Nightly Specials
125 Recipes for Spontaneous, Creative Cooking at Home

By Michael Lomonaco and Andrew Friedman

     Chef Michael Lomonaco has created nightly specials at some of the most well-known restaurants in this country: 21, Wild Blue, and Windows on the World, the restaurant that once stood atop the World Trade Center. His new book elevates home cooking from plain or convenience cooking to a creative endeavor and puts home cooks on par with chefs. He says that chefs and home cooks create nightly specials every day by "intuitive, improvisational cooking." Both chefs and home cooks use whatever is in the cupboard or fridge, what they have too much of or is the freshest. They also try out new ingredients or road test new recipes.

      Nightly Specials has ten sections, representing most of the food groups good cooks build their menus from: salads, bread-based dishes, soups and stews, pasta and grains, shellfish, fish, poultry, meat and game, side dishes, and desserts. Nearly all of the recipes have a full-page color photograph, shot at eye-level of the dish. Along with the special dishes, Chef Lomonaco includes classic recipes like pie crust, mashed potatoes, and risotto. At the end of each recipe is a side bar, Your Nightly Specials, offering different ways to change the dish to reflect what you have on hand. Using these suggestions, the dish becomes something else just as tasty and allows the cook to experiment.

     The recipes are easy to prepare for the experienced cook, with no complicated sauces or complex cooking methods. Though the presentations in the pictures are culinary art, the home cook can recreate the same flavors with a little work. The instructions, broken down into numbered steps, are clear and easy to follow. In general, though Chef Lomonaco recommends using farm-fresh produce, as close to organic as possible, he does provide alternatives that can be found in any supermarket.

      Nightly Specials is a great addition to the home cook's library. Having the recipe for the famous 21 burger (Skillet-Charred Pepper-Crusted Burger) is well worth the price of the book for the cookbook collector and the Turkish Braised Lamb Shanks with Roasted Plums (which I made with dried prunes) would grace any Sunday dinner table.