The Vineyard Kitchen: Menus Inspired by the Seasons

by Maria Helm Sinskey

Book Overview

In this age of celebrity chefs and rarefied ingredients, it is a great pleasure to publish this creative and wholesome collection of recipes, The Vineyard Kitchen, by Maria Helm Sinskey. In her debut book, Maria shares the homey yet sophisticated recipes that have made her one of America's most celebrated chefs and a culinary star. Though Maria lives in the Napa Valley, she was born and raised in the Northeast, and her recipes capture seasonal...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060013966
• ISBN13: 9780060013967
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 390 Pages
• Weight: 2.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 7.7" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

The Vineyard Kitchen

This book has some great receipes in it but almost no pictures of the food. The receipes are honest and delicious and a little above the skill of the average cook.

Thank goodness for the talented sanity

I'm so OVER cookbooks that try to impress and then merely confuse. I loved this cookbook, because the author/chef is so aware of what truly matters in cooking well...fresh, in season ingredients and preparation that enhances these ingredients. There's nothing pretentious about any of the recipes...some may seem a bit intimitating to novice cooks, but each recipe is very well written in order to guide and instruct. I always check out interesting cookbooks from my library to see if they are worth the investment before I buy...this one definitely is. Kudos to Maria Helm Skinskey...a great cookbook.

A Useful Book for Entertaining with Food and Wine

Maria Helm Sinskey is a professional chef who does ?culinary direction? and teaching at her husband?s vineyard. The book is a collection of ten menus per season where each menu consists of three to five dishes, three being the most common. The most typical menu consists of a recipe for soup or salad, a main dish, and a dessert. The introduction to each menu gives suggestions on pairings of wine with the food, depending on method of preparation.I know very little about wine and food pairings so my opinion on this subject is pretty thin. The advice includes a very wide variety of wines, including my favorite Rhine and Mosel area wines including wines from the Alsace, as the author?s family originally came from the Alsace (Strasbourg). The author seems to show the proper amount of respect for pairing wines with vegetables, especially the dreaded artichokes and asparagus and varies the recommendation by method of preparation.The focus on the seasons begs one to compare this to ?The Arrows Cookbook? and the focus on menus offers the comparison to Emeril Lagasse?s new restaurant(s) cookbook. The commitment to the menu style is better done than with Emeril?s book and I suspect the recipes are just a bit more discriminating than in Emeril?s book. The realization of the dedication to the seasonal is less convincing than in the Arrows book. It is a lot easier to take seasonal thinking more seriously when you are in Maine than when you are in California.Due to the organization by menu, where every menu has one or more desserts, you are getting many more dessert recipes for your money than you get from a more conventional organization, especially when the extra recipe (fourth or fifth) is often an additional dessert.With forty menus, you are also getting about 15 salads, 10 soups, and 15 dishes, which can best be identified as appetizers. These ?starters? seem to have a high percentage of dishes, which are richer than what I may like to see (high concentration of oils, cheeses, and cured meats). This and the dessert population both contribute to the fact that this book is NOT for dieters. I also noticed a bit of repetition among the starters recipes. Some looked suspiciously like others two seasons past. Very odd for seasonally timed dishes.The main courses continue the tendency toward the fatty. The 40 dishes cover protein with:Beef 9Fowl 8 (several of duck and goose)Lamb 5Fin Fish 5Pork 4Shellfish 3Vegetarian 6 (mostly pasta or risottos with lots of mushrooms and cheese)The 20% shellfish seems odd in today?s healthy eating environment, but lets be clear that this book is about seasonal eating with wine, not loosing weight. Many of the main dish recipes such as coq au vin, pepper encrusted New York strip, and bouillabaisse are old friends, so you may have several of them already.The quality of the recipes, the headnotes, and the cooks notes accompanying them is quite high. The author seems to give all the right cau

I highly recommend this cookbook!

I am not an experienced cook by any means, but I found the recipes to be clear, easy to follow and delicious! Many cookbooks that I buy tend to be a bit intimidating. But not this one.The Black and Blueberry Cobbler recipe was a huge hit at my dinner party.