Keep It Seasonal: Soups, Salads, and Sandwiches

By Annie Wayte and Annie / Glasier Christopher (PHT) Wayte

In our increasingly busy lives, meals need to be fast, healthy, and light. In Keep It Seasonal, acclaimed chef Annie Wayte offers 100 recipes, each with a spectacular color photograph of the finished dish, for simple soups, salads, and sandwiches organized by season so that home cooks can make the most of fresh, available produce. Keep It Seasonal is the ideal cookbook for those who shop at farmer's markets, Whole Foods, and Wild Oats. Why purchase asparagus out of season when the prices are sky high? Why buy strawberries in winter when they are tasteless and full of water? Not only is produce more affordable when it is in season, but its quality and nutritional content are at their peak. In Keep It Seasonal, chef Annie Wayte awakens cooks to ingredients that are truly fresh, local, and in season, and explains why buying locally grown foods is better than buying organic food trucked in from thousands of miles away. Within the four seasonal chapters, the recipes are organized into three sections: soups, salads, and sandwiches. Home cooks can mix and match with recipes such as Fresh Pea Soup with Morels, Crispy Prosciutto and Leek Salad with Mustard Dressing, and Grilled Spicy Lamb Sandwiches on Flat Bread with Pistachio Relish (spring), or Squash Soup with Roasted Chestnuts and Pancetta, Pomegranate Glazed Quail with Cinnamon and Raisin Tabbouleh, and Gorgonzola, Pear, and Honey Open Sandwiches (autumn). The recipes are simple and easy to prepare because the fresh ingredients speak for themselves, and each includes a full-color photo of the finished dish.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060583924
• ISBN13: 9780060583927
• Release Date: May 2006
• Publisher: William Morrow Cookbooks
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 3.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 11.3" x 1.0" x 9.8"

Customer Reviews

simple,eloquent food

Mostly great ideas that involve work rather than esoteric ingredients, although gammon is hard to find. Her soups mostly spotlight one ingredient(Jerusalem artichokes,asparagus) that she supports with both ingredients and techniques, and the results are exceptonally tasty.

Tastey simplicity all year

The beautiful photos in this book make it inviting, and the recipes make you glad you accepted the invitation. I've prepared many of them and, indeed, will use the book in a cooking class I'm teaching. The focus on soups, salads, and sandwiches keeps the recipes fairly simple, while the use of seasonal food keeps the tastes fresh, even when one lives in north, as I do.

Excellent Treatment of Seasonal Dishes. Buy It!

`Keep It Seasonal' by international restauranteur, Annie Wayte is a fine example of how to do a book on seasonal recipes. While Ms. Wayte has obviously gone to school with Deborah Madison's doctrines, specifically those in Madison's `Local Flavors', it seems to me that at least compared to `Local Flavors', Ms. Wayte has actually done a better job of promoting seasonal cooking. I am generally very favorably inclined towards books giving recipes by the season or by the month, and Ms. Wayte has enhanced this first impression by focusing on `Soups, Salads, and Sandwiches'. First, as she correctly states, sandwiches are a woefully ignored corner of the culinary world (however, the current interest in Paninis, New Orleans specialities, Philly cheese steaks, and other trends suggests this is changing). I can count on one hand, with fingers left over, the really good books on sandwiches, with only `Nancy Silverton's sandwich book' being worthy of a place in a carefully selected cookbook collection. But sandwiches are also a great subject for a seasonal presentation, as so many ingredients are fresh. And, you don't want to spend a fortune on sandwich makings, so the seasonal lettuce and other veggies are always welcome. The same argument works in spades for salads, as virtually all the more common salad ingredients are seasonal, including major protein sources such as lamb and fish. Soups can come along for the ride, as they are such great accompaniments to salads and sandwiches. Several seasonal cookbooks, such as Alfred Portale's '12 Seasons Cookbook' and Brother Victor-Antoine d'Avila Latourrette's Monastery cookbooks (including soups and salads!) break things down by month, but I suspect dividing things by season is quite adequate for almost all produce. If the seasonality thing were the only points of contact between Wayte and Madison, I would not be too impressed, but Wayte seems to have learned from (or in parallel with) Madison about the efficacy of creating stocks to match the soup. The simplest example of this is to create a broth for corn soup from the cleaned husks, after removing the kernels. Ms. Wayte begins each season with a list of ingredients commonly available in that season, including meats, herbs, and even edible flowers along with the fruits and veggies. While she makes no special note of the fact, it is interesting to note that some vegetables such as broccoli are bi-seasonal, as they show up in the lists for both spring and fall. Speaking of broccoli, I do have to point out a slightly misleading photograph of a warm broccoli salad, where the recipe simply says `broccoli' but the photograph has broccoli rabe. I really suspect 7 out of 10 people who commonly use broccoli don't even know about broccoli rabe and would never look for it to work in a `broccoli recipe', and yet, broccoli rabe really works better in the recipe, especially with its fellow Italian ingredients, Parmesan cheese and black olives. Otherwise, I was quite ta

Excelente!

Excelente recetario, especialmente para gente que vive sola o que es media floja para guisar. Las recetas son originales, ricas y lo mejor es que se adaptan a los ingredientes de cada temporada. Altamente recomendable!!!

Gorgeous and Practical

I've read about the author in a few magazines recently (and in the NY Times last year, I think), so when I saw the book, I was at first worried that it was too beautiful and full of amazing photos and so the food must be difficult. But I was wrong - I've tried a few things and they are really pretty simple. And it's great that I can look up recipes in the Spring chapter right now and know that the ingredients are in season. As well, the recipes are really creative and I love that Ms. Wayte includes sweet soups and sandwiches as desserts - I made rubarb soup last night! However, the best recipes, at least from the way they look in the book (I think there is a photo of every recipe), must be the salads. There are some amazing combinations and they all look like they could be a meal in themselves. Anyone looking for a great gift for a novice or accomplished cook could do a lot worse than this!