Andrea Reusing runs a popular restaurant called Lantern. Many people would expect her first cookbook to be filled with recipes for the restaurant's Asian dishes that have earned Reusing a national reputation.
Instead, Reusing has written a personal book about what she likes to cook at home.
"Some people have been surprised that it is not a Lantern cookbook," she said. "You may think that you wanted a Lantern cookbook, but that cookbook would be on your bookshelf for the most part.
"I wanted to make a messy book," she said. "I wanted people to feel this is something they can use, rather than a coffee-table book."
"Cooking in the Moment: A Year of Seasonal Recipes" (Clarkson Potter, $35) does reflect the interest in seasonal and local food that crosses Reusing's personal and professional life.
Organized by season, with many essays about a particular day or meal, the book has the feel of a diary – one year in the life of a chef.
Reusing is a self-taught chef who grew up in New Jersey. She came to North Carolina in 1996 to be with her boyfriend – now her husband – Mac McCaughan, well-known in indie music circles as a founder of the Superchunk rock band and the Merge record label.
She did a bit of catering before becoming the chef of Enoteca Vin restaurant and wine bar in Raleigh when it opened in 1999. Even then, before "locavore" became a buzzword, Reusing was sourcing many restaurant ingredients from area farms.
In 2002, when she opened Lantern with her brother, Brendan Reusing (who later sold his share to her), Andrea Reusing knew that she wanted to be known for using local food. She paired that idea with a business decision to serve Asian food: She thought it would sell in Chapel Hill.
Nine years later, she is known as a chef who creates incredible Asian food using mostly North Carolina ingredients. She currently is a finalist for the Best Chef in the Southeast award, which the James Beard Foundation will announce May 9. Gourmet magazine, before its demise, called Lantern one of the Top 50 restaurants in the country in 2006, and Reusing's Asian cuisine has been written about in Food & Wine, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
"Cooking in the Moment," though, is not an Asian cookbook. "I don't usually cook Asian at home. I do ingredient-driven things at home."
The book's title refers to focusing on one meal at a time, but Reusing said she also was thinking about cooking seasonally. "I wrote the book over 13 months, and I kind of wrote it chronologically," she said.
The many diary-like entries, roughly dated in chapters named after the four seasons, reinforce the seasonal feel. And many people will feel "in the moment" when reading her personal musings on the first asparagus of spring, her love of the "homely" turnips and other vegetables of winter, or her favorite ways to cook eggplant and okra in the summer. Other entries highlight her favorite farmers or cooking tips.
The more than 130 recipes include onion-braised overnight brisket in winter, shrimp stew with rice and peas in spring and cucumber salad with lemon basil in summer.
Her favorite season is fall. "Fall is particularly great in the South because you have all of the end-of-the-summer produce and all of the fall things together for a couple of weeks," she said. In that chapter, she offers grass-fed Porterhouse steaks with crisp herbs, oyster stew, red-onion preserves, white sweet-potato soup and macaroni with white beans, roasted pumpkin and ham hocks.
Reusing doesn't bake much, but she does include a few desserts, mainly with fruit, such as chilled berry pudding with cream, juicy Satsuma orange cake, broiled ripe figs with warm ricotta and strawberry buttermilk ice cream.
Reusing said that the book is not about quick cooking, but it does reflect a simplicity born of the deliciousness of quality ingredients at their peak freshness.
"You don't have to be an expert to cook dinner for your friends. This is not rocket science," she said.
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