Product Description

Hailed by People, the New York Times, Food & Wine, CBS This Morning, the Wall Street Journal, and other media around the country as the perfect choice for any cook, The Best American Recipes is the most wide-ranging and extensively home-tested collection of its kind. Series editors Fran McCullough and Molly Stevens track down the tastiest and easiest dishes of the year from sources as diverse as an amateur cooking contest in California and the Web site of a family-run Vermont food company. Their 150-plus finds range from Minted Pea Soup from the British cooking sensation Jamie Oliver, to sausage and biscuit nibbles from the singer George Jones, to a deeply flavored chili that’s the specialty of a San Francisco firehouse, to Chocolate Pecan Pie Bars from the chef Rick Bayless.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #385318 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Thoughtfully put together but sadly lacking in colorful visuals, this collection features a diverse range of recipes that are certain to excite the palates of those who are skilled enough to make them. Series editors McCullough and Stevens, both food writers, include personal notes at the end of each recipe, offering helpful tips on where to buy ghee for Corn Cooked in Milk with Chiles and Coconut or black mustard seeds for Sautéed Swordfish with Fresh Tomato Chutney. The recipes incorporate spices from around the world and extol techniques for getting the most flavor out of every ingredient, but herein lies the problem. Many of the recipes (like Grapefruit and Star Anise Granita or the Potato and Haricot Vert Salad ) require exotic ingredients and time-consuming preparations, making them less than user friendly. Vanilla "Creamed" Corn, for instance, requires pureeing corn kernels, freshly scraped from the cob, to create homemade corn starch, and the Cardamom Swirl Coffee Cake recipe instructs the reader to extract cardamom seeds from their pods and pulverize them into a fine powder. The editors do include a few fun and easy dishes—the Spinach and Artichoke Casserole can be prepared quickly using frozen spinach, cream cheese, canned artichoke hearts and Ritz crackers, and Easy Biscuits live up to their name, requiring only 2 ingredients—but the majority of these meals are not for the average, always-on-the-go individual. Seasoned foodies, however, will relish the challenge they present.
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Review

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Customer Reviews

I Really Like This Series
I appreciate the authors' dedication to research and development as well as the variety of this collection of recipes. I don't miss photographs, because the recipe descriptions are well-written and inspire my imagination. I have tried three recipes from this book, and all have turned out great. Savory Fig Tart and Cranberry Margaritas were huge hits at my Christmas cocktail party. (Tip: Make two rectangular fig tarts rather than one large square one. They will be easier to serve and eat.) Shrimp Baked with Tomato Sauce and Feta Cheese went over very well at a potluck supper. I mean to try several other recipes as well.

Collected Country's Recipe Output
Culling the newspapers, magazines, books and Net for recipes to cover range of standardized categories of appetizers, soups, salads, etc. is no easy task. Then to cover diversity of ethnicity, difficulty, etc. is daunting as well. Cut is always tough of what's in, what's out.

Nice job of providing range of easy and quick to exotic and time/ingredient/equipment consuming. There are recipes that will be luscious yet easy and simple to prepare or the more challenging, multi-layered creations.

Enjoy their inclusion of: Mango and Lime Chiffon Cake; Rick Bayless' Chocolate Pecan Pie Bars; Glazed Pearl Onions with Mustard and Brown Sugar; Three-Way Pork Burgers; Millionaire's Brisket with Coffee and Beer Mop Sauce; Tomato, Goat Cheese and Focaccia Pudding; Moroccan Herb Salad; North African Tomato Bulgur Soup; Chilled Potato-Chive Soup.

says who???????????
I was very excited to recieve this book but so far the recipes have fallen short. It's probably a very difficult task to compile a collection like this but there is a lot here that is very average.