SEBASTOPOL --

Copperfield’s Books welcomes Nik Sharma to Sebastopol in celebration of his beautiful new cookbook – Veg-Table: Recipes, Techniques, and Plant Science for Big-Flavored, Vegetable-Focused Meals.

Nik will be in conversation with award-winning writer and local chef, Michele Anna Jordan.

The discussion will be followed by a Q&A and book signing.

From the bestselling author of The Flavor Equation and Season: A fascinating exploration of the unique wonders of more than fifty vegetables through captivating research, stunning photography, and technique-focused recipes.

"Groundbreaking, inspiring, delicious: Nik Sharma’s Veg-Table is everything I’d hoped for and more!”—Nigella Lawson, author of Cook, Eat, Repeat

Nik Sharma, blogger at A Brown Table, Serious Eats columnist, and bestselling cookbook author, brings us his most cookable collection of recipes yet in Veg-table. Here is a technique-focused repertoire for weeknight mains for cooks of all skill levels looking to add more delicious and satisfying vegetable dishes to their diet.

Combining the scientific underpinnings of The Flavor Equation with the inviting and personal recipes of Season, this book features more than fifty vegetables, revealing their origins, biology, and unique characteristics. Vegetable-focused recipes are organized into chapters by plant family, with storage, buying, and cooking methods for all. The result is a recipe collection of big flavors and techniques that are tried, true, and perfected by rigorous testing and a deep scientific lens. 

Included here are Sharma’s first-ever pasta recipes published in a cookbook: Pasta with Broccoli Miso Sauce, Shallot and Spicy Mushroom Pasta, and more. And vegetable-focused doesn’t mean strictly vegetarian; bring plants and animal protein together with delicious recipes like Chicken Katsu with Poppy Seed Coleslaw and Crispy Salmon with Green Curry Spinach. A wide variety of hot and cold soups, salads, sides, sauces, and rice-, egg-, and bean-based dishes round out this collection.

Featuring more than 100 of Sharma’s gorgeous and evocative photographs, as well as instructive illustrations, this cookbook perfectly balances beauty, intellect, and delicious, achievable recipes.

Author: Nik Sharma is the author, photographer, and recipe developer behind Nik Sharma Cooks/A Brown Table and The Flavor Files newsletter. He has appeared on the shows Chefs Secrets: The Science of Cooking(PBS), The Road to Cooking, and the upcoming series, Confluence (PBS). Nik’s work has garnered multiple awards from Saveur, Parade, Better Homes & Gardens, and the American Food Journalism Awards. His first book, Season, was a James Beard– and IACP awards finalist. His second cookbook, The Flavor Equation, was a James Beard Award, IACP Award, and British Guild of Food Writers Award finalist and winner of the silver medal at the German Academy of Gastronomy. He lives in Los Angeles. 

Michele Anna Jordan, an award-winning writer and chef, operates micheleannajordan.com, a website that gathers together her passion for writing, home cooking and Sonoma County. The site augments her work for The Press Democrat, her former radio show Mouthful, on KRCB for 27 years, and her books, 24 to date. The site reaches back into Jordan's earliest archives, when she was crafting lyrical narratives about all aspects of life for the Sonoma County Independent (now the North Bay Bohemian) and offers new content weekly, including the special feature "Today in Sonoma." 

Jordan grew up in the North Bay and raised her two daughters on a dairy farm in Lakeville, east of Petaluma. She has studied traditional Hawaiian dance and culture for more than a decade and is currently at work on several new books, including Echo: Autobiography of a Sentence, a nonfiction novel–memoir, if you prefer–that explores one thread of her early life, the one that lead to her Hawaiian studies. She is also at work on a new book about Sonoma County and a revised edition of her best-selling “Vinaigrettes & Other Dressings.” 

Among her many awards are a James Beard Award for Magazine Feature Writing and Best Chef Sonoma County (1990). She was a 1994 Sonoma State University Distinguish Alum for the School of Humanities. Jordan lives in Sebastopol, with her two long-haired dachshunds, Lark and Bobby.