« Nonstop Top Chef | Home | Five items: Quinoa, ancient grain »

Wrapping up

By Ann | April 21, 2008

Before we say goodbye to The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The New Classics, I thought I’d offer a few final positives and negatives –

+ Offers lots of easy, healthy, low-fat, flavorful recipes that are great for everyday dinners. Many of these are labelled “fit to eat” and have nutritional information.

+ Recipes for ethnic dishes like curries or lentil soup taste surprisingly complex without being fussy.

+ At 672 pages, the book covers a wide territory, offering unique ideas for almost every course.

+ Dessert lovers will adore the multiple chapters on sweets, which make up almost a third of the book, and include everything from cookies to candy, pies, frozen treats and fruit desserts.

– Many recipes are real yawners, bland and dull.

– A few recipes (like the one for Elke Wood’s lemon squares) have confusing instructions, which resulted in kitchen errors.

– Most of these recipes are available on-line at Martha Stewart’s website, which begs the question: Why buy this book at all?

Favorite recipes:

Broiled black pepper tofu – offers a terrific new (to me), method to make tofu steaks.

Fish burgers – light and fresh, but still satisfyingly a burger.

Southern Indian curry with mustard seeds – flavorful, exotic and complex.

Least favorite recipes:

Braised chicken with olives, carrots and chickpeas — very, very bland.

Spaghetti with garden vegetables — if possible, even blander than above recipe.

Haricots verts and goat cheese salad with almonds — ingredients were too rich, while the flavor was too plain. Also looked quite unappealing.

Would I buy this book? Probably not. I think there are better comprehensive cookbooks out there (Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything comes to mind), and frankly too many of the recipes made from the book ended up in the garbage or doused with too much Sriracha.

So, there you have it folks. Stay tuned for the announcement of our next Cooking the Books project, coming soon! In the meantime, fans of Top Chef may want to check out my recap of last week’s episode, posted at Washingtonian.com.

Topics: Cooking the Books |

Comments

« Nonstop Top Chef | Home | Five items: Quinoa, ancient grain »