The Jamie Kennedy Cookbook

Dean Tudor is a journalism professor at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute and founding editor of the CBRA.

Formerly a chef at the Windsor Arms Hotel and Scaramouche restaurant in Toronto (and now owner-chef of the Palmerston), Kennedy put this book together during a “sabbatical” from the kitchen wars. Also during this lay-off, he ran a home catering firm; and thus all the recipes here should work in anybody’s home, provided that they have the ingredients and the needed equipment. This is not a book of restaurant recipes scaled down for the home. Although there are some restaurant- or trade-oriented recipes (the kind you only order in a restaurant), there are also some old standards such as coq au vin, oxtail soup, or beef goulash. The rest are apparently unique (warm salad with calf’s liver, apples and parsley vinaigrette, or grouper with curried spinach). Each recipe (and there are about 100 of them for the home cook who knows at least something about cooking) concludes with notes on the presentation of the dish. As Kennedy says, “As long as you’ve taken the time to prepare a dish, spend the extra minutes to present it in a way that does justice to your efforts.” Hear, hear!

For those of you who want to know what Kennedy himself eats at home, he mentions that he and his wife grill a lot of food, and that sometimes he indulges in peanut butter on dry toast.