What’s Cookbook Superstar Dorie Greenspan Really Like?

(Gerry Furth-Sides) With as well-respected a food writer as Barbara Hansen excitedly reminding me weeks in advance about Dorie Greenspan’s new book, Everyday Dorie to be introduced, there was no way I could not go.  Barbara is a cookie fan and love’s Dorie’s cookie books.

I found that lively, intelligent, knowledgeable and thoroughly invigorating Dorie herself was as much a motivation to try new recipes at home as her book.  She is one author who is a world traveler and yet makes it feel as if you in the audience were having a private talk with her.   And most fans had something to share with her or have their picture taken with Dorie.

Dorie talks about dishes she makes for friends and family (we heard one interview in which she said she’s had from 12 to 26 guests at Thanksgiving).  They take place (sigh)  in Paris, where she has lived for part of the year for more than twenty years, and the ones she prepares in her small New York City kitchen and her rural Connecticut home. As she told us, “this is all made with ingredients I bought in a supermarket or have in the fridge.  It is her New Yorker,  Connecticut Yankee and Parisian sensibility that transforms and elevates them from the ordinary.

Dorie’s legion of fans can find the irresistible food she turns to for weekday and weekend meals.  She is read regularly as the New York Times food columnist, and her books and talks are filled with tales of ingredients and conversational suggestions about she uses them, and you can, too.

“The recipes, most of which are simple, none of which needs skills beyond basic, turn out food that’s comforting, satisfying and inviting,” she says.  Dorie’s “secret” are her simple surprises tucked into a dish to make it special,  like the walnuts-and mustard-she puts in her gougčres, her favorite appetizer always in her freezer.

Chef Dorie  finds unusual ways to make a dish into party fare with ingredients such as Thai sweet chili sauce that can now be found in every supermarket.  Another of her favorites involves cannellini beans bundled into parchment paper for a “big-pot braise in miniature.” In Molasses Coffee Cake, it’s coffee and five-spice powder just the right amount of eastern flavors to a western favorite.

There are also unusual, always “why didn’t I think of that” easy-technique that can make an ordinary dish into a favorite.   Dorie melts bittersweet chocolate, spreads it thinly in a pie pan, freezes it, then breaks it into shards for her popular Salted-Chocolate Hot Fudge Sundae, .

Dorie Greenspan, a columnist for the New York Times Magazine, was inducted into the James Beard Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America and has won five James Beard Awards and two Cookbook of the Year Awards from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Her thirteen cookbooks include the just-published Everyday Dorie, Dorie’s Cookies and Baking Chez Moi, both New York Times bestsellers, Around My French Table and Baking: From My Home to Yours.  You can find her at doriegreenspan.com