Forking Fantastic!
By Zora O'Neill; Tamara Reynolds
(Gotham, Paperback, 9781592405053, 256pp.)
Publication Date: October 2009
Categories: Entertaining - Party Planning
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The innovative hosts of a hot-ticket underground supper club invite you to crank up your oven, break out the vino, and save the dinner party from extinction
Twice a month, two veterans of the New York food world prepare a big meal in a tiny kitchen, serving heaping plates of spectacular cuisine to twenty diverse people (or more). Friends old and new at their Sunday Night Dinners supper club make spirited conversation while feasting on sumptuous cooking. Never obsessed with perfect place settings or fussy details, Zora O'Neill and Tamara Reynolds instead focus on the practical joys of down-to-earth entertaining at home. In Forking Fantastic, they showcase their very best recipes for making mouthwatering dinners-and for having the time of your life.
With a healthy dose of irreverent attitude and infectious spirit, here Tamara and Zora take the pressure off and encourage us to reclaim the lost art of cooking delectable meals for the masses. Forking Fantastic! includes:
* foolproof, party-tested, delicious menus that are easy to master, each with a "Plan of Attack" for preparing multiple recipes without panic.
* practical tips on everything from shopping and stocking a kitchen to making creative vegetarian substitutions and trussing a whole lamb for spit-roasting
* hard-won advice from the trenches and an inside look at Tamara and Zora's own cooking disasters
Food-forward but always realistic, Tamara and Zora celebrate seasonal, local ingredients while also extolling cornbread mix and the frozen pea. Quirky, funny and fresh, this book arms intimidated cooks everywhere with the courage, confidence and tools they need to have people over for the sake of food and community, not for the prize of being the best hostess on the block. A manifesto for bringing back a time-honored ritual one mind-blowing feast at a time, Forking Fantastic! makes dinner parties rock.
Former waitress Tamara Reynolds has worked at many top Manhattan restaurants, including Babo, Union Pacific, and Prune. Zora O'Neill has cooked at Prune and hunts down tasty global food travel guidebooks. Both are self-taught cooks.
"Dinner hosts sick of Martha Stewarts and Barefoot Contessas will have a field day with O'Neill and Reynold's irreverent, compulsively readable entertaining guide. Veteran hostesses of an underground New York supper club, the two chefs share dinner party secrets emphasizing good times with a minimum of stress, and an informal, refreshingly profane tone that belies the genre's staid, prescriptive standard. In short, hosts are encouraged to make the party theirs, which means cooking what's comfortable, rather than catering to the diets of guests; not getting wound up over wine; and even playing the soundtrack you like, rather than worry about ambiance. Practical, empowering tips include hiring a dishwasher (cheaper than you think, especially if guests chip in) and skipping the intensive house-cleaning. Four seasonal menus, complete with timelines and wine tips, give hosts of all experience levels a number of entry points and techniques, including a Baby Step Dinner Party and a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Cassoulet, in which cooks are discouraged from scouring the earth for a particular sausage or bean. The affable, freewheeling spirit can backfire, however, as the authors frequently pause mid-recipe to offer an aside, anecdote or even a different recipe altogether. This volume will fit in nicely next to Amy Sedaris's I Like You, but even the Contessa would be impressed with these cookbook newcomers."
-Publisher's Weekly
"I love these girls and their tasty, delicious, no-nonsense cooking."- Jamie Oliver
"This eccentrically enjoyable book by two strange and wonderful women may well be the cookbook America needs right now. Fun, deliberately unintimidating and filled with interesting-even ingenious-recipes, it inspires the non-professional to raise their game-and have a good time while doing so. Both book and authors are clearly good for the world."-Anthony Bourdain
"In Forking Fantastic, Tamara and Zora share their gift of creating easy and delicious meals with wonderful stories, tips, and recipes--reminding us all that good food is about sitting around a table and eating, drinking, talking, and laughing." -Ana Sortun, chef/owner of Oleana Restaurant and author of Spice
"We all know that something special happens when a bunch of people sit down together to share a meal and for some reason there are too few family suppers happening. This book will help you relax, remind you to slug some wine for courage, and inspire you to corral some friends and friendly strangers. Like the best hosts, their book is full of great stories and is generous with advice and encouragement. Cheers to more Sunday night suppers-on any day, at any hour!- Naomi Pomeroy, Chef and Co-founder ripe Family Supper; Chef/Owner, Beast
"Ah yes-peek, and much more.....into what these gals get excited about, and share in delicious bites. You too, will discover your inner chef, I know I have." -Michael Recchiuti, author of Chocolate Obsession
"For too long food writing has made actual cooking seem intimidating and complicated. Tamara and Zora's style lead you along with wit and humor and lots of great tips to the point where you will be having great convivial dinner parties with interesting food every week without even having to think about it." --Sara Jenkins, chef and co-author of Olives and Oranges
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