The cookbooks bringing us joy and changing our lives in the kitchen this spring
Spring's parade of cookbooks are bringing a lot of joy into our kitchens. We read, cooked and baked our way through dozens of them, finding respite in some newfound culinary wisdom. Ace L.A. baker Nicole Rucker of Fat + Flour gave us recipes from her new book for London Fog brownies and her signature vegan lemon lavender cookies, using simplified methods that turned her baking world around. Ari Kolender, the chef whose East Hollywood raw bar Found Oyster won us over with pristine seafood and clam shack charm, wrote 'How to Cook the Finest Things in the Sea' and helped us feel comfortable cooking all kinds of fish and shellfish. And along with chefs and other food lovers, we explored our own lived-in libraries, highlighting the cookbooks that have meant the most to us, the ones we most cherish, each for our own reasons. Here's what we're dog-earing right now.
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Inside the Painstaking Restoration of John Woo's ‘Hard Boiled' Set for Cannes Classics Spotlight (EXCLUSIVE)
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Do you love or hate brunch?
The meal with a slice of cantaloupe at the end. Plus, breakfast burritos, Issa Rae's new pizzeria, remembering the Napa Valley icon at the middle of the 'Apostrophe War' and 'the art world's strange relationship with food.' I'm Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week's Tasting Notes. Chefs famously hate brunch. It's not considered a 'serious' meal. All that day drinking. All that hollandaise sauce. And, in recent years, plate after plate of avocado toast. Would their Blood Mary-soused customers even notice if the food wasn't as sharp at brunch as at dinner? And yet, here in Los Angeles some of our best chefs are making brunch a meal to take seriously. As senior Food editor Danielle Dorsey points out in our newly released guide to 32 great L.A. brunch spots, the same scallop tostada, crudo and lobster bisque roll you find at dinner at Ari Kolender's Found Oyster, is served at brunch. 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Meanwhile, Stephanie Breijo wrote about the new initiative launched this week by cookbook store Now Serving to help those who lost their homes in the Eaton and Palisades fires rebuild their cookbook collections. You can help by either buying requested cookbooks or participating in a series of raffles to raise money to replace the books that burned. Last week's Cooking newsletter, which is sent out on Sundays — here's a link if you don't subscribe to the free newsletter — came from Food contributor Carolynn Carreño, who wrote about 'the simple and decadent combination of bread and chocolate' and included four recipes from the Times archives: Nancy Silverton's Bittersweet Chocolate Tartufo With Olive Oil-Fried Croutons, Ray Garcia's Chocolate and Banana Bread Pudding and Pinot Bistro's Chocolate Croissant Pudding and Emily Alben's Chocolate Gelt Babka With Hazelnut Amaretti Filling and Chocolate Espresso Glaze. 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