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The Everything Easy Gourmet Cookbook: Over 250 Distinctive recipes from arounf the world to please your family and friends
You don't have to travel the world over to bring the taste of gourmet cooking home. Packed with more than 250 tantalizing recipes from continents near and far, The Everything Easy Gourmet Cookbook lets you serve and satisfy even the most cosmopolitan of cravings with inspired meals created quickly and effortlessly. Paired with simple instructions and a glossary for quick reference, The Everything Easy Gourmet Cookbook features such delectable recipes
304 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2005
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 1, 2021
When I first got this from the library I was excited -- simple recipes! Divided up by country with a lot of different countries represented! What could be better to add some variety to my family meals?
Unfortunately, when I started to pay attention to the details, I realised that it is very unlikely that this was carefully edited, much less that the recipes were actually tested. Some of the recipes look great -- detailed, thoughtful, interesting. But others are filled with mistakes, ranging from recommending Granny Smith apples as a 'sweet apple,' to a recipe which has you boil angel hair pasta for 10-15 minutes (it's very thin and cooks in 3-5 minutes), to a Chinese black bean dish which has you used canned black beans (instead of the fermented black beans that make Chinese black bean dishes what they are), to a recipe with snails that doesn't tell you how to clean the snails...
And then there are just decisions I disagree with: giving the entire continent of Africa a single chapter; the chapter on Bermuda & the Carribean being 95% French resort food, rather than the actual home-cooking of the region; giving a recipe for egg drop soup and suggesting that you make egg drop soup without the eggs for cholesterol reasons because 'heartier soups taste fine without it' -- why not just include a recipe for a soup that *isn't egg drop soup*? Why are there Filipino recipes (spelled 'Filippino') in the Chinese section? Or the pages where there's a sidebar about traditional/classic dishes of a particular country, but those recipes aren't anywhere in the book...
Those things are just style, of course, but having recipes that are flat-out wrong makes me distrust even the ones that look okay on a first glance -- is the beef & watermelon stir-fry an experiment or did someone misunderstand 'winter melon'? -- so I think this is going back to the library and I will look elsewhere for new recipes.
Unfortunately, when I started to pay attention to the details, I realised that it is very unlikely that this was carefully edited, much less that the recipes were actually tested. Some of the recipes look great -- detailed, thoughtful, interesting. But others are filled with mistakes, ranging from recommending Granny Smith apples as a 'sweet apple,' to a recipe which has you boil angel hair pasta for 10-15 minutes (it's very thin and cooks in 3-5 minutes), to a Chinese black bean dish which has you used canned black beans (instead of the fermented black beans that make Chinese black bean dishes what they are), to a recipe with snails that doesn't tell you how to clean the snails...
And then there are just decisions I disagree with: giving the entire continent of Africa a single chapter; the chapter on Bermuda & the Carribean being 95% French resort food, rather than the actual home-cooking of the region; giving a recipe for egg drop soup and suggesting that you make egg drop soup without the eggs for cholesterol reasons because 'heartier soups taste fine without it' -- why not just include a recipe for a soup that *isn't egg drop soup*? Why are there Filipino recipes (spelled 'Filippino') in the Chinese section? Or the pages where there's a sidebar about traditional/classic dishes of a particular country, but those recipes aren't anywhere in the book...
Those things are just style, of course, but having recipes that are flat-out wrong makes me distrust even the ones that look okay on a first glance -- is the beef & watermelon stir-fry an experiment or did someone misunderstand 'winter melon'? -- so I think this is going back to the library and I will look elsewhere for new recipes.
Displaying 1 of 1 review