Product Description

Long gone are the days when only “a meat and two veg” qualified as a real meal; today, says Sara Foster, “salads are meals, sandwiches and quesadillas qualify as respectable grown-up dinners (or breakfasts or lunches, for that matter), and eggs can be eaten any time of day.” In this new cookbook, Sara acts as a mentor to the rest of us, sharing her passion for practical, comfortable cooking at home with more than 100 recipes for everyday meals.

As the owner of two of the mid-Atlantic’s busiest gourmet markets, Sara shares her professional knowledge about ingredients and techniques, incorporating the changing trends in cooking, health, and entertaining. Formal is out; instead we want relaxed, versatile recipes that are full of flavor but don’t require precision cooking or fussy techniques. We want to approach cooking with a sense of comfort and ease, and Sara Foster’s Casual Cooking teaches us how: it is relaxed yet refined homey yet sophisticated, showcasing the kind of meals we all want to eat—and will actually cook, day in, day out.

In Sara Foster’s Casual Cooking, Sara will help you navigate both the kitchen and the market with greater ease, resulting in satisfying meals that won’t take all day to make. The recipes include the most popular dishes at Foster’s Market and her own personal favorites, and all feature the updated Southern flair that has made her one of the South’s best-known cooks.

From easy party platters to assemble for impromptu guests to ingenious ways of turning a bag of spinach, a package of sausages, or a ball of pizza dough into a fresh and fabulous dinner, here finally is a cookbook that reflects the way we really eat today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #221839 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-06
• Released on: 2007-03-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In her third cookbook, Foster, the owner of two gourmet markets in North Carolina, presents us with more of her trademark recipes; elegant, simple dishes with Southern flair. This time around she's focused on ways to prepare meals for what she calls "the way we eat today." She explains: "salads are meals, sandwiches and quesadillas qualify as a respectable grown-up dinner... and eggs can be eaten any time of the day." The recipes call for basic ingredients that are easy to keep in your refrigerator and pantry, and include plenty of tips on saving time and varying dishes. The Party Platters section includes recipes that can be made quickly with very few ingredients like Crispy Sweet Potato Chips with Caramelized Onion Dip, a simple antipasto platter with olives, nuts and dried fruit, and Warm Crab Dip. Simple Suppers, like Rosemary Grilled Leg of Lamb with Tuscan White Beans and Roasted Tomatoes have relatively short ingredient lists and also include Quick Fixes like using canned ingredients to save time. Last but not least is the "Simplest Sweets" chapter, which avoids complicated baking techniques with recipes for grilled apricots with buttermilk ice cream and lemon poached pears with lemon cream. Anyone with limited time and a real desire to cook will benefit from this solid, accessible cookbook. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Sara Foster began her career as a
chef for Martha Stewart’s catering company before going on to open her own take-out business, Foster’s Market, in Durham, North Carolina. Today, Sara has a second Foster's Marketin Chapel Hill, North Carolina, as well as her own website, FostersMarket.com, where her line of products
is also available. Sara teaches cooking classes
and is a frequent guest chef for Viking and
Williams-Sonoma at culinary functions. She is also the food columnist for Cottage Living and has
been featured in Martha Stewart Living, O Magazine, and Country Living, among other publications.
She is the author of Foster’s Market Cookbook and Fresh Every Day.

Carolynn Carreño writes for Saveur and the
Los Angeles Times and coauthored several cookbooks, including Once Upon a Tart and 100 Ways to Be Pasta

Customer Reviews

Very Nice Source of Many Ideas in Familiar Dishes
`sara foster's casual cooking' is Sara Foster's third book of recipes from her North Carolina `Foster's Market', and her second collaboration with West Coast culinary writer, Carolynn Carreno, who co-authored another recent `easy meals' book, `A Twist of the Wrist' with La Brea baker, Nancy Silverton. Since I liked Silverton's book, and I believed Foster's second book, her first with Carreno, was better than Foster's first book, Carreno appears to be a major contributor to the works to which she contributes.

The title and collaborator may give one the impression that Foster's book has a lot in common with Silverton's book, but it does not. While Silverton's book is oriented toward preparing food at home, Foster's book continues her journal of recipes from her market. And, while the title of the book suggests `easy' preparation, I would leave it at `easier than her previous books'.

Foster's books, and her personal history, have much in common with Ina Garten. Both were Martha Stewart collaborators, and both ran (and Foster still currently runs) catering businesses in upscale neighborhoods. There is also a lot in common in their selection of recipes; however, Garten has thoroughly transplanted her comfort zone from the commercial to the home kitchen. Thus, Foster's recipes all seem to be just a bit more highly polished and a bit more suitable for fancy entertaining, in spite of the `casual' rubric.

Ms. Foster starts with the seemingly obligatory `things you need in your pantry' chapter, which is a good read, but always irrelevant. The best course is the great advice from Mahdur Jaffrey, who recommends just acquiring what you need for the recipes you cook and learn, and stock up for those recipes only, adding things as you learn new recipes.

Foster's first chapter of recipes immediately sets the true tone of the book, as more of a source for relatively easy entertaining, rather than a book of recipes for cooking family meals. In fact, the first recipe is the famous James Beard tea sandwich, with its petite chopped parsley edging.

The second chapter on salad meals is closer to home, and introduces us to `Salad Meals'. It also introduces my favorite feature of this cookbook, the list of ten (10) simple and relatively easy recipes for a stock culinary preparation. In this chapter, the subject is vinaigrettes. On the one hand, vinaigrettes are so easy, one wonders why we even need any recipes for them at all. It would seem that once you get the hang of it, just about any vinaigrette would seem to be within your reach. But, as someone who has been cooking regularly for the last six years, and who has read close to 500 cookbooks, I still like the reassurance of consulting someone who has done it before. Foster, for example, suggests adding pesto or apple juice to two of her vinaigrettes. Now I may have thought of pesto, but I would never have thought of apple juice, and there always seems to be some hanging around after some baking project or other.

The third chapter is sandwiches, and this subject always warms my interest in a book, especially when Ms. Foster gives us her take on Po'boy sandwiches where the oysters are NOT fried. The next chapter on savory flatbread preparations is the kind of thing you should really read through several times at your leisure, then be prepared with its recipes as suggestions for improvisations with English muffins, day old baguettes, or tortillas. The pasta chapter has another of those thumbnail quick and easy recipe collections. Here, we get `nine quick and easy pasta sauces'. Almost all of them are old favorites, such as carbonara, basil pesto, Alfredo, and Pepperonata sauces, but Foster gives us the confidence to realize these should come very easily to us. Many of them are the sorts of recipes we should really know by heart, and Foster gives us the essentials to make it easy to remember them.

The `anytime eggs' chapter covers my favorite subject, recipes with eggs, including several recipes which will encourage us to master the art of poaching eggs. The recipes point up an important aspect of the book, which is less of a cooking manual than a simple list of good ideas for things to do with very traditional cooking techniques.

The list of easy techniques in `simple suppers' is both `My Foolproof Marinades' and `Three Easy Ways to Turn Sausage into Dinner'. One suggestion I might make to Madame Foster is to give both outdoor and indoor versions for recipes such as `backyard barbecued pork tenderloin', as we urbanites living above the Mason-Dixon line may not have lots of opportunities to fire up a charcoal grill.

The `Fish in a Flash' is fairly routine, except for the generally high level of interesting flavor combinations. The `Fast and Easy Side Dishes' is one of my favorite chapters, as I often run out of steam when putting together a main course, and have nothing left to do anything interesting for those all-important vegetables. The `quickie list' in this chapter is eight `quick things to do with a bag of spinach'. I'll offer the suggestion that such a list is great even if you are only cooking for two, as you always seem to use just half of that 10 ounce bag of pre-washed spinach, and don't quite know what to do with it before it wilts. I will note that a few of the recipes may not be quite as fast and easy as you may like, especially things like `Hoppin john', with its four or five ingredients requiring prep work. The list of interest in the dessert chapter is `ten easy, elegant parfaits'. This is less work to produce a greater `wow' value at the end of a meal.

Sara's recipes all seem to be just a bit brighter and more interesting than average. This is a far more valuable return from this book than `just another fast and easy recipe' book.

Great casual cooking for a beginning cook
I have really enjoyed Sara Foster's Casual Cooking. As a newlywed and a career woman, I am always trying to find new, simple recipes to make for my husband and myself after a long day's work. So far, I have tried two recipes: Pan-seared sea scallops with corn coulis, and Mom's pepperoni english muffin pizzas. The english muffin pizzas, while a well-known and easy recipe, were delicious, and allowed me to add new spices to a basic dish. I do not have much knowledge of which spices to use, so it was good to "spice" up my meal with parsley, basil and oregano. My husband was happy to taste something other than salt and pepper! The sea scallops with corn coulis made me feel like a real cook. I loved cooking with wine and fresh seafood. The dish turned out to be lovely. I enjoyed the cream sauce and corn with the golden brown seared scallops. I never would have had the confidence to try this recipe without sara's simple and easy explanations. I am looking forward to trying the chapters about "anytime eggs" and "pasta and noodles". Eggs are my favorite, and it will be so fun to try new variations with prosciutto and salsa sides! Also, I have been looking for a good Alfredo sauce recipe and a nice creamed corn recipe for Thanksgiving. I think I will finally be able to get it right this year with "Judy's creamed corn." That should make my sister, the "family chef", very happy. I would recommend Sara Foster's Casual Cooking to anyone looking to spice up their basic recipes. There are lots of new dishes to try, and great, easy directions for those cooks who have wanted to make their own sauces, marinades and sides, but have never had the resource to do so. This cookbook gives you the ideas and simple explanations. Have fun and go for it!

Exceptional, Fresh Recipes!
I bought Sara's book after watching her prepare grilled eggplant stuffed with ricotta and basil on Martha Stewart's Living program. After trying over two dozen recipes in this book, I can honestly say it is one of the more practical cookbooks I own. Reading it will inspire you to visit your local farmer's market again and again.

This book is definitely geared for beginners and/or folks who savor a fresh, home-cooked meal in the amount of time required to call in a pizza order. Save your French Laundry cookbook for the snowy weekends and pull this one out at the end of a hectic work day.

Although the recipes are simple, the finished product (sans the pizza muffin) is sophisticated. I love to entertain, and these recipes are perfect for impromptu socializing.

Lastly, the entire chapter dedicated to eggs will certainly cause you to rethink leaving home for a gourmet brunch!