Simple Nature: 150 New Recipes for Fresh, Healthy Dishes Hardcover – April 25, 2017

The Recipes Are Outstanding I Will Be Enjoying This Book for A Long Time.

Wonderful compilation of recipes from a master chef. Highly recommend this book

The analogy here is just too clear to miss. Moses came down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments. Alain Duccase, in Simple Nature, begins with Ten Principles. Here’s the First:"Try to get close to nature and respect its season."In explaining that principle, Alain is blunt with his examples. When considering year-round tomatoes, he writes:"The ones I find in winter have absolutely no flavor; nothing but water. They’re grown of the sun, in overheated greenhouses. A total waste of energy!"When it comes to cooking and culinary recommendations, there is nothing subtle or fuzzy about Alain Duccase. You know where he stands and his food is the best in the world.Those grand food ideas are on display in 150 recipes here, arranged by the season of the year. You get a list, by season, of the fruits and vegetables to shop for. This is not a vegetarian cookbook — there’s protein here. But another of the Ten Principles is to eat less meat and more produce. So, this book is vegetable-centric.And French. This is a very French book. You have the photos of French street markets that make you want to reach for your passport. And there are the lovely, simple recipes that come page after page. Simplicity is another of the Ten Principles but simplicity often means you achieve greatness with amazing ease.Here are some of the recipes in the book that have my stickies on them already:Braised Carrots with Lemon, Cilantro and ChiliBraised Endives with BlackberriesCrab Coquettes and Spicy Avocado with Passion FruitGrilled Vegetable TerrinePasta and Artichoke GratinRoasted Onions Stuffed with Mint and AnchoviesSweet Potato Salad with Candied Lemon ZestVegetables Cooked in Salt [only salt, lots of salt, pound of salt]The Grilled Vegetable Terrine is about the most complicated recipe in the book, but looks unbeatable. The Vegetables Cooked in Salt is about as easy as cooking can be. Yet, in true Duccase style, it provides an exceptional dining experience.Simple Nature is filled with recipes you have not seen before, like his Leek and Skate Terrine, a rainbow treat with layers of leeks, carrot, celery and poached fish. This dish takes an hour to prepare, but a half day to chill. Most dishes in the book take about an hour to prepare, cook, and then serve. These may be “simple” recipes, but this is not food in a mere 20 or 30 minutes. These are great dishes and even greatness needs a little of your time.With his insistence of fresh and local, this book is truly one for all the seasons, a book to be your companion the year round. So, keep it next to the bag or basket you use to visit your farmer’s market. They were made for each other. It’s simple nature.For more cookbook reviews and thousands of recipes, please visit Cooking by the Book. You’ll discover how we do Culinary Team Building for corporate teams!

Much feels lost in translation in this EXCEEDINGLY French cookbook. While the recipes are described as "simple", my experience with them is that they are bland. The proportions in various recipes (like the laughably inadequate amount of bachemel called for in the Spinach, ricotta, and walnut lasagna) feel like they are carelessly ascribed and often leave you with far too much or too little of some component. The ingredients are, well, super French. So, if you live in a French farmers market, you should be good able to locate most of the ingredients, but even if you are in a major metropolitan area, it will be pretty difficult to track these down. I'm really disappointed in this book. While there is something to be said for simple recipes with good ingredients, so far the recipes in this text have been full of errors and omissions, obscure ingredients, and produced mostly bland food.

I have loved the recipes I have been able to make. Chef Ducasse uses a lot of ingredients that are hard to find, even using farmers markets and following his seasonal recommendations. You may find intriguing dishes in here for which you will need to figure out reasonable substitutions for some ingredients. With a little internet searching that is often not hard.

Bought as a Christmas present for my wife, she unfortunately found few recipes that she would want to try.