Posts Tagged ‘Food’
Patric Kuh with Antonia Lofaso
8pm
in conversation with Antonia Lofaso
Finding the Flavors We Lost:
From Bread to Bourbon, How Artisans Reclaimed American Food
Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School
Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$20 General Admission Section Seat
$45 Reserved Section Seat + book
Kuh begins by narrating the entertaining stories of countercultural “radicals” who taught themselves the forgotten crafts of bread, cheese, and beer-making in reaction to the ever-present marketing of bland, mass-produced food, and how these people became the inspiration for today’s crop of young chefs and artisans. Finding the Flavors We Lost also analyzes how population growth, speedier transportation, and the societal shifts and economic progress of the twentieth century led to the rise of supermarkets and giant food corporations, which encouraged the general desire to swap effort and quality for convenience and quantity.
Kuh examines how a rediscovery of the value of craft and individual effort has fueled today’s popularity and appreciation for artisanal food and the transformations this has effected on both the restaurant menu and the dinner table. Throughout the book, he raises a host of critical questions. How big of an operation is too big for a food company to still call themselves “artisanal”? Does the high cost of handcrafted goods unintentionally make them unaffordable for many Americans? Does technological progress have to quash flavor? Eye-opening, informative, and entertaining, Finding the Flavors We Lost is a fresh look into the culture of artisan food as we know it today—and what its future may be.
Antonia Lofaso joined Joe Bastianich and Tim Love in the second season of CNBC’s ‘Restaurant Startup,’ as a consultant and the show is now in its third season. Best known for her role on Top Chef Season 4, Top Chef All Stars and Top Chef Duels, Chef Antonia Lofaso is one of America’s most loved chefs. Most recently, Lofaso has gone from television personality to business owner and is currently executive chef and owner of Black Market in Studio City, California and Scopa Italian Roots in Venice, California. With a lifelong passion for cooking, Lofaso chased her dreams and has managed to balance her busy career with being a single parent. She shares her secrets and tips in her book The Busy Mom’s Cookbook re-released in paperback and can be seen as a frequent judge on Food Network’s Cutthroat Kitchen.
Padma Lakshmi
in conversation with Aimee Liu
Love, Loss, and What We Ate
Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School
Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$43 Reserved Section Seating + Book*
$95 Reception**(6:30-7:30pm)+ Reserved Section seat + Book*
$20 General Admission Seats
* Books will be picked up at the event, and signed immediately after the talk
** Reception will include selections prepared from Padma Lakshmi’s recipes
Padma Lakshmi is the host of the Emmy Award-winning, top-rated Bravo series Top Chef, and the author of two cookbooks: the award-winning Easy Exotic and Tangy, Tart, Hot & Sweet. The first internationally successful Indian supermodel, she has appeared in numerous fashion spreads and has walked the runway for designers Ralph Lauren, Emmanuel Ungaro, and Alberta Ferretti, and starred in campaigns for Versus and Roberto Cavalli.
Love, Loss, and What We Ate is a vivid memoir of food and family, survival and triumph; and traces the arc of Padma Lakshmi’s unlikely path from an immigrant childhood to a complicated life in front of the camera—a tantalizing blend of Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone and Nora Ephron’s Heartburn.
Long before Padma Lakshmi ever stepped onto a television set, she learned that how we eat is an extension of how we love, how we comfort, how we forge a sense of home–and how we taste the world as we navigate our way through it. Shuttling between continents as a child, she lived a life of dislocation that would become habit as an adult, never quite at home in the world. And yet, through all her travels, her favorite food remained the simple rice she first ate sitting on the cool floor of her grandmother’s kitchen in South India.
Poignant and surprising, Love, Loss, and What We Ate is Lakshmi’s extraordinary account of her journey from that humble kitchen, ruled by ferocious and unforgettable women, to the judges’ table of Top Chef and beyond. It chronicles the fierce devotion of the remarkable people who shaped her along the way, from her headstrong mother who flouted conservative Indian convention to make a life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfather—a brilliant engineer with an irrepressible sweet tooth—to the man seemingly wrong for her in every way who proved to be her truest ally. Her memoir includes evocative recipes, and is alive with the scents, tastes, and textures of a life that spans complex geographies both internal and external.
Love, Loss, and What We Ate is an intimate and unexpected story of food and family—both the ones we are born to and the ones we create—and their enduring legacies.
Aimee Liu is the best-selling author of Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders and the novels Flash House, a tale of suspense and Cold War intrigue set in Central Asia; Cloud Mountain, based on the true story of her American grandmother and Chinese revolutionary grandfather; and Face,
a psychological mystery involving mixed-race identity. These books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Liu’s articles, essays, and short stories have appeared in anthologies and periodicals such as The Los Angeles Times, Ms., Cosmopolitan, Self, Glamour, and Good Housekeeping. She is a past president of the national writers’ organization PEN USA and a current member of the faculty of Goddard College’s MFA program in creative writing at Port Townsend, WA. Visit her website.
Madhur Jaffrey
Vegetarian India:
A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking
William Turner Gallery
Bergamot Station Arts Center
2525 Michigan Avenue,
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$47 Reserved Section seating + Book
$95 Pre-Reception(6:30-7:30pm)* + Reserved Section seating + Book
$20 General Admission
* Reception includes selections prepared from the book, California wine
Madhur Jaffrey is the author of many previous cookbooks—seven of which have won James Beard Awards—and was named to the Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America by the James Beard Foundation. She is the recipient of an honorary CBE from Queen Elizabeth II for her services to drama and promoting the appreciation of Indian food and culture. She is also an award-winning actress, having won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival, with numerous major motion pictures to her credit.
No one knows Indian food like Madhur Jaffrey. For more than forty years, the “godmother of Indian cooking” (The Independent on Sunday) has introduced Western home cooks to the vibrant cuisines of her homeland. Now, in Vegetarian India: A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking, the seven-time James Beard Award–winning author shares the delectable, healthful, vegetable- and grain-based foods enjoyed around the Indian subcontinent.
Vegetarian cooking is a way of life for more than 300 million Indians. Jaffrey travels from north to south, and from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal, collecting recipes for the very tastiest dishes along the way. She visits the homes and businesses of shopkeepers, writers, designers, farmers, doctors, weavers, and more, gathering their stories and uncovering the secrets of their most delicious family specialties. From a sweet, sour, hot, salty Kodava Mushroom Curry with Coconut originating in the forested regions of South Karnataka to simple, crisp Okra Fries dusted with chili powder, turmeric, and chickpea flour; and from Stir-Fried Spinach, Andhra Style (with ginger, coriander, and cumin) to the mung bean pancakes she snacks on at a roadside stand, here Jaffrey brings together the very best of vegetable-centric Indian cuisine and explains how home cooks can easily replicate these dishes—and many more for beans, grains, and breads—in their own kitchens.
With more than two hundred recipes, beautifully illustrated throughout, and including personal photographs from Jaffrey’s own travels, Vegetarian India is a kitchen essential for vegetable enthusiasts and home cooks everywhere.
Food events at Live Talks LA: Mark Bittman (Oct 16); Yotam Ottolenghi (Oct 23) & Marcus Samuelsson (Oct 28)
Mark Bittman, Yotam Ottolenghi and Marcus Samuelsson speak at Live Talks LA, October 2014
We are excited about a series of food events at Live Talks Los Angeles this fall. All three are held at All Saints Church, Beverly Hills and are preceded by a reception with selections prepared from each of the cookbooks featured. We feature Mark Bittman on October 16, Yotam Ottolenghi on October 23 and Marcus Samuelsson on October 28.
October 16, Mark Bittman — one of America’s best-known and most widely respected food writers. He covers food policy, cooking, and eating as an Opinion columnist for The New York Times and the paper’s Sunday Magazine. He produced “The Minimalist” column for 13 years and has starred in several popular Public Television cooking series. Now a frequent public speaker, he appears regularly on the Today Show and is a guest on a wide range of television and radio shows. Bittman has authored more than a dozen cookbooks, including How to Cook Everything® The Basics, How to Cook Everything®, How to Cook Everything® Vegetarian (all available as apps), Food Matters and The Food Matters Cookbook, and the new VB6™: Eat Vegan Before 6:00. Visit his website. In How to Cook Everything Fast, Bittman provides a game plan for becoming a better, more intuitive cook while you wake up your weekly meal routine with 2,000 main dishes and accompaniments that are simple to make, globally inspired, and bursting with flavor.
October 23, Yotam Ottolenghi who owns an eponymous group of four restaurants, plus the high-end restaurant, Nopi, in London. His previous cookbooks—Plenty, Jerusalem, and Ottolenghi—have all been on the New York Times bestseller list. He writes for The Guardian, and appears on BBC. Plenty More is the much anticipated follow-up to Ottolenghi’s bestselling and award-winning cookbook Plenty, featuring 120 vegetarian dishes organized by cooking method. Plenty influenced the way people cook and eat vegetables. Its focus on flavorful, vegetable-centric dishes that emphasize spices and fresh ingredients caused a produce-cooking craze in the UK, the US, and the world over. Plenty More continues in the spirit of Plenty, with dazzling dishes, prepared raw, grilled, baked, simmered, cracked, or braised. It features recipes for main dishes, sides, salads, and sweets including Membrillo and Stilton Quiche, Buttermilk-Crusted Okra, Candy Beets with Lentils, Roasted Rhubarb with Sweet Labneh, and Quince Poached in Pomegranate Juice.
October 28, Marcus Samuelsson, owner of Red Rooster restaurant in Harlem and former Executive Chef and co-owner of New York’s Restaurant Aquavit, AQ Cafe at Scandinavia House, and Riingo. The youngest chef ever to receive two three-star ratings from The New York Times, he starred on Discovery Home Channel’s Inner Chef. His cookbooks include Aquavit and the New Scandinavian Cuisine, The Soul of a New Cuisine, which won the 2007 James Beard Foundation Award for best international cookbook, and New American Table. He is winner of Top Chef Masters, and a judge on Chopped. In 2009, he was chosen by President Obama to cook the first state dinner. In his latest cook book, Marcus Off Duty, Samuelsson shows how he cooks at home for family and friends. Born in Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, and trained in European kitchens, he is a world citizen turned American success story. The recipes blend a rainbow of the flavors he experienced in his travels—Ethiopian, Swedish, Mexican, Caribbean, Italian, and Southern soul. His eclectic, casual food includes dill-spiced salmon; coconut-lime curried chicken; mac, cheese, and greens; chocolate pie spiced with Indian garam masala; and for kids, peanut noodles with slaw.
Previous food events at Live Talks Los Angeles include: Marcus Samuelsson in 2012 discussing his memoir; Daniel Boulud with Jonathan Gold and Suzanne Goin with Russ Parsons. Videos to each are in the links.