Just been checking out the James Beard Foundation Awards nominees and I see that congratulations are in order for Heidi Swanson for her nomination in the Healthy Focus category. Her book - Super Natural Cooking: Five Ways to Incorporate Whole & Natural Ingredients into Your Cooking - is a constant source of ideas and inspiration these days as I try out her ideas and experiment with new ingredients.
Nominated in the Asian Cooking section is Fuchsia Dunlop for Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook - I'm just reading Shark's Fin & Sichuan Pepper, her enthralling memoir of cooking and eating in China. Fuchsia is also up for a Newspaper Feature Writing award, as is David Leite of Leite's Culinaria. Other of my favourite authors up for awards are Mark Bittman aka the New York Times writer that brought No-Knead bread to the world (How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food), Alice Medrich for Pure Desert (we're big fans of her Chocolate Buckwheat Cookies around here), Anne Willan (The Country Cooking of France), 2005 Savour NZ presenter Patricia Wells (Vegetable Harvest) and - one of the most entertaining food books from last year - Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver (I still have plans to try out her recipe for homemade mozzarella!). The awards will be announced on Sunday 8 June.
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