Rock Star” cookbook. Entries, limited to those in the continental United States, will be accepted through midnight PST Oct. 8. The winner will be announced Oct. 10.
How to win?
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