Product Description

Pam Anderson grew up watching her parents and grandparents make dinner every night by simply taking the ingredients on hand and cooking them with the techniques they knew.

Times have changed. Today we have an overwhelming array of ingredients and a fraction of the cooking time, but Anderson believes the secret to getting dinner on the table lies in the past. After a long day, who has the energy to look up a recipe and search for the right ingredients before ever starting to cook? To make dinner night after night, Anderson believes the first two steps--looking for a recipe, then scrambling for the exact ingredients--must be eliminated. Understanding that most recipes are simply "variations on a theme," she innovatively teaches technique, ultimately eliminating the need for recipes.

Once the technique or formula is mastered, Anderson encourages inexperienced as well as veteran cooks to spread their culinary wings. For example, after learning to sear a steak, it's understood that the same method works for scallops, tuna, hamburger, swordfish, salmon, pork tenderloin, and more. You never need to look at a recipe again. Vary the look and flavor of these dishes with interchangeable pan sauces, salsas, relishes, and butters.

Best of all, these recipes rise above the mundane Monday-through-Friday fare. Imagine homemade ravioli and lasagna for weeknight supper, or from-scratch tomato sauce before the pasta water has even boiled. Last-minute guests? Dress up simple tomato sauce with capers and olives or shrimp and red pepper flakes. Drizzle sautéed chicken breasts with a balsamic vinegar pan sauce. Anderson teaches you how to do it--without a recipe. Don't buy exotic ingredients and follow tedious instructions for making hors d'oeuvres. Forage through the pantry and refrigerator for quick appetizers. The ingredients are all there; the method is in your head. Master four simple potato dishes--a bake, a cake, a mash, and a roast--compatible with many meals. Learn how to make the five-minute dinner salad, easily changing its look and flavor depending on the season and occasion. Tuck a few dessert techniques in your back pocket and effortlessly turn any meal into a special occasion.

There's real rhyme and reason to Pam's method at the beginning of every chapter: To dress greens, "Drizzle salad with oil, salt, and pepper, then toss until just slick. Sprinkle in some vinegar to give it a little kick." To make a frittata, "Cook eggs without stirring until set around the edges. Bake until puffy, then cut it into wedges." Each chapter also contains a helpful at-a-glance chart that highlights the key points of every technique, and a master recipe with enough variations to keep you going until you've learned how to cook without a book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3433 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-04
• Released on: 2000-04-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780767902793
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Learn what makes a recipe tick, says How to Cook Without a Book author Pam Anderson, and you'll serve great food fast. Recognizing that most cooks feel challenged in the face of daily meal making, Anderson provides a game plan: prepare dishes based on available ingredients and simple cooking techniques you've mastered--not on recipes you've got to look up and ingredients you'll need to shop for--and you maximize the potential of kitchen ease. Cooks looking for a way to address the what-will-we-have-tonight quandary definitively, or those who feel they lack the energy or know-how to tackle cooking every night, should find the book essential. In chapters such as "Simple Stir-Frys" or "Weeknight Ravioli and Lasagna," Anderson presents a particular cooking procedure, provides a recipe that embodies it in its basic form (the protein-adaptable Weeknight Stir-Fry, for example), then offers simple variations (such as Stir-Fried Chicken with Asparagus and Mushrooms or Stir-Fried Shrimp with Pepper and Scallions). Chapters conclude with an at-a-glance review of key technique points. Following Anderson's tips and innovations, lasagna, for example, becomes a weeknight option (use egg-roll wrappers for the pasta, Anderson advises, and forgo the baking); she also shows how, once mastered, her Big Fat Omelet, which serves four, can become the basis for a wide range of lunch and dinner entrées. With a comprehensive pantry section and a dessert chapter that puts frozen puff pastry to work in imaginative ways, the book is a trove of information that cooks can use and depend on. --Arthur Boehm

From Publishers Weekly
Former executive editor of Cook's magazine and author of The Perfect Recipe, Anderson wants to teach Americans a new way to cookAwithout relying on recipes. It's somewhat surprising, then, to discover that this book is full of recipes. However, readers may cotton to Anderson's method: each chapter consists of a simple technique, basic recipe, variations, key points and a little mnemonic device used to recall the technique. The techniques are, for the most part, terrific time-savers, such as cutting out the back before roasting a whole chicken or making one giant omelet to serve four people so that everyone can eat together. Variations are good, too, although many are so similar to one another that it seems a little repetitious to include a recipe for each (in turn, many of the recipes refer back to the original, resulting in a lot of page-flipping). A chapter on tomato sauces, for example, includes the basic Simple Tomato Sauce, as well as Tomato Sauce with Dried Porcini, Tomato Sauce with Sweet Onions and Thyme, Tomato Sauce with Shrimp and Red Pepper Flakes and many others. A chapter on pan sauces is a winner, encompassing Red Wine-Dijon Pan Sauce, Port Wine Pan Sauce with Dried Cranberries and Balsamic Pan Sauce with Pine Nuts and Raisins. In the end, this cookbook is a solid collection of simple, quick recipes, but with its sometimes scattered format, it is unlikely to free everyday cooks from the tyranny of recipes. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
Praise for How to Cook Without a Book by Pam Anderson:

"How to Cook Without a Book should win a prize for most understated cookbook title. What Pam Anderson really outlines here is a culinary tradition for today's American family; a practical, nourishing, and delicious way to deal with your family's everyday food life without written-in-stone recipes and without fuss or arcane ingredients. You'll love Pam holding your hand while you create the dishes that your children and grandchildren will one day certainly be cooking without a book."
--Arthur Schwartz, author of What to Cook and Naples at Table

"For down-to-earth, 'can-do' cooking that tastes terrific, nobody does it better than Pam Anderson. The book's common sense tips and kitchen wisdom will not only inspire new cooks but inform well-seasoned ones, too."
--Rick Rodgers, author of Thanksgiving 101 and Christmas 101

"[The] book gives you confidence that [the recipes] will work, and you will not be disappointed."
--The New York Times

"Her writing is sensible and easy to understand. Useful and challenging enough for both experienced cooks and novices."
--Philadelphia Inquirer

"My pick for cookbook of the year. . . . It's a book that both novices and experienced cooks will appreciate."
--Times/Post Intelligencer, Seattle, WA

"If you want to produce contemporary perfections in standards like meatloaf, roast turkey, cole slaw, and cobbler, this is the book for you."
--Chattanooga Times -- Review

Customer Reviews

The Cookbook You've Always Wanted!
I already own a bookshelf of cookbooks, but Pam Anderson's is truly unlike any other out there. It explains, in a concise manner, the basis for the primary forms of cooking (from scratch!) that we all love, but never cook for lack of time: those hearty soups, salads, sauces to go with that ever-present chicken, and how to expand your menu way beyond chicken, and so much more. Unbelievable, she shows us that we *can* cook these on a weeknight (most within 30 minutes).

I love the concept behind this book because, while I enjoy cooking, I often don't have time for all of the recipes that are my family's favorites -- or at least I didn't think I did. This book teaches you that a soup, for example, is a few basic ingredients that you probably already have in your home, and that it can be prepared in 20 minutes! She shows you how this is true for a wide variety of meats, pasta dishes, appetizers, desserts, even stir-fry and pad thai dishes.

While there are also example recipes for every category of food in the book, after reading it, you will be inspired to create your own variations, even if you never thought you could. In addition, there are tips on how to make most of this food sophisticated enough for a dinner party, including example menus.

With the help of Pam Anderson's book, I now have the joy and the option of creating my own recipes, instead of constantly pulling a book from the shelf to find the answer to "What's for dinner?"

It's easy to read, thoroughly enjoyable and best of all, the ideas presented will help end the feeling that cooking the nightly dinner is such a chore!

This book makes weeknight cooking a breeze!
"How to Cook without a Book" is the cookbook that I have been hoping to find. It teaches you the mindset and skills neccesary to quickly prepare a healthy meal with what you've got in your fridge and pantry. The weekends are great for trying new recipes and new ingredients, but what do you do on Wednesday night at 6pm when you're tired and hungry and haven't yet given a thought to what you'll cook and whether you have all the ingredients?

"How to Cook without a Recipe" teaches you a few simple techniques which can be used with a variety of ingredient combinations. For example, Ms. Anderson's saute techinique works for chicken, pork, fish, tofu, and more. So, if you have any of these on hand and a few seasonings, you've got your main dish.

So far I've read a few sections of the book, and it has already improved my cooking. What the book boils down to is this: learn a few techniques, stock your pantry, make a weekly trip to the grocery store to buy whatever's in season or on sale, and you'll be able to put a "real meal" on the table anytime.

Excellent for someone setting up a new house or apartment and for those who are tired of take-out and packaged instant meals. Would make a great gift for a college graduate or for a bride and/or groom-to-be.

I wouldn't have gone to cooking school if I'd read this
The overall lesson about cooking in this book is THE BEST OUT THERE. She tells you the truth. I can't imagine anyone not knowing what to cook for dinner if they had this book. It breaks everything down, gives you the big picture, so you realize what those recipes you've been following blindly were trying to do. It's true she has you get pre-made sauces and chicken broth (some Asian sauces should be bought pre-made anyway) and if you actually have time to make them you'll have to open up another book for those things if you're a beginner (who has time these days anyway?). On the other hand, I am so sick of reading cookbooks where the cook writes as if they are performing on stage, which has no relevance whatsoever to what I'm doing in the kitchen. This book doesn't waste your time, gets right down to business.