TOTAL Magic Giftpack includes Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Tastes cookbook, nine Magic Seasoning Blends® (Meat Magic®, Poultry Magic®, Blackened Redfish Magic®, Seafood Magic®, Blackened Steak Magic®, Pork & Veal Magic®, Vegetable Magic®, Herbal Pizza & Pasta Magic®, and Hot & Sweet Pizza & Pasta Magic®) and Magic Pepper Sauce®.

Chef Paul has often explained why uses certain methods, such as browning the ingredients over high heat, and adding the food in several stages rather then placing everything in the pot at the same time. In this long awaited book, Chef Paul takes his explanations further with the addition of “tasting notes.” Cooks can follow Chef Paul’s descriptions of exactly how color, texture and flavors of foods change as other ingredients are added and heat is applied, almost as though he were right beside them in the kitchen!

Much has changed during the years of Chef Paul’s career. Foods that were unknown in South Louisiana in his youth – jicama, bok choy, papaya, mango, mirin, and tilapia, to name a few – are today readily available in supermarkets. Now, energized by these ingredients, he has returned to the kitchen to blend them with the good things he grew up with. Chef Paul’s innovative combining of the new and the old includes Shrimp Mango Bisque, which matches mangoes, piquant chile peppers, and plantains with shrimp, and Beef in a Four-by-Four Chile Cream, which uses kohlrabi and a variety of chile peppers, both fresh and dried, to spike up the dish. Everyone loves pork stew, but wait till you taste Chef Paul’s Magazine Street Pork Stew, with its subtle hint of ground ginger and mustard and made hearty by the addition of yucca root. Even Chef Paul, who grew up surrounded by crawfish and shrimp, had never thought of combining crustaceans with fresh fruit until recently. But Shrimp in Tropical Fruit Cream, with its rich sauce that melds mangoes and papaya, demonstrates the magic of Chef Paul’s contemporary approach.

For food lovers everywhere eager to try new avenues of flavor, Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Tastes is the perfect guide. And for anyone who yearns to understand how and why flavors develop as they do, this book is essential!

Includes 150 recipes and 40 color photographs.

To use Magic Seasoning Blends® in recipes found in Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Tastes cookbook, simply add up the amount of dry herbs and spices called for in the recipe’s “Seasoning Mix”. Substitute approximately the same amount of the appropriate blend (for example, if you were doing a chicken dish, you’d substitute Poultry Magic®) for the herbs and spices in the cookbook.

If a recipe calls for a sweet spice or an unusual ingredient subtract the amount of sweet or unusual spice prior to adding up the dry herb seasoning mix, then add back the subtracted ingredient(s) to the Magic Seasoning Blends® amount required for the conversion.