Carla's Comfort Foods: Favorite Dishes from Around the World

by Carla Hall, Genevieve Ko (With), Frances Janisch (Photographer), Jennifer Barry (Designed by)

Overview

Featuring 130 recipes with new variations on soulful favorites, this cookbook covers the culinary globe on an ingenious, delicious mission: to capture the international flavors of comfort.

For Carla Hall, co-host of ABC’s The Chew, food is a wonderful way to forge connections with and between people. In her delicious new cookbook, Carla’s Comfort Foods, she finds inspiration by going around the world in search of the universal home-cooked flavors of comfort. Spinning standbys into distinctive new recipes, she combines the beloved flavors of home with the most delectable, enticing spices and tastes of international cuisine. Carla starts with your essential recipe for perfect all-American burgers; from there, you can choose to do them up Persian-style with cucumber yogurt sauce, lime, and fragrant spices; or give them a Vietnamese twist with pickled veggies, scallions, ginger, and cilantro; or take your burgers to Morocco with gutsy spices, chiles, and feta cheese.

Full of Carla’s entertaining stories, the book shows how seasoning can transform any simple recipe. A comprehensive spice and flavor guide lets you chart your own course in the kitchen by turning your favorite go-to dish into a culinary trip around the world. In recipes that reflect her own vivacious personality, Carla takes you from Southern chicken with milk gravy to West African spicy-sweet chicken stew; from German double-mustard potato salad to Moroccan spice-rubbed beef roast to Indian chile, pea, and coconut chutney; and from Southern peach cobbler to greek baklava.

From Nashville to Naples to Nigeria, nothing gathers friends and family around the table like the flavors of home. Now you can hug your friends and family with Carla’s incredibly flavorful takes on creamy soups and noodles, fragrant stews and dumplings, and mouthwatering pastries, pies, and tarts. Join Carla for a delicious journey!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781451662245
Publisher:	Atria Books
Publication date:	04/01/2014
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	356,767
File size:	99 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Carla Hall attended L’Academie de Cuisine in Maryland. She gained her audience when she competed on Bravo’s Top Chef and Top Chef: All Stars. She has been a TV personality since then, cohosting on the ABC talk show The Chew, contributing on Good Morning America, and featuring as a judge on Crazy Delicious on Netflix and on Bakeaway Camp on the Food Network. She is the author of Carla’s Comfort Foods, Cooking with Love, and Carla Hall’s Soul Food, which received an NAACP Image Awards nomination. She lives in Washington D.C. with her husband. Visit carlahall.com for more.

Genevieve Ko is the author of Better Baking. She has coauthored several books, including Home Cooking with Jean-Georges, Cooking with Love, and Carla’s Comfort Food. She has been an editor at numerous publications, such as Good Housekeeping, Gourmet, Fine Cooking, Bon Appetit, and The Los Angeles Times. She is currently a senior editor at New York Times Cooking. Visit genevieveko.com for more.

Editorial Reviews

As fans of ABC's The Chew know, Carla Hall's cooking blends her classic French training and her Southern upbringing and they also know her emphasis on fast, easy, and affordable meals. Her Carla's Comfort Foods combines all of those elements, serving up main courses, soups, salads, stews, pastries, pies, and tarts in excellent style. The cookbook also accent the international with dozens of international recipes among its 130 new offerings. A happy hootie ho to home cooks! Editor's recommendation.

01/20/2014
Hall’s enthusiasm for fast, easy, and affordable home cooking bubbles over at every exclamation in her latest cookbook on comfort food. (Hall also wrote Cooking with Love; she is the co-host of ABC’s The Chew and a former contestant on Bravo’s Top Chef All-Stars.) In this collection of 130 new recipes, Hall offers her take on homey dishes from around the world—including the American South, Italy, Morocco, Thailand, Hungary, etc.—connecting cultures over the communal meal. Organized by category (soups & salads, vegetables, meat) and subcategory (creamy soups, spinach, short ribs), the book is a useful resource for beginner cooks looking for different ways to prepare staple dishes. Each recipe uses basic ingredients easily found in pantries or local groceries, and includes clear, concise instructions and at least one cooking tip. Meant to address the less-seasoned cook who enjoys cheerful reassurances in the kitchen, the book’s tone throughout is conversational—“That’s how we all relate to food, right?”—personal, and confessional. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

I love Carla’s stories of how she develops her delicious dishes, tinkering with flavor combinations until she gets them just right. And what a range: her rustic mushroom tart is great and Granny’s five-flavor pound cake is worth the price of the book.

Jennifer Reese

"Carla is a born teacher. Full of useful insights and her signature humor (and patience), Cooking With Love puts Ms. Hootie Hoo herself right there at the stove next to you, every step of the way. Whether you're a novice or expert, she'll have you dancing into the kitchen to whip up unbelievably simple, sumptuous feasts from scratch."

Daphne Oz

Anyone who watches (or works at!!) the Chew knows that Carla Hall has a special way with comfort foods from the South, so it should come as no surprise that she is also a master of tasty, fresh, and simple foods from the rest of the known world. These quick and easy recipes give me an inexpensive opportunity to travel vicariously through Carla's eyes, and her fun-filled anecdotes and notes create a happy place to make exactly what I feel like eating right now. Carla is the international ambassador of the perfectly delicious!

Mario Batali

02/15/2014
Hall (Cooking with Love) is a popular former Top Chef contestant who owns an artisan cookie company and cohosts the ABC talk show The Chew. Coauthored with Ko (Home Cooking with Jean-Georges), her latest cookbook tempts adventurous eaters with 130 recipes for international comfort foods. Hall gives Mexican tomato-corn chowder, Southeast Asian cilantro fish stew, and other dishes her own twist, incorporating her preparations and tips. Recipe headnotes touch on Halls' career, personal life, and ingredient preferences. VERDICT Hall's unintimidating take on world cuisine isn't always authentic but can help novice cooks explore new spices.

Library Journal