Product Description

Fresh. Flavorful. Unpretentious. Food this good doesn’t need much of an introduction, and the inspired, down-home fare served at Foster’s Market speaks for itself . . . and keeps the locals coming back day after day.

In Fresh Every Day, Sara Foster continues the tradition of soulful, seasonally inspired cooking, with more than two hundred of the New Southern recipes made famous at her eponymous markets. She adapts the skills and secrets of a successful professional kitchen for dishes and flavors that speak to the way we really cook at home, from slow-cooked stews and roasted chicken to burgers and salad meals born of leftovers. No elaborate techniques or esoteric ingredients here—just good home cooking elevated to company fare. Cornbread Panzanella with Avocado. Pan-Roasted Halibut with Cherry Tomatoes and Butternut Squash. Fall Off the Bone Baby Back Ribs. Molasses Sweet Potato Pie. “Take these recipes,” Sara invites, “take everything you know and feel about food, and have fun cooking.”

A cookbook for all seasons bursting with recipes easy enough for any day of the week, Fresh Every Day brings new meaning to comfort food.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #52839 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-24
• Released on: 2005-05-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This follow-up to The Foster's Market Cookbook offers new simple, spruced-up recipes from the author's North Carolina gourmet takeout shops. In the tradition of Martha Stewart, with whom Foster coauthored the previous book and worked as a chef in the '80s, the effortlessly elegant food also reflects Foster's Southern background, with its prevalence of sweet potatoes, cornmeal and black-eyed peas. Flavorful marinades, fresh herbs and seasonal ingredients maximize taste for quick meals on the grill or hands-off roasts. Numerous salsas and sides enliven each plate, and alternatives "for all seasons" to standards, like Twice-Baked Potatoes, Rice Pilaf, and Sautéed Shrimp, provide year-round variety. Desserts are unfussy crowd-pleasers such as Mom's Apple Cobbler with Buttermilk Biscuit Topping, and Individual Chocolate Pudding Cakes. Sidebars on "Basics" and "Tricks of My Trade" share tips on techniques, shortcuts and gadgets. Busy cooks will learn to love leftovers when delicious Slow-Roasted Pork Shoulder is transformed into spicy Green Chili, and Skillet Cornbread becomes rustic Panzanella, an Italian bread salad. This is homey, American food with a kick, sure to appeal to cooks in search of easy ways to revitalize their repertoire. 160 color photos. (May 24)

Review
“Sara Foster is the rarest cook I know. She has a sensible, down-to-earth approach that eludes others. She understands good food. More important, she knows intuitively how to create dishes to please the widest audience imaginable. I love her style, which is graceful and homespun at the same time. She has taught me that great food really is in the details.” —Jonathan Waxman

About the Author
Sara Foster is the founder and owner of Foster’s Market, the cheerful, country-style market/cafés in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Author of The Foster’s Market Cookbook and a contributing food editor for Cottage Living magazine, Sara previously worked as a chef for Martha Stewart’s catering company. Sara and her husband, Peter Sellers, live on a farm outside of Durham.

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

Customer Reviews

Nouveau Southern with Chipotle. Better than the First Book
`Fresh Every Day, More Great Recipes from Foster's Market' is Sara Foster's second book in about three years, with a new co-author, Carolynn Carreno, a co-author of the very good New York City bistro / bakery book, `Once Upon a Tart'. Whether it is from the change in collaborator or some other reason, Ms. Foster has succeeded in giving us a book which is not only better than her first, but it is better than books from her nearest competitors, Paula Deen and fellow Martha Stewart alum, Ina Garten. While Deen gives us very good renditions of classic Southern dishes, Ms. Foster and her allies have done a `fusion Southern' cuisine which has all the charm of the original models with maybe just a little less fat and a little more flavor. Compared to fellow caterer, Ms. Garten of Long Island, Ms. Foster gives us much more bang for our $35. I have always thought Ms. Garten's books are just a tad overpriced for their content. Sara Foster has delivered a lot more content, and more interesting content, for the same price.

While it took a fair amount of careful reading before I gave Sara's first book my five stars, my visceral pleasure with this book kicked in almost immediately, which is a sure sign that this is a quality cookbook. Very good and very bad books usually show their colors in the first few pages. When you have to look for the good stuff, it is surely an average book.

The book has just a slightly different focus than the first book, in that it covers a lot of things Ms. Foster cooks at home for her family and dishes she demonstrates when she is doing book tours and cooking classes.

For starters, I always give high marks to books with good breakfast recipes. For every decent book on breakfast dishes, there are fifty or more on desserts, so, we are always in need of more and better breakfast dishes. None of the recipes are really unusual, but that isn't what you want from a rural milieu caterer. You can get the fancy breakfasts from The Plaza and the Hiltons. The scrambled egg recipe(s) are a fine sample of what Ms. Foster and company do so well in this book. She gives the basic technique that is effective, but simple. No James Beard water bath cooking for 40 minutes here. Then, she gives us six different variations plus the courage to throw in most different kinds of odds and ends leftovers from the fridge.

I thought the following page with breakfast tortilla recipes goes a long way to showing how far Mexican cuisine has influenced our cooking in that Ms. Foster uses the terms chipotle, burrito, quesadilla, and enchilada with no explanation of what they mean and really assumes the reader will have no problems following an instruction to `fold it like a burrito'. Later in this chapter, chipotle finds its way into several different recipes. The chapter also covers such essential subjects as grits, smoothies, biscuits, muffins, and granola.

The next chapter is `Simple Soups' which opens with a sidebar on soup making which has almost as many spiffy soup suggestions as several soup books I have reviewed. Like the breakfast dishes, most soups are pretty standard and pretty hearty, with a heavy emphasis on roasted ingredients and pureed preparations. There are some interesting surprises such as the golden gazpacho soup, but the big value is in teaching us to use soup toppings and garnishes.

The third chapter is on `seasonal salads and salad meals'. The content which impressed me most was the number of different vinaigrette recipes, including summer herb, sweet basil, balsamic, blue cheese, tarragon, sweet and spicy, sesame ginger, red wine with chives, tangy Italian, black olive, and pad thai vinaigrettes. And that just the vinaigrettes!

The fourth chapter is `seasonal sides' with lots of stuff on using fruits and root vegetables. The most interesting section is the general suggestion plus several recipes on mashing vegetables OTHER than potatoes. This notion, plus the variations on doing corn on the cob are worth the price of the chapter.

The fifth chapter is `quick and tasty meat main dishes' which throws lots of Southern, Italian, Greek, and Mexican ideas into a pot and comes up with great nouveau Carolina cuisine. The featured sidebar is on grilling. The best `extras' are recipes for `fridge pickles and pan seared duck breasts.

The sixth chapter is `fast and fresh fish, pasta, and risotto meals'. This chapter is heavy on the shrimp and scallops plus halibut, snapper, sea bass, and lots of condiments such as lemon chive oil, Cajun aioli, and green goddess dressing. The sidebar on fish cookery is excellent.

The seventh chapter is `meals that cook themselves' which, of course, is not literally true. It is a collection of recipes that cook for a long time with little or no fuss or attention. Lots of classics appear here, many with the addition of Sara's favorite ingredient, chipotle.

The last chapter is `a little something sweet' which tend to be quick assemblies rather than elaborate cakes and pies, although there is a pretty standard recipe for a piecrust and a blueberry pie. The recipe uses all vegetable shortening, and I am partial to pastry crusts done with butter. I don't thing Sara will mind if you use a classic French pate brisee in place of `Judy's Flaky PieCrust. Her sidebar on making piecrusts may not have every little detail, but it's very good if this is the only book you have.

Ms. Foster's pair of books is the perfect example for those of you who don't want a lot of cookbooks, but you want interesting recipes. Getting these two books will give you great value with no risk of recipe overlap. I certainly recommend these over books from Ms. Deen and Ms. Garten, although both of these ladies have done some very nice volumes.

Highly recommended!

This Is What They Eat in Heaven But Oh My Poor Eyes!
First the good news: the recipes and photos are every bit as wonderful as those in Sara Foster's first cookbook. That is very high praise, as you know.

We've had the book less than a week and we've made the Icebox Pickles, the Chipotle Mustard Sauce, the Chicken Salad with Apples, Grapes, And Spicy Pecans, and the Dark Chocolate Soufflé Cake. It's all so, so good!

Sara Foster, I am your devoted fan and I will probably buy any cookbook you write. However, the layout on this one is terrible: small print and not much white space. For example, the "WHAT TO SERVE WHEN" section should have been separated from the intro paragraph, instead of just changing ink color. The binding should allow the page to lie flat - after all, it's a cookbook. The book is just plain hard to read and use.

That said, I'm already waiting for the next Sara Foster cookbook!

A good solid cookbook
I own both this book and her first one, and while I generally have had more success with recipes from the first, Fresh Every Day is certainly not without merit. A previous reviewer is correct in stating that the print is too small and the layout could be more user friendly. I have found that the breakfast, bread, and dessert recipes are more reliable than some of the others. I only experienced one failure from Ms. Foster's first cookbook, when the chevre stuffing wouldn't stay in the chicken thighs. It was still delicious, just not pretty.

The most important thing I can say about my experience with Ms. Foster's cookbooks is this - I e-mailed her at Foster's Market with a question, and I received a personal reply with a plausible answer. For that fact alone, I'll buy whatever she writes. I recommend both her books.