An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler

This is a collection of essays about the joys of simple slow food--touching on everything from boiling water to cooking eggs and beans, to how use the odds and ends of one meal to start the next one. Ms. Adler believes that almost all kitchen mistakes can be remedied, cooking resourcefully and not wastefully. She is a writer and a cook who has logged serious time on the line of restaurants big, small, famous and humble. She spent time at Chez Panisse working with Alice Waters and time at Prune working with Gabrielle Hamilton. I just love when books in my categories mesh and interweave in myriad ways.

Her way of cooking leads one to end up with a refrigerator and freezer full of mostly unlabeled odds and ends but out of my growing collection I have made some inventive tasty meals. She is also of the opinion that everything tastes better with a sprinkle of parsley, a squirt of lemon, a dash of parmesan cheese, and a spray of breadcrumbs--and I have found that indeed she is pretty much spot on.