The Family Meal: Home cooking with Ferran Adria pt 2

What's in it?

The book is separated into 3 sections.  We will go through them briefly, and in order.

"From elBulli to your kitchen"

This section includes an introduction, a little history, and many tips and suggestions for you from the elBulli kitchen.  There is a wonderful visual guide to the fish used in the book, which is an extremely good idea considering the same fish can go by as many different names as there are ways to cook it.

"Basic Recipes"

Here is where the good stuff starts.  This section is all the base recipes for stocks and sauces used in the rest of the book. These are the foundations on which most of the meals are built. 10 sauces and 4 stocks.  Each one alone good for making at least 10-15 things you've heard of and another 90 you haven't.  When you start combining them the stats get crazy.  Some of the recipes may take a little time but none are hard to complete or require hard to find ingredients. They all freeze well as well, so make some, use what you need for a meal, then freeze the rest to use tomorrow, or next week, or next month. Having just 2 of these 14 basics in your freezer can open up more possibility from whats in your pantry than you can imagine.

Your freezer could look like this!

"The meals"

Now that you have a freezer full of things you may not be sure how to use, the authors haven't just left you to figure out what goes where and with what else.  The meals are actually 3 course meals: appetizer, entree, desert. You can take each one as is, mix and match, or, if you're only feeling slightly hungry, just make desert.  Each meal starts with a gorgeous photo of all the required ingredients for each course, all laid out on a table to give you a visual idea of what your preparations should look like:

And all the individual recipes are laid out step by step with pictures and instructions:

No, not like that.  Like this.

These two HUGE details make every recipe in this book accessible, and takes the guess work out of trying to interpret an authors words into something edible. You already have an approximation of what each step of your cooking process should look like. How awesome is that?

Next time we will test a few of the dishes and we hope, finally convince you to get this book.