Winner of the 2015 International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Cookbook Award

Forewords by Alice Waters and Michael Pollan

In this dazzling, full color cookbook and kitchen manual filled with lush photographs and beautiful drawings, the chef of Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse offers basic techniques and essential recipes that will transform anyone into a confident home cook.

When his oldest son was leaving for college, Cal Peternell, the chef of San Francisco’s legendary Chez Panisse, realized that, although he regularly made dinners for his family, he’d never taught them the basics of cooking. Based on the life-altering course of instruction he prepared and honed through many phone calls with his son, Twelve Recipes is the ultimate introduction to the kitchen. Peternell focuses on the core foods and dishes that comprise a successful home cook’s arsenal, each building skill upon skill—from toast, eggs, and beans, to vinaigrettes, pasta with tomato, and rice, to vegetables, soup, meats, and cake.

Twelve Recipes will help home cooks develop a core repertoire of skills and increase their culinary confidence. Peternell tells you what basic ingredients and tools you need for a particular recipe, and then adds variations to expand your understanding. Each tip, instruction, and recipe connects with others to weave into a larger story that illuminates the connection between food and life. A deeply personal book, it was written by the chef alone and it glows with warmth and humor as he mulls over such mundane items as toast and rice to offer surprising new insights about foods that only seem exceedingly ordinary. It’s a book you’re as likely to keep by your bedside as your stovetop. With Peternell as your guide, the journey is pure pleasure and the destination is delicious.

Twelve Recipes features gorgeous color photos and inset illustrations by Peternell’s wife and sons (all artists), and forewords by celebrated chef Alice Waters and New York Times columnist and bestselling author Michael Pollan.

In this charmingly written, beautifully photographed and illustrated cookbook, the chef of Alice Waters's Chez Panisse offers basic techniques and essential recipes that will transform anyone into a confident home cook

When Cal Peternell, the chef at Berkeley's legendary Chez Panisse, was helping his oldest son pack his things for college and beyond, he naturally set him up with the gear for a new kitchen: a nice skillet, a decent knife, a cutting board, and a colander. He also started writing. Just twelve recipes at first—reminders of foods they'd cooked together and enough to put together some good meals—but what started as a cookbooklet from a father for his sons has become, luckily for the rest of us, Twelve Recipes: a baker's dozen chapters on how to cook and eat well.

Standards—toast, eggs, beans—are renewed with simple elegance and wit. More advanced and adventurous dishes are made accessible. Variations are allowed for and encouraged, rules are well explained and unenforced. Twelve Recipes is a cookbook that will get you into the kitchen and get your friends around the table; an essential and versatile book of recipes, and a book to read with pleasure in and out of the kitchen.

“Peternell’s warmth comes through with each whimsical illustration, family photo and humorous meditation on everyday foods. . . . It is a delicious love letter from a father to his sons that imparts some basic cooking and life lessons along the way.”