January 22, 2019 – David Kinch, chef-proprietor of the 3-starred Manresa and owner of The Bywater and Manresa Bread as well as a long-time Santa Cruz resident, is getting ready to write his second cookbook.
Kinch’s first cookbook, the best-selling and critically-acclaimed Manresa: An Edible Reflection, written with Christine Muhlke with photography by Eric Wolfinger, offered copious essays from Kinch about his philosophy and inspirations, as well as detailed recipes for producing dishes exactly as they were made at the time by he and the other chefs and cooks in Manresa’s fine-dining kitchen.
For the new cookbook, Kinch is partnering with Devin Fuller, a former Manresa team member and a long-time guest at the raucous dinner parties he throws for his personal friends. The very private chef is not sharing a lot about the content just yet, but the idea is to offer more easily executed recipes and techniques for making the dishes that Kinch cooks on his days off.
“I want the book to be accessible. I want people to look at the recipes and feel they can do every single one,” Kinch says.
Still, he says that he also doesn’t want to be “patronizing” and suggest that the recipes will be easy or take no time to make.
“I don’t want people to think they’re going to read this book, they’re going to throw some things in a pot and things are going to magically appear, because that’s not what cooking’s about. Everything is all about the effort you put into it,” Kinch says. “I want to teach people some basic skills and show them some simple recipes that will stay with them and enrich their lives.”
About the author
SARAH WOOD—founding editor and publisher of Edible Monterey Bay—has had a life-long passion for food, cooking, people and our planet.
She planted her first organic garden and cared for her first chicken when she was in elementary school in a farming region of Upstate New York.
Wood spent the early part of her career based in Ottawa, Canada, working in international development and international education. After considering culinary school, she opted to pursue her loves for writing, learning about the world and helping make it a better place by obtaining a fellowship and an MA in Journalism from New York University.
While working for a daily newspaper in New Jersey, she wrote stories that helped farmers fend off development and won a state-wide public service award from the New Jersey Press Association for an investigative series of articles about a slumlord who had hoodwinked ratings agencies and investment banks into propping him up with some early commercial mortgage securitizations. The series led Wood to spend several years in financial journalism, most recently, as editor-in-chief of the leading magazine covering the U.S. hedge-fund industry.
Wood now lives with her family in Washington, DC, where she is a freelance writer and manages communications for Samaritan Ministry, an antipoverty and antiracist nonprofit that provides struggling Greater Washington residents with highly personalized and compassionate life counseling and coaching.
