Archive for the ‘Cookbooks’ Category
Wednesday, January 30th, 2013
I’ve located a few old reviews that I don’t seem to have posted here, so I thought I’d go ahead and add them while I work on catching up with new ones.
Pros: Fantastic recipes, useful charts and tips, clear and easy instructions
Cons: So-so recipes, bad “…and next ten ingredients” instructions
Rating: 3 out of 5
Originally written: Jul 07 ‘00
This is one of my favorite healthy cooking cookbooks. My fiancee and I don’t often repeat recipes. We like variety, and we love to explore new tastes. However, there are a number of recipes in here that we’ve made over and over again. This cookbook isn’t perfect. There are a number of recipes in it that aren’t particularly appealing.
The potato skins with cheese and turkey bacon are very good. Particularly with the nonfat sour cream and the cheese, I actually quite liked the turkey bacon. This dish tasted surprisingly like traditional high-fat potato skins.
The honey-mustard glazed meatballs were sweet and wonderful, although we found that they didn’t tend to hold up as meatballs. They’d be better as a meat and sauce to go over mashed potatoes or bread.
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Tags: cookbook reviews, Cookbooks, Cooking Light, recipes
Posted in Healthy | Permalink | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 11th, 2012
Pros: A nice simple cookbook for someone who doesn’t have much experience and doesn’t want to be overwhelmed
Cons: …
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Review book (published 2011) courtesy of Chronicle Books
Some time ago I reviewed Megan & Jill Carle’s College Cooking book—a handy guide to making simple meals with only a minimal kitchen and supplies. Their The First Real Kitchen Cookbook: 100 Recipes and Tips for New Cooks
picks up at the next natural stage: what to do when you move out on your own post-college. You probably have slightly more kitchen to work with, room for a few more pots and pans, and hopefully a little income and the desire to eat better food. The Carle sisters suggest which pans you should pick up first, what some of the necessary utensils and gadgets are, and what you might pick up next if you have some extra money and space after getting the basics.
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Tags: beginner, cookbook, cooking, First Kitchen, Jill Carle, Megan Carle, recipes
Posted in How-To | Permalink | 4 Comments »
Thursday, April 12th, 2012
Pros: Tons of spicy information, tall tales, and quirky personality. Don’t forget the delicious recipes!
Cons: None so far
Rating: 5 out of 5
Review book provided courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley
Jennifer Trainer Thompson’s Hot Sauce!: Techniques for Making Signature Hot Sauces, with 32 Recipes to Get You Started; Includes 60 Recipes for Using Your Hot Sauces
is a verbal love affair with hot sauces of all kinds. The author writes with style and wit, including plenty of spicy tales to keep things interesting. Her enthusiasm for her subject rings through loud and clear.
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Tags: cookbook reviews, Cookbooks, hot sauce, Jennifer Trainer Thompson, recipes
Posted in Food Type-Focused | Permalink | No Comments »
Friday, March 23rd, 2012
Pros: Mmmmmmm…..
Cons: Just remember to put that butter out to soften, and it helps to have a good stand mixer
Rating: 5 out of 5
Review book (published 2011) provided courtesy of Chronicle Books
I’m eating a lot less sweets these days, but I’m still a sucker for certain things. A great crisp cookie is one of them. Tina Casaceli’s Milk & Cookies: 89 Heirloom Recipes from New York’s Milk & Cookies Bakery
includes 89 recipes for cookies of all kinds, from the soft to the uber-crisp. Casaceli organizes her recipes by type (vanilla cookies, double chocolate cookies, oatmeal cookies, peanut butter cookies, sugar cookies, and “special cookies”, as well as family favorites and brownies & bars).
Most chapters start off with a “base” dough for the relevant type of cookie, such as the vanilla base dough on page 20. Then each recipe within that chapter tells you how to alter or add to the base dough to get the results you want. This is a method that’s more important to an operation that’s trying to produce a ton of cookies on demand and doesn’t want to have to create 90 different doughs, and it does mean a little flipping around as you’re making your recipes. The changes are simple ones, though, so as long as you don’t have a three-second memory limit like I do, you’re probably fine. The classic chocolate chip cookies are a great example of a use of the vanilla dough base. They’re packed full of both chocolate chunks and chocolate curls (or shavings), and have a sort of soft inside and crispy edge. The recipe makes plenty, which is good, because they’ll disappear fast! (Ours certainly did.) The vanilla dough can also be used to make such recipes as white chocolate-macadamia nut cookies, dark chocolate-toffee cookies, and walnut cookies.
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Tags: Cookbooks, cookies, cooking, recipes
Posted in Desserts and Sweets | Permalink | 1 Comment »
Friday, August 5th, 2011
Pros: Stunning collection of information, techniques, diagrams, photos, tables, recipes, and more!
Cons: Very expensive; many of the recipes and techniques also require expensive, difficult-to-obtain, or space-hogging items or ingredients; complex techniques and recipes are not for the casual cook!
Rating: 5 out of 5
NOTE: The folks involved with Modernist Cuisine were kind enough to give me temporary online access to the set for review purposes. If I (hopefully!) end up eventually picking up a physical copy, I’ll try to come back and comment on the physical quality and characteristics of the books as well. For now, I’ll just point out that according to Amazon, this set spans nearly 2500 pages and has a shipping weight of 50 pounds! Also, since the set is so large and expensive, you’ll have to put up with a longer-than-usual review!
Most magazines reviewing Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
(by Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet) will undoubtedly review it as a curiosity, as a coffee table set, or as a guide for culinary professionals and would-be professionals. I wanted to tackle it from a different direction: at what level might it be worth buying for a non-professional cooking enthusiast/hobbyist? Or would it at all?
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Tags: Chris Young, Cookbooks, Maxime Bilet, modernist cooking, modernist cuisine, Nathan Myhrvold, recipes, sous vide cooking
Posted in How-To | Permalink | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011
Pros: Lovely, engrossing memoir-with-recipes
Cons: …
Rating: 5 out of 5
Review book (published 2011) provided by Random House.
I’m not a parent. Yet after reading Keith Dixon’s Cooking for Gracie: The Making of a Parent from Scratch
, I feel as though I have at least a little of the taste of what all those insane changes to your life are like. Keith’s daughter Gracie was born five weeks early, and her unexpected early arrival threw her parents’ lives into chaos in more ways than one. The thing that Mr. Dixon kept coming back to, however, was his cooking.
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Tags: Cookbooks, cooking for pregnant women, cooking with a baby in the house, Keith Dixon, memoir, recipes
Posted in How-To | Permalink | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 27th, 2011
Pros: Delicious! Great layout
Cons: Some ingredients may be a little tough to find
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Review book (published 20011) provided by Chronicle Books.
Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee’s Quick & Easy Mexican Cooking: More Than 80 Everyday Recipes
includes more than 80 recipes that won’t take all day to prepare. Ms. Lee’s parents bought a Mexican grocery store when she was young, and so began her education in Mexican foods. Neighborhood women would share recipes with her and her family, and once she graduated from college she lived in Mexico for a time.
Luckily for us it’s easier to find Mexican ingredients in a wide variety of stores now, but some ingredients still might not appear on your local supermarket shelves. However, I didn’t find that to be a huge problem when working with the book, just an occasional note. And of course, these days you can order many ingredients online.
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Tags: Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee, cookbook reviews, Cookbooks, cooking, food, Mexican cooking, Mexican recipes, recipes
Posted in Regional | Permalink | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, June 29th, 2011
Pros: Very simple, delicious recipes that will encourage you to make use of seasonal, local foods
Cons: Make very sure to read a recipe fully before starting
Rating: 4 out of 5
Review book (published 20011) provided by Random House.
Andrea Reusing’s Cooking in the Moment: A Year of Seasonal Recipes
encourages readers to take advantage of local, seasonal ingredients using simple, flavorful recipes. There’s been a recent surge of interest in eating locally, rather than trucking in tons of out-of-season produce and meats from other areas. Not only do you support your local community and small-scale producers, but you reduce emissions, packaging, and so on. While her recipes are built around ingredients local to her own area in North Carolina, many of the ideas will port well to similar types of produce from your own region. The book includes many essays on local foods and small-scale community suppliers; these are fun to read one at a time when you’re making a nearby recipe. But the recipes are definitely my favorite part of the book.
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Tags: Andrea Reusing, Cookbooks, Lantern, local foods, recipes, seasonal foods, sustainability
Posted in Chef & Restaurant | Permalink | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, June 7th, 2011
Pros: Fantastic repository of knowledge, information, how-to’s, and delicious recipes
Cons: I imagine it would be a bit tough to learn to butcher from images and descriptions alone
Rating: 5 out of 5
Review book (published 20011) provided by Random House.
Joshua and Jessica Applestone opened Fleisher’s, an old-fashioned butcher shop with a modern purpose in mind: they wanted to source only pasture-raised, local animals that had been fed a natural diet and had been treated well. Many people told them they’d never be able to make it work, and yet they did—largely by educating people on the differences between factory-farmed and well-raised meats, and by returning to a neighborhood, customer-oriented style of business. They weren’t afraid to tell people that the fact that they ran out of a specific meat was a good sign, one that meant they weren’t sourcing indiscriminately or throwing away less popular cuts. They weren’t afraid to reject a supplier if they found out something wasn’t right with an animal. They also weren’t afraid to show people how to make great food on a decent budget despite the additional expense in sourcing well-raised animals.
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Tags: Alexandra Zissu, beef, Cookbooks, Fleisher's, Jessica Applestone, Joshua Applestone, lamb, meat, organic, pork, poultry, recipes, sustainability
Posted in Food Type-Focused, How-To, Ingredient-Focused | Permalink | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, May 31st, 2011
Pros: Fun, intriguing, and educational memoir material; delicious recipes
Cons: Some recipes could have been a little better
Rating: 4 out of 5
Review book (published 20011) provided by Chronicle Books.
Janice Cole, a food writer and recipe developer, decided she’d like to try raising a few chickens for their eggs at home. She did a little research—by her own admission, not enough—and raised three hens from little chicks. Before long she was discovering all the joys of such an endeavor: the love of cuddly, excitable animals; the delight of fresh eggs… the mountain of chicken poop; the problems caused by cold winters; and on and on. Through good and bad, she learned a lot and enjoyed the bounty of her hens.
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Tags: chicken, cookbook, cookbook reviews, eggs, Janice Cole, memoir, raising chickens, recipes, self-sufficiency, suburban homesteading, urban homesteading
Posted in Food Type-Focused | Permalink | 2 Comments »
