informative inspiring medium-paced

sara77's review

4.0

Fun read

This is like hanging out with your friends and swapping your favorite recipes. Not the most comprehensive cookbook perhaps but a good one for planning a dinner party.

such great recipies to get you back to remembering why cooking is so great.
simple recipes and ones to challenge.

Currently drooling over !

This review can be found at Amazon.com as part of the vine program, or my personal blog www.ifithaswords.blogspot.com

I'm sure there are some hidden gems in Food 52 cookbooks, but if you are an avid reader of food blogs or have an extensive library of cookbooks, you will find a lot of well trod territory. I didn't find much that I hadn't made before or seen in cookbooks I already own (mine is a library copy). Nothing jumped out and screamed, "Me! Make me!"

My main complaint, however, is with the organizational structure. The format is in keeping with the voting style of the website, which does not translate well to print. These books are great for leisurely perusing and bookmarking for later, but not for "what should I make for dinner in the next hour?" If I have a hankering for soup, instead of going to the soup/starters section, I have to flip back and forth from the table of contents to each soup recipe until I find something that meets my needs. I found it very frustrating.

Apropos to vegetarians: there are quite a few photographs of meat dishes in progress, so, if you are squeamish, this may not be your book. I am not particularly, but I found raw, splayed chicken to be a tad jarring in between photos of cocktails and cakes. Category divisions would easily solve this problem too.

This is a great idea for a cookbook. FOOD52 polled their blog readers for the best recipe to gather one for each week of the year (plus a few extras). As with the website, the layout is clean and interesting, and the photos are beautiful. The book is divided into seasons and (theoretically) what's best to cook during them. There are some recipes that I'll never look twice at, but I'm definitely looking forward to making some of these out. After all, crowd-sourced food can't be wrong, right?

I received this as a digital ARC from Netgalley.

There are some good recipes in this cookbook, but boy, are there are some pretty darn yuppie recipes in here. General rule of thumb - if your recipe calls for saffron, you're officially entering into the realm of yuppy cooking.