Product Description

You love to cook, and you're always looking for great new recipes. But who on earth has time to search out the very best recipes among the thousands in the latest food magazines, new cookbooks, food-related Web sites, and local and national newspapers? Now two seasoned professionals have done all the work for you.
Acclaimed by reviewers from the New York Times to People as the only collection of its kind, The Best American Recipes offers a dazzlingly diverse selection. To create this year's edition -- the most exciting ever -- Fran McCullough and Molly Stevens combed through hundreds of sources, from the most talked about to the most obscure, tracking down thousands of recipes. They thoroughly home-tested each dish so you can be sure that every one is foolproof.
Variety is the key. You'll find inspiration for every meal and every occasion, with rediscovered classics as well as brilliantly simple dishes from the nation's top chefs. The more than 150 recipes include

• a terrific starter you can make in minutes: Minted Pea Soup, from the British cooking sensation Jamie Oliver
• an elegant breakfast: Baked Eggs in Maple Toast Cups, from a small Vermont food company
• a quick weeknight supper: Chicken Saltimbocca, from a supermarket flyer
• a fresh and versatile vegetarian main dish that's great for a party: Cremini Mushrooms with Chive Pasta, from a celebrated New York chef
• a truly memorable holiday side dish: Mashed Potatoes with Sage and White Cheddar Cheese, from a major food magazine
• the perfect snack: Chunky Peanut Butter and Oatmeal Chocolate Chipsters, from a soon-to-be-published cookbook by a baking expert

Every recipe comes with tips and suggestions from the editors' home kitchens, which expand your cooking and serving options and give you sterling results the first time, every time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #162820 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-14
• 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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
150 recipes that scream, "Try Me!" (The San Diego Union-Tribune )

About the Author
Fran McCullough has been an editor at Harper and Row, Dial Press, and Bantam, where she discovered such major cookbook authors as Deborah Madison, Diana Kennedy, Paula Wolfert, Martha Rose Shulman, and Colman Andrews. She is a coauthor of Great Food Without Fuss, which won a James Beard Award, and the author of the best-selling Low-Carb Cookbook, The Good Fat Cookbook, and Living Low-Carb.

MOLLY STEVENS won a James Beard Award and an IACP Award for All About Braising. She is a contributing editor for Fine Cooking.

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.