The Santa Monica Farmers' Market Cookbook Summer Entertaining

Book excerpt: The ultimate guide to easy, local, sustainable entertaining in season. Now in e-book form, it’s easier than ever to access Amelia Saltsman’s tricks and techniques to simple, delicious cooking from local farmers’ markets. This seasonal “bite-size package” offers three menu chapters, each with recipes, entertaining tips, wine suggestions, shopping lists, and a countdown plan. There are also sections on how to shop at a farmers’ market, suggestions for useful kitchen tools and pantry items, and basic cooking techniques, as well as the Roasted Seasonal Vegetable Primer, an indispensable master recipe tool for every home cook. Illustrated with food photography by Staci Valentine, the book showcases the best of summer foods. Whether readers want an elegant supper or casual barbeque, or to know what to serve on a night perfect for sipping rosé, they will find out here. Each menu includes an appetizer, first course, main dish, accompaniments, and dessert that complement each other in flavor and preparation time. Cooks can prepare all the recipes for an extravagant lunch or dinner, or use just two or three for a simpler meal. Having entertained “market-style” for years, Amelia offers her strategies for balancing it all while producing a special meal: plan, shop, work, cook, visit with guests, and embrace the “carpe diem” philosophy of seasonal ingredients. Using one market as a lens, Amelia gave us the tools to shop and cook in season in her first, best-selling book. Now she shows us how to bring that knowledge to stress-free entertaining. Delicious ingredients give us the confidence to entertain. When we start with foods that were raised for how they were grown, all that is needed is a bit of technique to bring out their best. Wherever readers live, they will enjoy serving such simple showstoppers as: • Roast Halibut Loin with Black Olives and Summer Herbs • Cherry and Almond Salad • Green Zebra Tomato Gazpacho • Easy Peach Pavlova Words of praise for The Santa Monica Farmers’ Market Cookbook: Amelia’s book is an amazing resource to have with you, a complete season-by-season handbook to guide you through the bounty of the market. –Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse Restaurant In her first book, Saltsman proves that minimal effort, coupled with high-quality food can produce extraordinary results. –Publishers Weekly