I Cook in Color

October 1, 2020
Chef, author, and entrepreneur Gomez (My Two Souths, 2017) celebrates the foods of her childhood in Southern India, her life and career in Atlanta, and her extensive world travels in this wide-ranging collection of recipes. Organized by type of dish, it offers an abundance of options for drinks; salads; soups and stews; vegetables and rice; seafood; poultry; pork, goat, and lamb; beef and venison; and desserts and sweets. Each recipe is accompanied by a few sentences about the dish's origin, the meaning it holds for the author, or the way she uses it in her everyday life. Many entries also include surprisingly frank and useful notes, such as you definitely need a juicer to make this drink. The wide array of cultures represented here means that there are a lot of ingredients that may vary in availability depending on the reader's location, but many recipes include suggestions for substitutions for some ingredients. Gomez's voice, sense of humor, and love of food's place in culture come through in all aspects. Robustly indexed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

October 5, 2020
Chef Gomez follows My Two Souths (also coauthored with Foose) with an eclectic recipe collection in which ingredients’ appearance takes center stage. Colorful ingredients, Gomez posits, offer nutritional benefits as well as visual appeal (“If a food has an attractive color, chances are it’s beneficial for you”), and, indeed, the vivid hues of her midsummer salad with grapefruit, cherries, watercress, and rainbow chard, and autumnal kabocha pumpkin bean soup are beautiful to behold. Adventurous cooks will fall in love with such dishes as Catalonian paella, quail ragu with picante frantumato, and fish head stew, with respective nods to Spain, Italy, and southern India. Those with less experience in the kitchen will be able to whip up a quick “emerald potion” smoothie, a 20-minute meal of “Pigs and Apples,” and an elegant seed-crusted whole roasted cauliflower. Desserts feature cardamom-huckleberry compote and saffron-poached quince. Gomez’s experience as an online cooking instructor shines through in her precise and easy-to-follow instructions. Drawing on an eclectic palette and knowledge of global cuisines, these recipes will delight food lovers of all stripes and cooks of all skill levels.