My Family Table: A Passionate Plea for Home Cooking

My Family Table is rooted in the American kitchen, reconnecting folks with 130 recipes for roasting, braising, frying, baking and all the other easy skills take-out readers have forgotten or never learned.

Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2012: USA Winner, Best Easy Recipes Book

2012 IACP Award Winner in the Children, Youth and Family category

2012 James Beard Award Nominee

"Of the recently published books by gourmet chefs on home cooking (e.g., Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Home Cooking with Jean-Georges and Rick Tramonto's Steak with Friends), James Beard Award-winning Louisiana chef John Besh's latest is easily the most beautiful. This stunning volume is filled with intimate photographs of the Besh family in the kitchen, at the table, and outdoors with friends. Recipes like Risotto of Almost Anything and Whole Roasted Sole with Brown Butter reinforce Besh's Jamie Oliver-like argument that practical home cooking does not require reliance on processed products. Includes some excellent holiday recipes. Highly recommended." --Library Journal

Renowned chef and James Beard award-winner John Besh invites us into his home and shows us how we can put good, fresh, healthy food on the table for our families every day.

In My Family Table, the Iron Chef champion makes a case for the importance of home-cooked meals. "If I can help make a difference by cooking simply and sharing what I love to cook, I can possibly help us all use our passions and skills to make our lives better at almost every meal."

From organizing your kitchen and stocking your pantry to demystifying fish cookery, John Besh shares his favorite recipes he cooks with his family every day. Master recipes Risotto of Almost Anything and Creamy Any Vegetable Soup show you how to make the food without worrying about having the right ingredients or mastering complicated techniques. Filled with mouthwatering photographs of each recipe as well as showing John in his kitchen with his wife and four sons, My Family Table captures the spontaneity, intimacy, and fun of home-cooking and will inspire the nation back to the family table.

My Family Table is rooted in the American kitchen, reconnecting folks with 130 recipes for roasting, braising, frying, baking and all the other easy skills take-out readers have forgotten or never learned.

Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2012: USA Winner, Best Easy Recipes Book

2012 IACP Award Winner in the Children, Youth and Family category

2012 James Beard Award Nominee

"Of the recently published books by gourmet chefs on home cooking (e.g., Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Home Cooking with Jean-Georges and Rick Tramonto's Steak with Friends), James Beard Award-winning Louisiana chef John Besh's latest is easily the most beautiful. This stunning volume is filled with intimate photographs of the Besh family in the kitchen, at the table, and outdoors with friends. Recipes like Risotto of Almost Anything and Whole Roasted Sole with Brown Butter reinforce Besh's Jamie Oliver-like argument that practical home cooking does not require reliance on processed products. Includes some excellent holiday recipes. Highly recommended." --Library Journal

Renowned chef and James Beard award-winner John Besh invites us into his home and shows us how we can put good, fresh, healthy food on the table for our families every day.

In My Family Table, the Iron Chef champion makes a case for the importance of home-cooked meals. "If I can help make a difference by cooking simply and sharing what I love to cook, I can possibly help us all use our passions and skills to make our lives better at almost every meal."

From organizing your kitchen and stocking your pantry to demystifying fish cookery, John Besh shares his favorite recipes he cooks with his family every day. Master recipes Risotto of Almost Anything and Creamy Any Vegetable Soup show you how to make the food without worrying about having the right ingredients or mastering complicated techniques. Filled with mouthwatering photographs of each recipe as well as showing John in his kitchen with his wife and four sons, My Family Table captures the spontaneity, intimacy, and fun of home-cooking and will inspire the nation back to the family table.

John Besh is saddened by the lack of real cooking happening at home. As he writes in the Introduction: “A terrifying wasteland of food options lurks between our kitchen stove and our favorite restaurants. Our packaged foods are loaded with salt and sugar and a whole lot of other things that are anything but good for us; our meat is shot up with hormones and antibiotics, our produce is sprayed with God-knows-what, and fast food options are the devil’s work. This is not healthy. This is not real. And I did not grow up in this kind of world.”

But rather than rant, in My Family Table, Besh comes up with strategies to fight back. Eleven chapters of essays plus how-to strategies, recipes, and kitchen wisdom range from Sunday Suppers to School Nights, from Breakfast with My Boys to How to Cook a Fish, from Dinner from a Cast-Iron Pot to Drew Makes a Cake (And Other Desserts). He advocates roasting succulent meats that will last the rest of the week in different preparations. He praises the techniques of slow cooking, with inspired recipes for Stuffed Peppers and Short Ribs and My Favorite Meat Loaf. He provides ideas he devised for his own familyhis wife Jenifer and their four boys, to eat healthily and well, on weeknights when he’s working. He draws bright ideas from cuisines he loves, like Vietnamese Chicken Salad, using the Herb-roasted Chicken from Sunday Supper.

Breakfast is the one meal he always cooks with his family, which isn’t always easy when each boy craves something different. Entertaining is a tradition in New Orleans to be adapted across the country, and John’s hints on how to do brunch and holidays well are timeless. And finally, every Besh boy has his favorite dessert recipe and in this chapter, John writes glowingly about being in the kitchen with them as they go about their preparations.

After attending the Culinary Institute of America and apprenticeships in Germany and France, John Besh led a squad of infantry marines in combat during Operation Desert Storm as a non-commissioned officer of the United States Marine Corps Reserve. In 1999 Food & Wine magazine named John Besh one of the “Top 10 Best Chefs in America,” in 2006 Besh won the James Beard Award as the Best Chef, Southeast, and he went on to win the battle against Mario Batali on the Food Network’s Iron Chef. Gourmet magazine ranked Restaurant August in its “Top 5 Restaurants in the United States” in 2003 and 2006, and Zagat New Orleans 2008 ranks Restaurant August #1 in food and service. Besh also received the Louisiana Restaurant Association’s award for 2008 Restauranteur of the Year. He was awarded Food Arts’ Silver Spoon Award in 2009 for revitalizing the culinary legacy in New Orleans.  He is a frequent guest chef on the NBC Today show, and has appeared on top programs on the Food Network and the Sundance Channel as well. He own seven restaurants including August, Besh Steak, La Provence, Luke, American Sector, Domenica, and Luke Riverwalk.