* FOOD BOOK OF THE MONTH: The Nimble Cook, by Ronna Walsh

THE NIMBLE COOK (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019, 400 pages, ISBN 978-0-544-93550-1 $30 USD hardbound) is by Ronna Welsh, owner of a NYC cooking school The Purple Kale Kitchenworks. She specializes in teaching cooks to strategize efficiently while cooking simply and creatively. Notable log rollers include Jacques Pepin, Amanda Hesser, and Dorie Greenspan. Here she has a book of great meals that make the most of your ingredients. She rides the crest of books that use the whole food item in cooking, with no waste. She tries to get you to learn new techniques for releasing flavour so you eventually cook without recipes, putting the ingredients first. She cleverly uses end papers of the book to layout graphs of cooking chicken, herbs, pork, and citrus, showing relationships created by herb-infusions, roasted whole lemons, sausage, and chicken stock – for example. It is all arranged by type of ingredient, from aromatics through leaves, stalks, shoots, heads, bulbs, summer veggies, winter roots, mushrooms, apples, lemons, fish, poultry, meat, pasta and polenta, and grains. She concludes with a pantry: eggs, bread, wine, vinegar, dried fruit, nuts and seeds, rubs, butters, condiments, and cheese. The chapters of ingredients are sub-arranged by seasons. She then gives us some fave preps for each (called "starting points"), followed by ways to use these preps with other dishes (which she calls "explorations"). The starting points should see you through more than one dish, thus allowing you to get the ingredients ready for another use. She says, "Your kitchen starts to sustain itself". Preparations have their ingredients listed in avoirdupois measurements, but the book could have been so improved if it also used metric in the recipes, or at least had a metric conversion chart.

Audience and level of use: cooks, innovators.

Some interesting or unusual recipes/facts: seared sausage with julienned celeriac; pulled pork and pickled squash sandwich; cabbage and green lentils with orange vinaigrette; sauteed unravelled Brussels sprouts with caraway, lemon and dill; braised chicken legs with rhubarb compote and sun-dried tomatoes; spiced lamb meatballs with chickpeas, pickled parsley and yogurt.

The downside to this book: publishers should please think about ROW (rest of the world) when dealing with measurements. Of the developed countries, the USA stands alone with avoirdupois measurements. At least quality US bakers use metric in scaling their recipes.

The upside to this book: good material on how to use food that used to be thrown away.

Quality/Price Rating: 91.

Chimo! www.deantudor.com