In the Green Kitchen

Getting back to basics means you have to be good at them in the first place. That was Alice Waters’s idea during Slow Food Nation almost two years ago. For that event, she set up the Green Kitchen, a demonstration studio where America’s great chefs (and cooks) taught the building blocks of cooking. Each segment was put online so the masses could tie a roast with Paul Bertolli, boil pasta with Lidia Bastianich, roast a chicken with Thomas Keller and so on, thereby alleviating any remaining fear of cooking simple meals with fresh ingredients. The resulting book, IN THE GREEN KITCHEN: Techniques to Learn by Heart, is an odd hybrid that requires downshifting to appreciate.