Patrick O'Connell

The Art of Entertaining presents seventeen seasonal parties, both intimate and grand, held at a variety of Relais and Chateaux venues. These hospitality insiders, who transform their properties into perfect settings, share their ideas for creating parties that can be translated to every home. The themes, floral choices, festive table displays, recipes for cocktails and dishes, and much more show you how to wow guests with unexpected touches. Set the mood for an elegant New Year's Eve party by covering ceilings with gold balloons. To dazzle friends on the Fourth of July, make a cake in patriotic red, white, and blue and light sparklers on top. Create a cowboy-themed cookout with haystack seating and wildflowers. This beautifully photographed go-to tome will be embraced by hosts and hostesses seeking fresh inspiration from the most admired chefs and entertainers in America.

The remarkable story of the architecture and interior design of America's most famous country inn and restaurant. The transformation of the internationally acclaimed Inn at Little Washington-from a rural garage into a sumptuous country house hotel-reads like an enchanted fairy tale. Legendary chef and owner Patrick O'Connell tells the story of how this property was reimagined with a team of skilled designers and architects. The inn, which opened in 1978, is considered a masterpiece in American hotel and restaurant design and has expanded to include not only the original main building, but an entire village of cottages, guesthouses, and gardens. British interior designer Joyce Conwy Evans collaborated with O'Connell in creating the sensational English-style ambience. Lavishly photographed and enhanced by Conwy Evans's watercolour renderings, this gorgeous book features luxurious guest rooms, stunning bathrooms, exquisite tabletop vignettes, floral arrangements, and displays of art, which will inspire every home decorator.

This cookbook is the distillation of a life's work by a self-taught American chef who learned to cook by reading cookbooks and went on to become one of the world's most renowned chefs. O'Connell began his career with a catering business in an old farmhouse, cooking on a wood stove with an electric frying pan purchased for $1.49 at a garage sale. (The pan was used for boiling, saut eing and deep frying for parties of up to 300 guests.) This experience sharpened his awareness of how much could be done with very little. The catering business evolved into a country restaurant and Inn which opened in 1978 in a defunct garage and which is now America's only 5 star Inn. Craig Claiborne raves, "the most magnificent inn I've ever seen, in this country or Europe, where I had the most fantastic meal of my life." This is not a typical "Chef's Cookbook" filled with esoteric, egomanical, and impossibly complicated recipes which only a wizard with a staff of eighty would ever attempt to produce. Rather, the recipes assembled here make up a practiced, finely honed repertoire of elegant, simple and straight-forward dishes. Everyday ingredients are elevated to new heights through surprising combinations and seductive presentations. ]A Consuming Passion ] propels the home cook into a new world of American Haute Cuisine and provides the formulas for reproducing it at home. Careful and detailed instructions, all written by the author, assure success. Tim Turner's luscious photographs capture the playful but elegant spirit of the food and introduce the reader to some of the charming local characters who provide products for the Inn's kitchen as well as taking the reader on a delightful and romantic culinary journey throughout the Virginia countryside surrounding the small town affectionately known as "Little" Washington and reveals an America we thought was lost forever.

Patrick O'Connell's second poetry collection resonates with the possibilities of dual perception, of the choices we can maked to define our relationship to the world. The poems speak of deliberation and intent, and chronicle the struggle in laying aside anger and hopelessness. Moving out from the darkest of corners, Falling in Place insists on the grace and elusive beauty of birdsong, the scent of rain, silence and the "pure white silk of the sky."

Winner of the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer (Manitoba Writing and Publishing Awards). Patrick O'Connell's first collection of poetry glides through a transient landscape with ease and sly wit, slipping softly through moonlit city streets, skimming birdlike under bridges, walking in a dream of fields and trees. His constant companions, faith and despair, transport him with metamorphic force, shape-shifting through imaginative territory of disturbing and uncanny beauty.