Book excerpt: A photographer (who happens to be an ex-restaurant cook) and an indie rock star (who happens to be an avid home cook) show you how to slow down your life by cooking beautiful, straightforward, but sophisticated, food for--and with--friends with this cookbook featuring more than 100 recipes. When he's on tour with his band, Grizzly Bear, what Chris Taylor misses most about home is the kitchen and the company. With his friend Ithai Schori--who used to work at high-end restaurants--he cooks for dinner parties of four to forty, using skills he learned from his mom. Their food is full of smart techniques that make everything taste just a little better than you thought possible--like toasting nuts in browned butter or charring apples for a complex applesauce--but their style is laid-back and unhurried. This book is about cooking not just for, but with, your friends. So the authors enlisted their favorite pastry chef, mixologist, sommelier, and baristas to write detailed material on wine, desserts, stocking a home bar, mixing drinks, and buying and brewing fantastic coffee. Through more than 100 seasonally arranged recipes and gorgeous, evocative photographs of their gatherings you fall into their world, where you and your friends have all day to put food on the table, and where there's always time for another cocktail in a mason jar before dinner.