THE NIMBLE COOK

For more than two decades, Ronna Welsh has been empowering home cooks and chefs with radically simple strategies for cooking creatively and efficiently. In this sweeping masterwork with 400 recipes, she shows how to make varied, impromptu, economical, and delicious meals by coaxing the most flavor from common ingredients.

The Nimble Cook teaches optimal prep methods, like the perfect way to dry and store greens—forget the salad spinner—for a salad made in seconds to pair with a vinaigrette composed of refrigerator door condiments. It provides hundreds of “starting point” recipes to transform basic dishes into luxurious ones, like an onion jam for burgers; a cheese stock for decadent risotto; or a mix of salt and whirred bay leaves that takes roasted shrimp or fish from ordinary to extraordinary. Welsh teaches nimble cooks irresistible uses for parts that otherwise go to waste, whether cucumber peels in kimchi or apple cores in a sweet-and-sour syrup for a bourbon cocktail. Graceful illustrations throughout provide further inspiration, making this book an essential addition to any creative cook's kitchen.

Professional chef Ronna Welsh is the founder of Purple Kale Kitchenworks, a bustling cooking studio and influential blog (www.purplekale.com) Her international readership includes fans who have traveled from as far as London, Toronto, and New Zealand for her workshops.

For twenty years Welsh has worked alternately as executive chef, pastry chef, and consulting chef in a host of quirky, greenmarket-driven New York City restaurants, such as Savoy and Rose Water. She has also worked in restaurants, pastry shops, on farms, and in homes in the south of France, the Spanish Pyrenees, the Greek island of Lesbos, and a little town in Sicily. Accolades for her culinary work hail from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Real Simple, Time Out New York, Bon Appetit and many other print and online media outlets. Ronna is a long-time member of the Chefs Collaborative and Women, Chefs, and Restaurateurs. She serves on an advisory board at Just Food, the New York based non-profit devoted to food justice and farmer community connections.