Earls The Cookbook (Anniversary Edition)

Description

Create all of your favourite Earls’ dishes at home with this much-anticipated cookbook from the wildly popular restaurant chain. Read insider stories from the past 30 years, while cooking through more than 100 recipes for legacy dishes, staff favourites and current menu selections.The first cookbook from Earls is as authentic and approachable as the restaurants are themselves. This book captures the soul and character you feel in every one of the Earls’ restaurants–passionate, authentic, accessible and playful, and full of Earls’ unique charm. Fans of Earls will be thrilled to make their favourite meals at home, and get a peek inside this iconic restaurant chain.
     Earls invented premium casual dining in 1982 and has been redefining and revolutionizing it ever since with 67 locations (and counting) across Canada and the US. The book will include stories from the restaurant’s rich history and feature its most popular recipes. Readers will recognize their favourites, from shared dishes, to sandwiches, soups and salads, noodle bowls and wok dishes, burgers, pizza, main courses, steaks, dessert and brunch. Look for recipes like Pear & Beet Salad, Artichoke Dip, California Shrimp Pizza, Calamari, Potato Skins, French Onion Soup, Nasi Goreng, Tandoori Chicken and Apple Crumble–all complete with mouthwatering photography.
     At last, the food from your favourite restaurant can be yours at home. Read, cook, relax and enjoy this collection of delicious, accessible and easy-to-follow recipes, for fun dishes inspired by food from around the world. The perfect gift for yourself, and the Earls fans in your life. “A cosy and informative read. And it’s user-friendly, thanks to the home-testing of the recipes by chef Fay Duong.” —The National Post  
“Earls has been a staple of the Canadian casual dining scene over the past 30 years. Its new cookbook is currently one of the best-selling books in the country and shares some of the most popular recipes since its humble beginnings. You can even make its famous Kung Pao at home. Just make sure you wrap the meal up with mocha Kahlua pie for dessert!” —Eat North EARLS RESTAURANT started as a family-run business, launched by father and son, Leroy Earl “Bus” Fuller and Stanley Earl Fuller in the early ’80s, and is also one of North America’s most successful independent restaurant groups. Earls has a total of 62 restaurants in Canada as well as US locations in Washington, Colorado, Virginia, Boston, Chicago and Miami. The author lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. IntroductionWhy an Earls cookbook?
Well, lots of reasons, but let’s start with the day one of our guests sent us a copycat recipe. She was curious to know how close she was. (She actually missed only two ingredients.) We wondered if any of our other recipes had been copied, so we idly decided to google “Earls restaurant recipes.”
Whoa! Thousands of hits, some of them from various chefs of ours, but lots of others concocted by home cooks and accompanied by disclaimers including:
Here’s my version of . . .
I have absolutely no idea if this recipe is anywhere close to the actual recipe for . . .
While this isn’t an exact copy of . . .
Now to figure out how to make . . .There must have been thousands, more or less, of our not-quite-correct recipes online.
A lot of those kitchen sleuths did a really good job of duplicating our recipes, but it was nonetheless an eye-opener for us. In the now forty years since Bus and Stan Fuller opened the first Earls, people wouldn’t have kept coming back in, and one restaurant wouldn’t have grown to sixty-eight (at last count), if they didn’t love the food. So is it that much of a surprise that they would go home and try to replicate our dishes?
Well, no. What did surprise us, is how difficult we’d been making it for them. There was a time when chefs jealously guarded their secrets, but we grew out of that way of thinking a quarter century ago, and it’s safe to say that, especially over the past decade, the rest of the industry has, too. Yet here we were, people who try hard to be the nice guys and gals of the restaurant world, neglecting to share.
So, two things. Sorry. And boy, did we try extra hard to make it up to you with this book.
We tested hundreds before we chose more than one hundred of them, carefully calibrated for the home kitchen. In this refreshed edition, our culinary development chef, David Wong, helped refine and finesse our New Classics food recipes with love. As for the rest, Earls test kitchen veteran Fay Duong spent months remaking them all in her own home. Then another test kitchen vet, Dawn Doucette, remade most of them all over again to be photographed so beautifully by John Sherlock, who normally shoots just fancy food. These recipes work.
We also understand that some of you like a drink now and then, and since our beer, wine and cocktails have always been top-notch, those crucial subjects also generated a few words. Our advice is to find one of those first, then sip the result as you read all the others. And in this refreshed edition, we’ve shared eight more cocktail recipes to shake up and sip on, curated by the very talented, industry-renowned leaders on the Earls beverage development team.
As perhaps you’re beginning to see, in envisioning this cookbook we imagined it as being a lot like a great night out at Earls: the food, the drinks, the fun. True, it’s only a book, so we had to start the conversation. But you can take it from here. CN

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