Reddit mentions of Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables

These three books are from incredibly talented chefs in the US and London and are truly outstanding: [Plenty] (https://www.amazon.com/Plenty-Vibrant-Vegetable-Recipes-Ottolenghi/dp/1452101248/ref=pd_sim_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1452101248&pd_rd_r=QS2966PJKEEF0GRXT77M&pd_rd_w=AGutm&pd_rd_wg=8W62G&psc=1&refRID=QS2966PJKEEF0GRXT77M), [On Vegetables] (https://www.amazon.com/Vegetables-Modern-Recipes-Home-Kitchen/dp/071487390X/ref=pd_sim_14_23?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=071487390X&pd_rd_r=QS2966PJKEEF0GRXT77M&pd_rd_w=AGutm&pd_rd_wg=8W62G&psc=1&refRID=QS2966PJKEEF0GRXT77M), and [Six Seasons] (https://www.amazon.com/Six-Seasons-New-Way-Vegetables/dp/1579656315/ref=pd_sim_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1579656315&pd_rd_r=K5GB31833Y91YN058FX5&pd_rd_w=mrmpX&pd_rd_wg=A77Ay&psc=1&refRID=K5GB31833Y91YN058FX5).

Oooh, this is something I've struggled with in the past so I promise I'm speaking from experience here! It really helps to realize that 90% of the flavor in gourmet dishes comes from a few standard ingredients and achieving the right ratio of salt/fat/sour/heat.

Keep the following in your pantry at all times:

• brown sugar
  
• lemons (fucktons o' lemons! buy 'em by the bag and you'll use them more!)
  
• crushed chili peppers
  
• soy sauce
  
• salt
  
• pepper
  
• really nice grated Parmesan cheese (the kind from the cheese section, not the kind out of a Kraft can)
  
• olive oil
  
• breadcrumbs (making your own on the weekends is fun and easy, but you can stick with canned or Panko for now!)
  
• fresh herbs (if you have the tendency to go crazy, pick ONE BUNCH of fresh herbs at the grocery store, stick it in a jar of water in between meals, use it in multiple meals and swear that you can't buy new herbs til you use up this bunch)
  
  You can make just about any goddamn thing under the sun taste good with a mix of 2-3 of the above, while still completely scratching that gourmet itch. Do this to jazz up any kind of meat, do this to jazz up any kind of vegetable.
  
  One cookbook which has helped me IMMENSELY is Six Seasons by Joshua McFadden. He has a similar palette to me - we both love tangy, ultra-flavorful foods. He's all about building a pantry of the list above and then just applying this mix to whatever vegetables are in season. It turns out I'll eat absolutely fucking anything if I put good Parmesan, a lil salt, crushed chili peppers, lemon juice and a lil bit of olive oil on it.
  
  I think if you combine my flavor list with the "1 beige, 1 brown, 1 orange, 1 green" program of the other commenter, you'd have a REALLY SOLID eating plan. In fact I may just try that out this month!

This is a really interesting question and I’m curious to see what others post. When it comes to how to plan, pace, and execute a multi course meal, I mostly learned through osmosis cooking around my parents and just doing it myself. Would love to learn of some books that talk about this more explicitly. One resource I recommend though is this series of chefsteps articles. They describe the whole process of planning and executing a particular menu.

When it comes to flavor pairings and how to put together a well rounded dish or meal, I think there are lots of great resources. Most of the books below are more sources of inspiration than books that explicitly discuss how do flavor pairings or whatever.

• Six Seasons: vegetable focused cookbook discussing what’s in season. The main point is that you should think of the year broken into six seasons. I often use this book to jog my memory of what things might go together based on seasonality
  
• The Bug Fat Duck: this is a great source of inspiration in so many ways. The plating is beautiful, the dishes are often made up of many components and inspire pairings. Above all, it discusses Hestan’s ideology and creative process in crafting dishes and menus. As a heads up, this is a pretty modernist book, and pretty much all of the dishes are an insane amount of effort to pull off and may require special equipment. I mostly use it for ideological inspiration
  
• Atelier Crenn this is pretty much the same style of book as above, but a different chef

There's a whole lot of cookbooks in that space of "you know how to cook already, here's a slightly more advanced set of recipes" that you can dive into. Deep-diving into a single cookbook for a while will expand you "outward" and give you an understanding of a particular cuisine or technique and let you stock your pantry around that.

Just speaking personally about what i've done.

Taste and Technique: Recipes to Elevate your Home Cooking was one that i cooked a good deal of recipes from and it seriously upped my game. It's French/Pacific Northwest recipes that use (relatively) easy to find ingredients and provide seasonal variations on most of the dishes.

If you have access to a decent spice market, Ottolenghi's books are pretty good for expanding your repertiore. Jerusalem and Plenty More.

If you have access to good produce, i know people that rave about Six Seasons but i haven't used it yet. I also like Lucky Peach's power vegetables but the ironically kitschy photos are a little off putting (but the recipes are super solid).

People need to break this mentality that cooking knowledge needs to be "deep" like you're going to level up until you're gordon ramsay. Cooking knowledge past the basics is better thought of as "wide" wherein you expose yourself to a variety of techniques and cooking styles and work them into your repertoire, where it becomes an expression of your personal craft.

Ha! Well since you asked...

• Run Fast, Eat Slow and Run Fast, Cook Fast, Eat Slow by Shalane Flanagan and Elyse Kopecky
  
• Dining In by Alison Roman; also her column at the NY Times
  
• The First Mess blog and cookbook
  
• 101cookbooks blog and cookbooks
  
• Six Seasons, by Joshua McFadden
  
• Seven Spoons by Tara O'Brady
  
• Any of Nigel Slater's books - especially Tender
  
  Truly truly, I could go on. But those are some good places to start :)

My favorite book on my shelf right now is Joshua McFadden's Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables.

We are big carnivores at my house, but this book has taught me to approach eating seasonally so differently. The information is helpful, delicious, approachable, and unpretentious. Buy it and then immediately make the fried delicata squash "donuts" with pumpkin seeds and honey.