Chef on a Shoestring

You Don't Have to Break the Bank to Cook Restaurant-Quality Meals Cooking great meals doesn't require spending a fortune on ingredients. Each week on the CBS Saturday Early Show, a prominent chef is given thirty dollars to create a three-course meal for four. Chef on a Shoestring collects some of the best of those culinary delights to benefit Share Our Strength, one of the nation's leading antihunger, antipoverty organizations. These recipes, created by some of the most celebrated chefs in the country, are produced on a budget but are rich in every other way. The recipes are organized into convenient categories to allow you to mix and match various courses from different chefs. You can begin a meal with Sara Moulton's Miniature Pumpkin Soup, serve Bobby Flay's Saffron Risotto with Sautéed Shrimp as your main course, and finish with Don Pintabona's Polenta Lemon Cake with Fresh Berries. Or try the Asparagus and Bean Sprout Salad with Dill Pesto from Aquavit's Marcus Samuelsson, Crispy Fried Snapper with Chili Ponzu from Tom Douglas, and Coconut Rice Pudding with Fresh Mango from John Villa, chef of Dominic Restaurant & Social Club in New York City. These and other delectable recipes from Mario Batali, Terrance Brennan, and Waldy Malouf are sure to liven up your weekday or weekend dinners. Filled with advice on stocking your pantry, buying in season, shopping on a budget, and avoiding the temptation to be too frugal, Chef on a Shoestring is a unique culinary adventure for taste- and budget-conscious home cooks.

Andrew Friedman has made a career of getting to know the heads and hearts of professional cooks and athletes. For more than ten years, Friedman has collaborated with many of the nation's best and most revered chefs on cookbooks and other writing projects. His writing career began in 1997, when Alfred Portale, asked him to collaborate on the Gotham Bar and Grill Cookbook. The book received wide acclaim and since then he has worked as a cookbook collaborator on more than twenty projects, helping a number of the nation's best chefs (Alfred Portale, David Waltuck, Tom Valenti, and many others) share their unique culinary viewpoints with readers. As coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Breaking Back, the memoir of American tennis star James Blake, he took readers inside an athlete's mind during training and competition, and he does the same as a frequent contributor to Tennis Magazine. In KNIVES AT DAWN: The American Team and the Bocuse d'Or 2009, Friedman combines these two personal passions to tell the story of the premier cooking competition in the world. Friedman has contributed articles to O--The Oprah Magazine and other publications and websites. He has been profiled in The New York Daily News and New York Magazine, and interviewed for, or featured in articles in, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as on NPR's Taste of the Nation and WOR Radio's Food Talk. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Columbia University, and is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute's "La Technique" cooking program. He lives in New York City with his family.