Author Florence Fabricant at last year’s Authors Night for the East Hampton Library. (Photo by Mark Sagliocco/Getty Images for East Hampton Library)
East Hampton Library’s Authors Night is pretty insane if you’re a book freak like me. If you also happen to be a foodie, forget about it. The 12th annual event hosts 100 authors, most of whom have ties to the East End. Chef Eric Ripert and famous foodie Gwyneth Paltrow, who both summer here, are two of the co-chairs and authors.
After five cookbooks, Ripert has a new memoir, 32 Yolks: From My Mother’s Table to Working the Line. The coming-of-age chronicles his childhood influences, both good and bad, in Antibes, France and Andorra, Spain and onto his first kitchen experiences. His humbling and ultimately rewarding attempts at creating the perfect hollandaise sauce, make for the book’s title and a good old yarn.
You can bet your bottom dollar, there is nothing as complicated, or fattening, as hollandaise sauce in Gwyneth Paltrow’s It’s All Easy: Delicious Weekday Recipes for the Super-Busy Home Cook, sure to be another bestselling cookbook for the actor and online retailer. With all of her jobs, I’m guessing she knows what “super-busy” means. Paltrow shares 125 recipes for “healthy meals in the time it would take to order takeout,” with little or no sugar, fat, or gluten.
Gwyneth Paltrow at Authors Night 2013
For more easy and healthy recipes, you’ll love Elisabeth Johansson’s, Clean Cooking: More Than 100 Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, and Sugar-Free Recipes, offers “whole meals down to individual sauces and dressings,” including smoothies, juices, alternative breakfasts and snacks.
Ina Garten may have gotten her start in an entirely different realm, but she earned her stripes at the Barefoot Contessa, her much-missed East End gourmet shop. Following 15 years of writing cookbooks, her latest tackles the question: “Can I make it ahead?” Here, Garten “lets you in on her secrets,” like how to make dishes that actually improve with time, in no time at all. We’re sensing a trend here.
Plated: Weeknight Dinners, Weekend Feasts, and Everything in Between by Elana Karp and Suzanne Dumaine offers another 125 recipes, with a chapter titled “Make Ahead.” Nick Taranto and Josh Hix were so “tired of take-out,” dinners the financiers founded Plated, the food delivery service. Karp and Dumaine, part of the Plated culinary team, will “help you cook and eat food you love without having to think so hard about it.” Hardly thinking is how we like to end our days.
Florence Fabricant, food writer for the New York Times, is always thinking. Her book, City Harvest: 100 Recipes from Great New York Restaurants, a collection of 100 recipes from New York top chefs and restaurateurs, benefits City Harvest, the food-rescue organization that feeds over 1.4 million people a year in New York. Fabricant adapts recipes from Dominique Ansel, Tom Colicchio, Daniel Humm, Anita Lo, François Payard, Marcus Samuelsson, Ivy Stark, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, for the home cook.
You won’t find any Pokémon at the Authors Night cocktail reception—just completely drool-worthy food.
“There’s a laid back elegance when entertaining in the Hamptons that makes everyone feel closer, more relaxed, but maybe that’s the (Northfork) wine,” wrote Eric Ripert in his foreword to Annie Falk’s Hamptons Entertaining: Creating Occasions to Remember. Falk rounds up 18 of her friends for inspiration. “A Preppy Picnic” with Christopher Burch, “Farewell to Summer” with Cynthia Sulzberger and Steven Green and “Halloween Merriment” with Judith and Honorable Rudolph Giuliani give rise to the party planner in all of us. Best of all, proceeds from the book go to the Peconic Baykeeper.
Tickets are $100 for the book signing cocktail reception at 4 Maidstone Lane, East Hampton and begin at $300 for dinners with selected authors at private homes. Visit the East Hampton Library, Authors Night website or call (631) 324-0222 x7 for more info.
