California cuisine keeps things fresh and simple
California cuisine starts with an easygoing attitude
Vibrant, fresh and laid-back, California food can be created wherever your kitchen might be.
“California is more of a state of mind — keeping things really casual and carefree, and eating a balanced diet,” Los Angeles-based chef and author Gaby Dalkin says.
“We have such an incredible array of things here in California. We can have a really beautiful loaded salad for lunch and then we can have some crazy dessert later that afternoon.”
Making the most of marketfresh produce is Dalkin’s tack in her second cookbook, What’s Gaby Cooking: Everyday California Food (Abrams Books, 2018), but so is cooking with an easygoing attitude.
“I think part of being carefree and living this California life is not taking food too seriously,” she adds.
Confidence is essential to becoming a strong home cook, Dalkin emphasizes, and striving for ultraprecision is overrated.
A mastery of the basics means you’ll be able to respond on the fly when things don’t go as planned. And if you know how to whip up a solid sauce, you can craft an outstanding meal out of very few components.
“Being perfect is no fun. It’s fun to mess up in the kitchen and take it and run with it,” she says. “We live in a world where everything looks so beautiful on Instagram and Pinterest all the time so I think it’s refreshing to not be perfect.”
While her first cookbook Absolutely Avocados (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) focused solely on uses for the perennially popular fruit, What’s Gaby Cooking is an extension of her popular blog of the same name.
Inspired by the splendour of her region’s many farmers’ markets and travels up and down the Pacific coast, the collection “encompasses everything I love about food,” says Dalkin.
The more than 125 recipes are built on accessible kitchen staples and range from week night friendly main courses like grilled chicken with summer succotash to four-season variations on avocado toast, pizza and Cobb salad, and effortlessly impressive dishes worthy of weekend parties.
“Today, people really want to eat incredible food or entertain and put something beautiful on the table, but they don’t want to slave away in the kitchen,” says Dalkin, adding that 95 per cent of the recipes in the book could be on the table within 30 to 45 minutes. Recipes excerpted from
What’s Gaby Cooking: Everyday California Food by Gaby Dalkin (Abrams Books, 2018).