*** In some ways, this book is about the crazy shit that happens when we ply our favorite chefs with booze, food, and questions, and then scour their hazy minds for late-night eats. But like the show, this cookbook offers more than just drunken tales. We quickly recognized that the show was a way to explore a vibrant culture. The drunken disquisitions and stripped-down food the chefs share with us almost always follow a few minutes of sober, if hungover, explanation of the food they cook for a living. We do this on purpose, highlighting one of the many contradictions that makes the contemporary restaurant world so fascinating--the sweating tattooed 27-year-old raging behind the swinging kitchen doors, the suits and gray temples seated in the well-appointed dining room, twirling pappardelle and nibbling rabbit saddle. Cooking has become glamorous, even though it's really toil. Food has become trendy, even though nearly every aspect of making it is actually old. The people who cook for a living aren't "The New Rock Stars." And we love them despite that-- no, because of that. What still strikes us as remarkable is the food that the chefs cook at the end of the night. It's tempting to think of it as "drunk food," since it's typically conjured while under the influence. But it's something much more exciting. It's what they make not when they're feeding customers but when they're feeding friends. Sure, it's stuff they decide to make for late-night indulgence, but like the food that cooks make for family meal, it reflects the love and care and skill you'd expect from food meant to feed their restaurant family. Stripped of pomp and inspired by a particularly hungry moment, what they cook often says more about the chef than the food at their restaurants does. We thought the recipes for those dishes deserved to be recorded, and cooked. And so the pages herein are our compilation of some of our favorite moments from this show. Some of the recipes in this book are dead-simple. Some take work that's worth the effort. They all occupy that magical range between exciting and useful, aspirational and doable. They'll serve you well whether you dispatch them alone and sozzled at the stove or feed them to friends gathered at a table during a reasonable dinner hour. As all recipes should be, they're here to guide you, not to limit you. In other words, go nuts. You might choose to slip Chang's pork belly into warm Wonder bread rather than Chinese buns or smear chicken liver pate rather than foie gras torchon on Maya Erickson's Fernet-spiked gingerbread. You even start making mash-ups, family meal style, and swapping Jen Egg's tongue chili in place of the taco beef on Christina Tosi's seven-layer dip, or vice versa. *** Excerpted from Munchies: Late-Night Eats from the World's Best Chefs by J. J. Goode, Helen Hollyman, Editors of Munchies Editors All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
