Culinary School

As Serious Eats's culinary nerd-in-residence, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has pondered all these questions and more. Kenji shows that often, conventional methods don't work that well, and home cooks can achieve far better results using new - but simple - techniques. In hundreds of easy-to-make recipes, you will find out how to make foolproof Hollandaise sauce in just two minutes, how to transform one simple tomato sauce into a half dozen dishes, how to make the crispiest, creamiest potato casserole ever conceived, and much more.

When the organizing committee for her upcoming high school reunion needs a caterer, Halia agrees to help out. Soon she's serving up her signature macaroni and cheese and famous chicken wings to a host of appreciative ex-classmates. Some folks have blossomed since graduation. Others, like manipulative Raynell Rollins, currently married to a former football star, haven't changed nearly enough. When Raynell is found dead the morning after the reunion, the role call of possible suspects could fill the school gymnasium. Extramarital affairs, mega-church scandals and sports secrets...

When Jane Bertch was seventeen, her mother took her on a graduation trip to Paris. Thrilled to use her high school French, Jane found her halting attempts greeted with withering condescension by every waiter and shopkeeper she encountered. At the end of the trip, she vowed she would never return.

This is the story of one woman's journey to find herself. Armed with nothing but a love of food and the words of the 20th-century food writer M.F.K. Fisher, she travels from France to Italy, then the Congo, and back again. Along the way, she goes to pastry school in Paris, eats the most perfect apricots over the Tuscan hills, watches a family of gorillas grazing deep in the Congolese brush, has her heart broken one last time on a bridge in Lyon, and, ultimately, finds a path to life and joy.

When Nell Valenti is offered a chance to move to Tuscany to help transform an aging villa into a farm-to-table cooking school, she eagerly accepts. But Nell gets more than she bargained for when she arrives. With only a day to go until the launch dinner for the cooking school, the villa is in shambles, and Chef O is blissfully oblivious of the work that needs to be done before a group of local dignitaries arrive, along with a filmmaker. The situation only worsens when Nell discovers that the filmmaker is an ex-boyfriend, and he's found murdered later that night.

Nell Valenti is settling into her role of transforming the Villa Orlandini into a superb farm-to-table cooking school, and the time has finally come for a full taste test run. But when Chef Orlandini prepares to reveal his top secret marinara recipe for the first time to a group of American gastro-tourists, Nell realizes she might have bitten off more than she can chew.

In a first for the chefs' profession The Chefs’ Knowledge has gone audio. We broke new ground with our first-ever book for junior chefs, and now we’ve gone one step further by releasing a new audio version that takes the project in a completely new direction. The Chefs’ Knowledge contains interviews, advice, and expert knowledge, as well as working professional recipes for the 100 dishes every chef should know.

When a wealthy New York philanthropist pays top dollar for a private four-day ziti workshop, Nell Valenti wants everyone at the Villa Orlandini Cooking School focused on the task at hand. But complications abound when Nell’s boyfriend, Pete Orlandini, rushes to Rome for an unexpected business trip; Chef Orlandini is more preoccupied with a potential spot on an American cooking show than with preparing for the workshop; and an uninvited woman sneaks into the villa to inspect Pete’s olive grove.