Georgia Magazine - December 2009 - (Page 28)

Meet Virginia Willis No matter where her career takes her, Southern tradition is at the root of her success BY DEBORAH GEERING PRESS © 2008 TEN SPEED Willis’ recipes in “Bon Appetit,Y’all” blend her Southern roots and French culinary training. She was an International Association of Culinary Professional’s cookbook finalist for 2009. www.georgiamagazine.org COURTESY OF WWW.VIRGINIAWILLIS.COM I n a remembrance on her blog, Virginia Willis writes of watching her beloved grandmother, whom she called Meme, frying chicken and baking cobbler in the teeny-tiny kitchen of her vacation mobile home. Willis comes by her commitment to good-food-in-any-circumstance honestly. “If I’m hungry, I’ll find a kitchen,” says the Atlanta chef and author of one of the most noteworthy cookbooks of 2008, “Bon Appétit, Y’all: Recipes and Stories from Three Generations of Southern Cooking” (Ten Speed Press). Now, Willis intends to bring that ancestral passion for good food to several new ventures intended to build upon the success of “Bon Appetit, Y’all,” which merged Willis’ French culinary training with her traditional Southerncooking roots. This fall, she filmed a pilot for a television show that explores the provenance of food and culminates in the preparation of a meal, wherever her journey takes her—in the middle of a farmer’s field, for instance, or in the galley of a Atlanta Chef Virginia Willis wears many hats, includshrimp boat. “It’s not me just interview- ing producer, editor, food stylist and cookbook ing the shrimper on the shrimp author. For her upcoming demonstrations and cookboat,” she explains. “It’s me ing classes, visit www.virginiawillis.com/events.html. hauling in the nets, pinching Willis keeps putting more irons the heads of the shrimp, shoveling the ice. … It’s all about how that in the fire. She’s developing a prodfood gets on your plate. There’s a lot uct line of Southern pantry items— heirloom grits, specialty seasonings of work to get it there.” The working title: “Let’s Get and the like. The foods will reflect Willis’ taste for top-shelf quality and Dirty, Y’all.” If it is picked up, the series natural ingredients—no “preservawould be the first starring Willis— tives and chemicals and hydro this, though not her first television experi- that and the other.” And she recently finalized a forence by any means. She has served as the kitchen director for Martha mal proposal for her follow-up cookStewart Living Television, produced book, tentatively titled “Bon Appetit, the Discovery Channel’s “Epicurious” Y’all: Basic to Brilliant.” In it, she and Turner South’s “Home Plate,” shows how to take 200 good recipes and worked with Nathalie Dupree on and turn them into something specfour PBS series and cookbooks. Her tacular. “I liken it to taking it from French connection comes from several years as editorial assistant for Wednesday to Saturday night,” she Anne Willan at École de Cuisine La explains. For instance, a recipe called Chaussons au Roquefort—little turnVarenne in Burgundy. It’s her beautiful and accessible overs of a store-bought puff pastry cookbook, however, that has lifted filled with apples, walnuts and Roquefort cheese—are perfectly her to national prominence. “I had a sold-out class in Maine lovely on their own. “But if you were last week,” she confesses with going out to dinner to a nice restauincredulity. “It’s really crazy. I’m rant, you wouldn’t just get some turnovers on the plate. There would amazed, and I’m so thankful.” GEORGIA MAGAZINE http://www.virginiawillis.com http://www.virginiawillis.com/events.html http://www.georgiamagazine.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Georgia Magazine - December 2009

Georgia Magazine - December 2009
Contents
Viewpoint
Picture This?
Georgia News
Calendar
Currents
A Victorian Christmas
It’s a holiday tradition!
Around Georgia
My Georgia
Georgia Gardens
Georgia Cooks
Snapshot

Georgia Magazine - December 2009

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