Product Description

This sturdy kitchen organizer is the perfect companion for any home cook-and essential for fans of Alton Brown's I'm Just Here For the Food.

Designed to be a constant kitchen companion, the Kitchen User's Manual has eight separate sections for your recipes, notes, and other cooking essentials. Each section includes a durable full-page plastic pocket to hold clippings, equipment manuals and warranties, and other kitchen paperwork.

Blank pages have plenty of space for clippings or handwritten recipes-plus notes on the side. And it's the place for all that cooking information that's rarely gathered in one place: temperature and measurement conversion charts, ingredient substitutions, guides to cuts of meat, cutting and carving diagrams, sanitation and safety information, and much more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #381404 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Ring-bound
• 160 pages

About the Author
Alton Brown is the host of the Food Network's Good Eats. He began his TV career as a cameraman and commercial director, but when e wasn't shooting he was cooking and watching cooking shows, which he thought were dull and uninformative. Tired of the griping, Brown's wife, DeAnna, suggested they do something about it. They moved to Vermont, where Brown attended the New England Culinary Institute. During the years that followed, he concocted a new kind of food show, one that blends wit with wisdom, history with pop culture, and science with common cooking sense. Alton and DeAnna live in the southern United States with their daughter, Zoey, "one worthless hound dog," and an iguana named Spike.

Customer Reviews

Like his show, a great starting point
Alton Brown's Food Network TV show, Good Eats, is one of the most educational shows on cooking that I have seen. He likes to explain how and why things work. I love both the pedantry and the humor of his show (although I have heard others who dislike the child-like approach he takes; not childish! Child-like. There's a big difference.)

As my title says, his show is a good starting point. Alton Brown can help you understand how food and cooking work. He provides good solid information and he lays a foundation that gives you the confidence to invent your own food. ("Play with your food!"). But he cannot, in a half hour show that includes comedy sketches, teach you everything. His book, "I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking" is much the same. He presents good basic information on cooking methods and techniques in a book with catchy graphics and his typical humor. If you want to learn the WHYs of cooking, this book is a great start. From here, move on to Shirley Corriher's "Cookwise," which gives greater depth a slightly more serious science.

I *love* this book. But here are the negatives: 1) Not a cookbook. Don't look for a lot of recipies. 2) Not loose or spiral bound. All cooking books should be, and too few are. 3) Covers all major cooking methods (from boiling to microwaving), but no baking! Baking is my main hobby. Maybe a future book -- "Cookwise" has baking info.

Alton Brown singlehandedly changed me from a recipie slave to a creative cook. I've moved on to other food writers, and I've invented my own food, but Alton will always be my kitchen hero.

Not worth the money
I'm a huge Alton Brown fan. This is one of the books I asked for when my birthday came around. I thought I wanted it after reading the reviews and thought it sounded good. I was very disappointed. While there is some good information in it, it's mostly blank pages that you write your own recipes in w/ your notes. There are a few clear plastic pages so that you can put in recipe clippings and instructions and warranties for various kitchen gadgets, but a simple file folder would solve that. Sadly, I will be returning this book and finding something else to purchase.

Don't pay full price
Buy this used or like new if you want it. It's not bad, but it's really just a blank cookbook for you to fill in. It is, however, a very sturdy book with metal rings and it has a lot of recipe cards and a little section with measurement conversions and substitutions, which has already come in handy numerous times.

I like it because I like to tweak recipes I see and either make them healthier or more to my taste. Once I get it down to how I like it, I write it down in here and I always have it on hand. Like I said, don't pay the full $22 for it.