Italian Easy or Adventures on the Wine Route

Italian Easy: Recipes from the River Cafe London

Author: Rose Gray

"Easy food doesn't have to mean unsophisticated food."

Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, founders of London's renowned River Cafe, are famous for their innovative approach to traditional Italian fare. In Italian Easy, their fifth cookbook, they reinvent the Italian kitchen for today's busy home cook, refuting the notion that elegant food requires hours of preparation. These are visually spectacular, remarkably simple recipes for those who love good food but have little time to prepare it.

Displaying the imagination and panache that are Rose and Ruth's hallmarks, the nearly 200 recipes in Italian Easy are streamlined for efficiency in the kitchen without compromising either quality or taste. Relying on a well-stocked pantry, just a handful of fresh, seasonal ingredients, and even fewer steps, these sublime recipes summon both familiar and surprising Italian flavors. Bruschetta with tender asparagus and shaved Parmesan, tagliatelle with ripe figs and spicy chiles, slow-roasted chicken with fresh nutmeg and prosciutto, and the restaurant's popular Chocolate Nemesis cake are all as enticing as they are effortless.

This is not Italian food that's impossible to pronounce or prepare. At once straightforward and sexy, this is Italian Easy--the cookbook that makes it possible for busy people to eat well every night of the week.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

Gray and Rogers deliver innovative, stripped-down Italian home cooking, and they're fond of dishes that a home cook can shop for and get to the table within an hour or two.

Book about: Cooking 1 2 3 or Cheese Board

Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer's Tour of France

Author: Kermit Lynch

Kermit Lynch’s recounting of his experiences on the wine route and in the wine cellars of France takes the reader through the Loire, Bordeaux, the Languedoc, Provence, Northern and Southern Rhone, and the Cote d’Or.

Publishers Weekly

``Wine is, above all, pleasure. Those who would make it ponderous make it dull,'' declares wine importer Lynch in this robustly irreverent account of his quest through France in search of wine. Lynch's winefoolery is serious; drollery never compromises his knowledge of his subject or his high standards. Even when mocking the misdeeds of viniculturalists, he remains an arbiter who merely wishes ``wine could be a constitutionally protected form of expression.'' Hating wine hype, Lynch criticizes modern agricultural and manufacturing methods with equal fervor. He laughs at trends in wine consumption, and singles out modern greed as a corrupter. Effortlessly eloquent, Lynch is a master of the brief barb: ``Loving Chablis is like falling in love with a frigid floozy.'' The author prefers a wine that offers ``a subtle seduction; it keeps you coming back for more.'' So too with this unusual guide: it makes you thirst for a sequel. Photos not seen by PW. (Oct.)

Roald Dahl

Nearly all wine books are written by experts whose intention is primarily to inform or to educate. They give little aesthetic pleasure. Kermit Lynch is certainly an expert, but his book, Adventures on the Wine Route, is also a great pleasure to read. I enjoyed it more than any other wine book I have read.

Hugh Johnson

I am simply thrilled by it. I am bowled over by his blend of poetry and candour. What heaven-sent common sense.

Clive Coates

Quirky, opinionated, maddening, hilarious... riveting, illuminating, totally original... Strongly recommended.

Victor Hazan

In Kermit Lynch's small, true, delightful book there is more understanding about what wine really is than in everything else I have read.

M.F.K. Fisher

One of the pleasantest and truest books about wine I've ever read.

The Wine Advocate - Robert M. Parker,Jr.

A riveting account of one man's pursuit of authenticity as well as excellence in wine... Kermit Lynch's colorful portraits of some idiosyncratic vintners, and his commentaries on their wines, make for some of the finest reading since Joseph Wechsberg ate and drank his way through France in his book Blue Trout and Black Truffles.