An Unplugged Kitchen : A Return to the Simple, Authentic Joys of Cooking Book

In Unplugged Kitchen, sliced peaches become a filling for a country sandwich, Sweet Rum Ricotta becomes an afternoon snack, and the steaming juice of leafy greens becomes "The Verdura Cure." This is no ordinary cookbook. Not only do the recipes have the power to change our perceptions about food but Unplugged Kitchen offers us a map through the landscape of food, with its rituals and its particular pleasures. In the sensory world of Unplugged Kitchen, your nose pressed to a tomato tells you how freshness smells and your eyes measure olive oil in puddles. You crush walnuts in a beautiful mortar and press soup through a food mill to create more interesting textures. Viana goes wherever food delights and brings us along to taste asparagus in Rome, radishes and butter in a Parisian cafe, and green almonds under a tree in a Sicilian garden. Along the way she reacquaints us with core ingredients. The verdant scent of lustrous white spring onions, prepared in a Fava and Spring Onion Pasta, is a welcome to spring. Viana reveals the tomato in all its absolute glory, whether it's served pure as nature in a tangy Tomato Cocktail, 1930s style, or as a perfumed dip fragrant with lavish green coriander.