On Wed, 17 Dec 2008 09:16:50 -0800, "SteveB" <toquerville@zionvistas>
wrote:

>I have a friend in California who is a real chef. She's a dear, and a hard
>worker. They are retired now, and her kitchen is like on TV. Viking,
>Dacor, Wolf, you know. BUT THE WOMAN CAN COOK.
>
>Coming from a medical career, she also is very conscious of fats and
>cholesterol and everything else that tastes good, sometimes being annoying.
>We go visit them a couple of weeks a year, and it is like going to a resort.
>Playing golf, eating good on the hilltop patio, driving around in a Ferrari,
>Maserati, or Porsche.
>
>I come home and have this thing that I'm going to eat healthier, and learn
>to cook like her. Lots of her stuff is very simple, but tasty beyond
>description. Lots of it is Italian or European in nature, as they traveled
>there a lot.
>
>Are there some starter cookbooks and ways I can get headed in a new
>direction away from pork chops and fried potatoes and gravy? I do cook lots
>of more complicated stuff, but at times, I just have a mental block when
>thinking of what to prepare for dinner, and grab what's easy and I know.
>
>Maybe I'll ask for a particular cookbook this Christmas. Which one?
>
>Steve
>

For French, you could always go back to Julia's Mastering the Art of
French Cooking (or Escoffier - A Guide to the Fine Art of Cookery).
Or, maybe Madeleine Kamman's The New Making of a Cook: The Art,
Techniques, ans Science of Good Cooking.

Patricia Wells - an American, but located in the south of France for
years - did At Home in Provence, Simply, French (with Joel Robuchon),
and Trattoria.

The Tuscan Year: Life and Food in an Italian Valley by Elizabeth Romer
isn't, strictly speaking, a cookbook. But much of the life of this
Tuscan farm family revolves around the kitchen. There are
descriptions of how to make dishes (more than I had remembered now
that I'm flipping through it), but they're narative descriptions - not
what you'd normally think of with recipes.

As someone else mentioned, abebooks.com is a good source for out of
print books, but you have to careful if you're a book lover.

- Mark