Laura Calder took top honours for French Taste: Elegant Everyday Eating at Cuisine Canada’s annual Canadian Cookbook Awards ceremony, held at The Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in Toronto, November 5. Asked to comment on her gold medal win for “English Cookbook”, Calder told GFR “It feels especially good to get recognition in Canada and I’m so glad people like the book.”
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On the morning I met Canadian Living magazine food editor and author of The Vegetarian Collection: Creative Meat Free Dishes That Nourish & Inspire the professional cook turned recipe developer and cookbook author was beaming. The Vegetarian Collection had just climbed to the top of the softcover non-fiction bestseller list. Small wonder, since reducing the amount of meat in our diets has become a priority for health and environmental reasons. Kent’s task, of course, was to make that transition delicious.
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Blumer has made a career at focusing the joy of preparing and serving good food into easily consumed and digested cultural products, but it turns out it all came about by accident. Blumer’s first career was as a rock’n’roll manager, specifically to Jane Siberry, the Canadian avant-garde new wave chanteuse whose career he followed to California. In the early 90’s Siberry went to England to record an album with the legendary producer Brian Eno and Blumer used this hiatus to write Surreal Gourmet. “I was winging it, ” he says, “it was just my perspective on what makes a great dinner party.”
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I met Jack Bishop to talk about a book based on a TV show based on a magazine with a website hovering over all of them. Bishop is the Editorial Director at America’s Test Kitchen, a private company as famous for its PBS broadcast television show as its foodie-must-read magazine, ‘Cook’s Illustrated’. Bishop was in the Toronto offices of HarperCollins, the Canadian publisher of ‘The Best of America’s Test Kitchen 2011’. I spoke with Bishop about how ATK tests their recipes, gadgets and ingredients while maintaining their independence and serving home cooks across North America.
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In 2008, Bittman came out with Food Matters in which he advocated eating much less meat and more vegetables. He also confessed, in this book and in his newspaper columns and website, markbittman.com, to leading a double life. By day Bittman did his best to be a vegan. By, night he ate anything he liked. When I interviewed him for Gremolata in early 2009, he’d been at it for over a year and had lost a bunch of weight and felt great. Last month I interviewed Bittman again for the video below. He’d been at it and was touring to promote the follow up to Food Matters, The Food Matters Cookbook, which features 500 additional recipes that privilege plants over meat. As Bittman explained, both books are guided by what he calls “sane eating”.
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