Buy from Powells

Title

• CookFight

Authors

• Julia Moskin
• Kim Severson

Publisher

• Ecco Books

CookFight

2 Cooks, 12 Challenges, 125 Recipes, an Epic Battle for Kitchen Dominance

Overview

From the publisher

Colleagues.
Friends.
Food obsessives.
Work wives.

New York Times writers Julia Moskin and Kim Severson were all of the former, until Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni challenged them to go head-to-head in a culinary duel — a battle for dinner dominance that turned them into kitchen combatants.

Armed with only $50 each, Bruni dared them to prepare a full meal for six, a showdown which he would judge for the newspaper. The thrill of battle proved too exhilarating to resist, and that initial clash turned into a yearlong kitchen war as Moskin and Severson faced off to tackle the most vexing kitchen predicaments, from how best to console friends in need through old-fashioned home cooking to conjuring kids’ food that keeps both parents and children happy at a party.

CookFight is the delicious result of their brinksmanship, a chronicle of their skirmishes over the course of 12 months and a look at how two very different people — best friends from wildly divergent backgrounds — approach the kitchen.

In each heartfelt and hilarious chapter, Severson and Moskin confront a new “challenge” — those quandaries all home cooks deliberate, from how to strategize a dinner party (the Fancy Food Challenge) to how to eat more seasonally and locally (the Farmers’ Market Challenge). Every recipe, from Julia’s Caramelized Corn with Mint to Kim’s Carnitas, is a delectable testament to their creativity and savvy. Only the reader will be able to call the winner.

Selected contents

• Pork Braised in Milk and Cream

Related article: Kitchen throwdown