Deciding on a main course for dinner can be a daunting chore, whether it's for family on a Tuesday night, or for company on the weekend. Deciding what to serve alongside that main course can often feel equally overwhelming. That's how most homecooks find themselves in a rut, turning to the same few meals again and again. Let Counter Intelligence help you mix it up tonight with mouthwatering recipes and lots of new menu ideas, from casual to elegant.

With everything from appetizers to desserts, this cookbook is filled with recipes that can be mixed and matched to create countless meals. In addition, each recipe is accompanied by gorgeous photography and filled with short video clips that will guide you through the important techniques and ingredients you need know to execute the recipe successfully. This innovative format allows me to virtually be in the kitchen with you, guiding you step by step through every recipe.

Want to bake your own breads but afraid you’ll “kill the yeast” ?
Bread Baking the Artisan Way helps you break through this barrier.

Traditional bread books assume you already know what they mean by directions like:
“Place in a warm spot to rise” or
“Condition the dry yeast in warm water”.

But what do these instructions really mean?

To see how you properly “knead dough until smooth” for example, click on the link and view the video. Watch the chef’s hands close up. Watch them again. Practice moving your hands with the same gestures. All while sitting in your comfy chair.

Let Chef Mike teach you professional baking techniques and how to use them in your own kitchen. When you’ve got real live dough on your workbench you’ll be confident to “knead the dough until smooth" and know exactly what you’re doing. You’ll never be “afraid to bake bread” again.

Bread Baking the Artisan Way includes 25 of America’s Favorite breads. Easy. Fool-proof. And great-tasting. The recipes are taken from chef’s How To Bake Bread: The Five Families of Bread®, winner of “Best Bread Book in the World” at the Paris Cookbook Fair.

Few culinary devices are as deliciously versatile as soups. Think about it! In the blazing heat of summer, you can reach into the refrigerator for a bowl of Smoky Gazpacho and serve a refreshing supper without breaking a sweat. Or, in the dead of mid-winter, warm up the kitchen—and your family—with a simmering pot of rich Cranberry Bean Soup with Ham Hocks. Seasonal influences on soups abound, whether it’s fresh spring vegetables in a Pistou Soup, sweet summer corn in Corn and Bacon Chowder or fall’s bounty of chanterelles in a hearty Mushroom, Leek and Farro Soup.

This collection of 25 recipes gives you a taste of the diverse world of soups, recipes with a range of cultural and seasonal influences that are sure to offer something to suit any mood and any meal.

Making dinner can be one of the most daunting tasks of the day. It’s late, you’re tired… brain dead actually. You’re too exhausted to go out for dinner. All you want to do is eat a nice warm meal at your own table in your own home and decompress. Maybe with a glass of wine or even a cocktail.

Serves Two is the answer to your dilemma. Inside its pages are recipes for complete made-from-scratch-meals, with one pan clean-up and ready to eat in about 30 minutes. These are not casseroles, but dishes like Roasted Halibut with Fingerlings and Chimichurri Mayo, Braised Chicken Involtini with Tomatoes and Capers and Whole-Wheat Pasta with Chicken, Snow Peas and Peanut Sauce. How is this possible? I’ve condensed my knowledge as a cooking school instructor, caterer and recipe developer and paired foods with similar cooking techniques, to make a meal in one pan.

My students assume I learned to cook at my mother’s or grandmother’s feet, perhaps watching as they stirred pots of bubbling curries, vigorously stir-fried cabbage, coconut, cumin, and cilantro in cast-iron woks, or patiently cut chunks of green mangoes to smother them with potent cayenne, turmeric, salt, and popped mustard seeds.

How I wish that romantic imagery was true! The reality is, I learned to cook the Indian way in a prairie-flat foreign land that was spiked with stalks of corn, using grocery store ingredients that seemed accessible: potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and corn with a mere handful of simple spices from the spice aisle. My first attempts were not to recreate 6000 years of incredible flavors, nuanced with layers of aromatic herbs and spices, but simply to bring in an essence of home cooking from my mother’s kitchen from southern India.

It’s those important trials, tribulations, failures, and eventual successes that I mastered over almost 30 years, through my books, teaching, and consulting career that I bring to the table to make your task of cooking the Indian way an easy one.

Spices are the spine that props the Indian body of curries, stir-fries, chutneys, breads, legumes, vegetables, and grains, and I will show you how to use them every step of the way and what to do to extract as many as eight flavors from a single spice.

In this app, I provide an innovative, no-nonsense, expedient approach to execute and savor amazing flavors from one of the world’s most ancient cuisines. The 25 recipes capture the essence of authentic and inspired Indian cooking for the busy 21st century cook that can be assembled with fresh, local, and easy-to-procure ingredients in mere minutes. The ability to keep active preparation time for most of the dishes under 30 minutes, with explicit instructions to help you along, will make Indian cuisine all the more accessible. Helpful hints, quick-tips, and convenience products where applicable without compromising on the integrity of the flavors pepper the app that include starters, mains, sides, and desserts. The cream that tops these easy-to-replicate dishes: more than 75 videos of me hand-holding you through what ingredients like asafetida, chappati flour, and skinned black lentils are all about, techniques that show you how to fold the perfect cone-shaped samosas or roll out dough the right way for making fluffy-thin rotis.