Tom Valenti is the executive chef at Jockey Hollow Bar and Kitchen in Morristown, New Jersey. Formerly, he was executive chef of Oxbow Tavern, Le Cirque, and Ouest in Manhattan. He’s won many awards for his comfort food cooking and wrote the cookbooks Welcome to My Kitchen, You Don’t Have to Be Diabetic to Love This Cookbook, and Tom Valenti’s Soup, Stews, and One-Pot Meals.

Andrew Friedman has made a career of getting to know the heads and hearts of professional cooks and athletes. For more than ten years, Friedman has collaborated with many of the nation’s best and most revered chefs on cookbooks and other writing projects. His writing career began in 1997, when Alfred Portale asked him to collaborate on the Gotham Bar and Grill Cookbook. The book received wide acclaim, and since then, Friedman has worked as a cookbook collaborator on more than twenty projects, helping a number of the nation’s best chefs (Alfred Portale, David Waltuck, Tom Valenti, and many others) share their unique culinary viewpoints with readers. As coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Breaking Back, the memoir of American tennis star James Blake, Friedman took readers inside an athlete’s mind during training and competition, and he does the same as a frequent contributor to Tennis magazine. In Knives at Dawn: The American Team and the Bocuse d’Or 2009, Friedman combines these two personal passions to tell the story of the premier cooking competition in the world. Friedman has contributed articles to Oprah Daily and other publications and websites. He has been profiled in The New York Daily News and New York Magazine, and interviewed for, or featured in articles in, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as on NPR’s Taste of the Nation and WOR Radio’s Food Talk. He holds a BA in English from Columbia University and is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute’s “La Technique” cooking program. He lives in New York City with his family.