CHEF JOHN ASH

John Ash: Cooking One on One:
Private Lessons in Simple, Contemporary Food
from a Master Teacher

"Teaching has come to be the thing I love most in life..." Chef John Ash

Simple Sauces that are (shhhhhh!) Delicious and Healthy!

Rich sauces have traditionally been the tool to help make simple foods delicious and more special. For any of you who worked your way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking you learned not only about the various families of sauces (white sauces, brown sauces, butter and fat emulsion sauces an so on) but also that often the addition of cream or butter or egg yolks and often all three really made the final sauce sing. I still love those traditional French Sauces but over the years I've learned that a steady diet of those is hardly a prescription for optimum health and a slim waistline.

The challenge that I took on recently was how to have all the great flavor and mouth feel of butter, cream or egg yolk enriched sauces without actually using them and with the intent of making them (excuse what I'm going to say next) “healthy”. Of course we would never want to call them “healthy”. Having been in the restaurant business for such a long time I've learned that to label anything “healthy” on the menu was a way to make sure it would never sell no matter how good it might be. Lots of surveys have told us that most Americans don't really want to eat healthy when eating out. We're told that a big reason for eating out is to “indulge and sin”! That would be OK of course if we were living back a decade or two or three when eating out was an occasional treat. Now however many of us eat out way more often than we cook at home (despite the popularity of the Food Network and the 1000's of cookbooks that are published each year).

So following is the result of my search to try to create delicious and healthy sauces. All are vegetable based (remember that we are supposed to be eating 9 to 13 servings of fruits and vegetables a day now) and contain no dairy or eggs at all. The base for many of these is a sauce that I call “No Cream” cream sauce. It is easily made and can be stored refrigerated for a few days or frozen for a few months. I hope you'll find these intriguing enough to create your own variations and versions. And . . . for those of you who are not currently cooking at home . . . an encouragement to get you back into the kitchen and take control of what goes into your mouth! Not a bad New Year's or any time resolution.

"It's the process of cooking that's so much fun — the bonus is that you get something at the end to eat." Chef John Ash

Simple Sauces: Delicious and Healthy:

• “No Cream” Cream Sauce
  
  
• Chickpea and Roasted Garlic Cream
  
  
• Roasted Mushroom and Mustard Sauce
  
  
• Red Bell Pepper, Tomato and Chipotle Sauce
  
  
• Curried Butternut Squash Sauce
  
  
• Spicy Carrot Sauce
  
  
• Asian Peanut Sauce
  
  
• Mango Mustard Seed Sauce
  
  
• Cold Avocado Sauce
  
  
• Ancho Chile Salsa
  
  
• Ginger Custard Sauce
  
  
• Simple Sauces that are (shhhhhh!) Delicious and Healthy! (article)
  
  
• More Recipes

Cookbooks Authored by Chef John Ash
Winner of the Julia Child "Cookbook of the Year" from the IACP One of California's foremost chefs, in association with Fetzer Vineyards, celebrates the bounty of the garden and the vine with a collection of more than 300 recipes that pay magnificent tribute to fresh and healthy high-flavor food--plus a a helpful--and fun--approach to testing and evaluating wines. Color photos.	Winner of the 2005 James Beard Foundation Award John Ash: Cooking One-on-One: Private Lessons in Simple, Contemporary Food from a Master Teacher	American Game Cooking: A Contemporary Guide to Preparing Farm-Raised Game Birds and Meats Game farms have made exotic fowl and meats widely available to the non-hunter, and this is an excellent resource for those who want to cook on the wild side. From boar-based borscht to roast lacquered duck with muscat-tamarind sauce, the recipes contained herein are delicious.

(Chef John Ash)