Everyday Asian or Hotel Bemelmans

Everyday Asian: From Soups to Noodles, From Barbecues to Curries, Your Favorite Asian Recipes Made Easy

Author: Marnie Henricksson

Love Asian food but too intimidated to make it at home? Do you find yourself flipping through an Asian cookbook, and then going out for Thai noodles or Korean Barbecue, rather than going into your kitchen? When Marnie Henricksson gave up her noodle shop in Greenwich Village, and settled down to raise her kids in the 'burbs, she had difficulty finding her favorite Asian ingredients at the local supermarket. So, Marnie tweaked her recipes to work with readily available ingredients, allowing her and her family to enjoy Asian food everyday. In Everyday Asian, Marnie shares seventy-five of her favorite dishes with home cooks.

As the recipes draw on the traditional cuisines of Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and India, Marnie begins the book with a chapter detailing how to find, make, and store necessary ingredients, as well as giving advice on invaluable kitchen equipment for Asian cooking.

Here's your opportunity to master classicdishes such as Pad Thai, Chinese Pork Roasts, Spring Rolls, and Vietnamese Pho, and expand your imagination with Marnie's innovative recipes for Asian Pesto (replace pine nuts with peanuts and Italian basil with Thai basil, cilantro, and mint) and Spicy Chicken Wings (an American classic with a good dose of Asian spices).

It's clear from the abundance of Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Vietnamese restaurants that Americans are crazy about Asian food; however, cooking the real thing at home has always been a problem if you don't live near an Asian market. Now, with Marnie's easy-to-follow recipes, enjoying Asian food as often as you like is just a supermarket aisle away.

The New York Times

In her first book, the former owner of Marnie's Noodle Shop in Manhattan comes off like the Laurie Colwin of Asian food. Henricksson cares a lot about authenticity, but she cares more about the experiences of cooks who live outside America's urban centers and have trouble finding many Asian ingredients. She offers robust but stripped-down versions of dishes like pad Thai and Vietnamese beef pho, and the ginger sauce she puts on her striped bass is so zingy that we spread the leftovers on practically everything we ate for a week. This is a model of what a smart, honest, populist cookbook should be. — Dwight Garner

Go to: 150 Things to Make with Roast Chicken and 50 Ways to Roast It or Edible and Useful Plants of Texas and the Southwest

Hotel Bemelmans

Author: Ludwig Bemelmans

"Ludwig Bemelmans was the original bad boy of the New York hotel/restaurant subculture" writes Anthony Bourdain, and with his reporter's eye for sensory detail and his keen wit, Bemelmans' humorous autobiographical tales of behind the scenes kitchen life at the Ritz in 1920s and 30s New York never fail to amuse and engage.

Proabaly Bemelmans' best work—and certainly his most famous essays—Hotel Bemelmans brilliantly evokes the kitchens, back passages, dining rooms, and banquet halls of Bemelmans' years at the Hotel Splendide—a thinly disguised stand-in for the Ritz. It's a strange, fabulous, and sometimes terrible universe populated by rogues, con-men, geniuses, craftsmen, lunatics, gypsies, tramps, and thieves—and it's all here in bitingly funny detail. Twenty-four of the tales are vintage Bemelmans, two have never before been published, and the lot is accompanied by 73 of Bemelmans' original, charming drawings.

Jonathan Yardley

Between 1938 and 1942 Bemelmans published four books about his life in hotels and restaurants -- Life Class, Small Beer, Hotel Splendide and I Love You, I Love You, I Love You -- all of which have been out of print for ages. Hotel Bemelmans is a greatest-hits selection of two dozen reminiscences culled from those books and previously uncollected material as well as a generous sample of his charming drawings … the best parts of the book are those in which Bemelmans writes about Mespoulets and the other mostly anonymous service people who are a lot more interesting than the Society they serve.— The Washington Post r

The New York Times - Paul Levy

In this elegantly illustrated new edition of Hotel Bemelmans, Bemelmans tells witty tales of a young Austrian immigrant's working life in the Hotel Splendide in Manhattan, a thinly disguised Ritz-Carlton.

Library Journal

Bemelmans's humorous sketches, released in 1946, offer a glimpse of upper-crust hotel and restaurant life in the 1920s through 1940s. This Overlook edition contains two recollections not included in the original. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.