"Alice Waters" news and stories

Cookbooks from high-profile cooks and celebrity chefs -- including Giada De Laurentiis, Bobby Flay, Mark Bittman, David Chang, Martha Stewart and Alice Waters -- have gone digital.

Popular cookbook publishers Clarkson Potter and Ten Speed Press released 88 cookbooks as full-color e-books, optimized for color e-readers like the iPad and Nookcolor.

The titles will also be digitally available in black-and-white for Amazon's Kindle and other non-color digital readers. More than 2,600 e-cookbooks are available in Amazon.com's Kindle store. Barnes & Noble's Nook bookstore has more than 1,700 digital titles available.

While some, like Flay's Throwdown!, are from the fall 2010 list, 81 of the titles (such as Waters's The Art of Simple Food) are from the backlist.

Long before Alice Waters turned the Bay Area into a global gourmet hub, San Francisco was a food-obsessed city, even if the often-repeated boast that the city has more eateries per capita than anywhere else is iffy at best (exact stats aren't available).

"It's the weather. Unlike Southern California where they can go frolic on the beach – we're trapped inside our houses a lot, so we entertain, we eat and drink together," suggests Laurel Mays, managing editor of 944 magazine. And the ease of access to high-quality ingredients, which Waters so emphasizes, has been a source of local pride since the start. "That access to amazing ingredients, whether wine country or produce from the [Salinas] valley or seafood, that's catapulted our cuisine onto another level," agrees Marcia Gagliardi, who writes a weekly column on the local food scene.

Eating out is part of the DNA of San Francisco: when Gold Rush miners descended en masse, holed up in rooming houses without their kitchen-savvy wives, they paid for home cooking at impromptu cafés and the city's boom in restaurants had begun. "You hear so many stories of older San Francisco restaurants being boarding houses where the guys would smell the food the wife was making upstairs, she would start cooking for them and suddenly, they had a restaurant," Gagliardi notes. "It's the same now – the big tech community of young, single, unattached people go to restaurants each night to meet and mingle," Laurel Mays chuckles.

Read on about San Francisco's classic treats, after the jump...

Alice Waters is the queen bee of the local food movement in America. Her latest cookbook, In The Green Kitchen, is a compilation of essential cooking techniques. Unlike her other eight books, this one isn't for the seasoned home cook but rather the novice who really doesn't know how to boil water. (The "green" refers not only to the skill level but also to Water's passion for fresh, local ingredients.) The recipes include steaming a vegetable, making a good salad dressing and roasting a chicken. Each technique is introduced by a famous chef or cookbook author, including the likes of Lidia Bastianich, Rick Bayless and Thomas Keller, and all proceeds from the book will benefit the Chez Panisse Foundation in support of Edible Education.

SF: How did you come up with the idea for this book?
AW: I've had this idea in my head for a very long time to do a television series about the green kitchen. The idea of just coming into conversation with different kinds of cooks and trying to see what we had in common in terms of cooking simply.

When Slowfood Nation pulled itself together in San Francisco, I thought that maybe it would be a good time to do a trial run. So we got a set together, a live audience and a friend videotaped it. We invited different cooks who were in town for Slowfood Nation to drop in and we videotaped them doing some very simple dish and technique.

I asked my friend Christopher Hirscheimer to photograph them to document the event. I liked the photos so much I said, "Let's do a book."

Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell are the farmers and innovators behind Beekman 1802, a 200-year-old estate and farm in upstate New York. We'll be running recipes, photos and tales from the farm as their crops come into season.

Last month we concluded America's Oldest, Largest Garden Party by asking all of you to submit the best recipe you've concocted from ingredients from your own garden.

We were overwhelmed with all of the culinary talent out there, and we had to turn to our friend, celebrity chef and gardener Alice Waters, to help us choose the best of the best.

The recipe that emerged victorious was a succulent (and some might even say sexy) lamb stew that's just perfect for chilly autumn weekends.

An autumnal feast. Photo: Brent Ridge, Beekman 1802.

Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell are the farmers and innovators behind Beekman 1802, a 200-year-old estate and farm in upstate New York. We'll be running recipes, photos and tales from the farm as their crops come into season.

One of the true pleasures of life on the farm is walking out to the heirloom vegetable garden to decide what looks good for dinner. All summer, we've been sharing some of our own recipes, but we're not the only ones out there with a backyard garden and a little creativity. There are thousands of you!

We decided to hold a contest to see who came up with the best impromptu recipe from their garden this year.
And guess what? One of the most influential gardening chefs in the world, Alice Waters, is going to help us choose the winner. We'll even prepare the winning recipe and put it right here. You and your recipe could be famous!

To get you started on the right track, we're giving you one of our favorites this season.