Chefs for celebs keep it in the family

As I read “The Family Chef,” a variation of a Beach Boys song kept running through my head:

“I wish we all could be California girrrllllssss ...”

Two California girls, sisters Jewels and Jill Elmore, are the authors of the cookbook. It’s based on their experiences as personal chefs, or “family chefs,” as they prefer to call it, to showbiz celebrities such as John Travolta and Jennifer Aniston, who writes a short foreword for the book (and gets equal billing on the cover with the authors).

Name-dropping aside, “The Family Chef” is an enjoyable read, having a fair amount of interesting ideas and anecdotes about food, family, how to shop, attitudes on cooking and, oh, yeah, it has recipes, too.

It’s the first cookbook I’ve read that I felt I could take along to the beach. It’s got a kind of “sun-drenched” feel to it, with stories of Southern California fish markets (pick fish that smell like the ocean, not fish, they tell you), cooking for a client in Fiji and catering at a seaside home on the edge of a cliff.

Some of the recipes are as exotic as the stories: You’ll find dishes that call for ingredients such as champagne vinegar, kurobuta pork chops and galangal root, to name a few. Don’t be daunted, though: the book has a large number of recipes that have fairly basic ingredients: a good old-fashioned grilled steak served with pan-roasted cauliflower, for example.

The sisters are also generous with suggestions for substitutions, and they take the further step of providing a chapter on where to find such things as champagne vinegar.

The distinct personalities and cooking styles of each sister are apparent: Jewels, the more flamboyant one, favors more exotic ingredients and complex preparations. Jill comes across as more down-to-earth; her recipes are more likely to use everyday, easy-to-find ingredients and straightforward cooking techniques while sacrificing nothing in flavor. I tended to gravitate toward Jill’s recipes, although many of Jewels’ recipes held appeal, too.

The book has a few minor disappointments. The whitefish recipe I tried had a typo and offered no guidelines for a cooking time at the end of the process. Also, a back cover blurb by actress Kelly Preston led me to believe an outstanding peach cobbler recipe would be found within. No such luck. There are no dessert recipes in “The Family Chef.” Maybe they’re saving it for their next book?

Walnut-Encrusted Whitefish

1 cup walnuts

½ cup flour

1 egg, beaten

1½ teaspoons Cajun seasoning, or Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Blackened Redfish Magic

4 6-ounce pieces of whitefish, skin on

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon butter

½ lemon

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Place the walnuts in a food processor and pulse until finely chopped. You can also finely chop by hand if you do not own a food processor. Place the walnuts, flour and egg in three separate shallow dishes (pie plates work well). Season the flour with ½ teaspoon Cajun seasoning. Season fish evenly on both sides with remaining Cajun seasoning. Dip flesh side of fish in flour, shaking off any excess. Then dip in egg and, finally, in walnuts. Set aside on a plate. Repeat with the rest of the fish.

Heat an oven-safe skillet large enough to accommodate all the fish over medium-high heat and add the oil and butter. Sauté the fish, walnut side down, for 2-3 minutes, watching carefully so as not to burn the nuts. When the nuts are nicely browned, flip the fish over and continue cooking for another 3-4 minutes or until skin is crispy.

Transfer the pan of fish to the oven to finish cooking. Squeeze a bit of lemon juice over the fish and serve immediately.

Kitchen notes: I used cod as my whitefish and almonds instead of walnuts; the flavor was wonderful. As the recipe doesn’t specify a length of time in the oven, I started checking the fish for doneness after 15 minutes and pulled the fish out at about 18 minutes. Depending on the thickness of the fish and your oven, you may have to adjust the cooking time.

Contact the writer:

444-1250, pam.miller-jenkins@owh.com