Inspired By Ingredients Market Menus And Family Favorites From A Three-star Chef

Introduction There's an old saying that you are what you eat. But I've always thought that for chefs, the expression should be "We are what we cook." The dishes that my colleagues and I serve in our restaurants and prepare for friends and family at home sum up the lives we've lived up to that moment. Our palates are formed in childhood, refined in cooking school, honed and personalized as we work for other chefs and dine in other restaurants, and finally shared with the public when we begin composing menus in our own restaurants.But I'm getting ahead of myself. Unless you've eaten at JUdson Grill, the restaurant in midtown Manhattan where I was the executive chef from 1998 through 2004, or read the food magazines that have reviewed my work and featured my recipes, you might not know who I am.These are the bare facts: I was born and raised in Sayreville, New Jersey, schooled at the Culinary Institute of America, trained in a number of three- and four-star restaurants in New York and France, and now have the privilege of serving a menu of my own design to some of the most discriminating diners in the world.Laid out in broad strokes, my biography sounds a lot like most New York City chefs' biographies. But, as with cooking, the difference is in the details.The first thing you should know about me is that I'm a proud New Jersey native. I had a happy childhood, love my parents and siblings, and don't have a bad word to say about Bruce Springsteen. I didn't grow up in a family of "foodies," but we had it pretty good when it came to food. My father kept a modest garden in the backyard from which we picked cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and corn. The memories of those vegetables and the cooking we did with them led me years later to develop such dishes as Cucumber-Dill Soup with Scallions (page 76), Pan-Fried Summer Jersey Vegetables (page 91), and Boiled Lobster with a Corn Salad and Grilled New Potatoes (page 103).The next thing you should know about me is that the Telepans are descended, in part, from Hungarians, and nowhere do we show our pride more than at the dinner table. My mother has always been one of my favorite cooks, making me and my siblings countless Hungarian-influenced dishes featuring cabbage -- including a noodle one called Kaposzta Teszta (page 340) -- and poppy seeds, which show up in my repertoire in dishes like Lemon-Poppy Seed Bars (page 79). Some of Mom's most beloved recipes have been adapted for the menu at JUdson Grill. Some have become favorites of my wife, Beverly, and my daughter, Leah. All of them are represented in this book.The next and in some ways the most important thing you should know about me is about the strawberries. Every chef can point to a moment early in his or her life or career that qualifies as an epiphany. For me the Big One came while I was working for the great chef Alain Chapel at his eponymous restaurant in Mionnay, France. One afternoon, I was going about my business, hauling a crate of strawberries into the walk-in refrigerator. It was a perfectly normal day until I glanced down at the berries -- in the dim, romantic light they looked like a chestful of precious, edible jewels -- and found myself mesmerized. I had never seen such beautiful, plump, perfect strawberries. To look at them was to taste them; you could actually see how good they were. Since I'm trying to bare my culinary soul here, I'll confess that I sneaked about a dozen of them just to be sure and, yes, they were the best I've ever had.I had always known that raw ingredients were important, but that was the moment when I began to revere them.When I returned to New York, I started going to the Union Square Greenmarket and shopping for produce for the restaurants where I worked. This is when I first met some of the farmers you'll encounter in this book and began appreciating how much their hard work influences any cook's success. NeveTelepan, Bill is the author of 'Inspired By Ingredients Market Menus And Family Favorites From A Three-star Chef', published 2004 under ISBN 9780743243872 and ISBN 0743243870.