Fresh Take: Cooking Through Crisis

When the news feels all-consuming, I often turn to cooking. This week, it was particularly fitting that at the top of my pile of the newest cookbooks released was chef José Andrés’ The World Central Kitchen Cookbook. Its pages have brought me moments of joy and inspiration. The recipes—including Haitian griot, Ukrainian borscht and Afghan stewed chickpeas with spinach—are all about nourishing amid crisis. Simple meals can provide hope to survivors and sustenance to first responders.

The book’s core philosophy is use what you’ve got, which I can get behind. That drove me to try out the recipe for chicken chili verde (pictured below), which World Central Kitchen volunteers have served to refugee migrants in East Texas, flooding survivors in Nebraska, and firefighters in Redding, California.

Bright and spicy, I’ll eat this one again and again. I highly recommend a comforting soup or stew this weekend.

Chicken chili verde

Chloe Sorvino

P.S. Colorado friends, my book tour is popping up at Boulder Book Store with a signing and discussion of Raw Deal on Monday, Oct. 30, starting at 6 p.m. Mountain Time. Register for free admission here. I can’t wait to see you there!

— Chloe Sorvino, Staff Writer

Order my book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, out now from Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books.

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What’s Fresh

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Field Notes

Breakfast at Corner Bar by chef Ignacio Mattos.

Chloe Sorvino

The power breakfast to end all power breakfasts, from a recent 8 a.m. interview at Corner Bar by chef Ignacio Mattos, located inside the oh so chic boutique hotel in my neighborhood, Nine Orchard.

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Chloe Sorvino leads coverage of food and agriculture as a staff writer on the enterprise team at Forbes. Her book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, published on December 6, 2022, with Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books. Her nearly nine years of reporting at Forbes has brought her to In-N-Out Burger’s secret test kitchen, drought-ridden farms in California’s Central Valley, burnt-out national forests logged by a timber billionaire, a century-old slaughterhouse in Omaha and even a chocolate croissant factory designed like a medieval castle in northern France.