<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Beets are good.
Review: As an example, I never knew how to properly cook beets. But when I followed their simple method the beets turned out great--delicious. And the same is true for the many vegetables highlighted in this great cookbook. This is truly an outstanding reference for preparing fresh vegetables--whether from your garden or from the market. Simple instructions, tested results.
Rating:
Summary: Beets are good.
Review: As an example, I never knew how to properly cook beets. But when I followed their simple method the beets turned out great--delicious. And the same is true for the many vegetables highlighted in this great cookbook. This is truly an outstanding reference for preparing fresh vegetables--whether from your garden or from the market. Simple instructions, tested results.
Rating:
Summary: Thanks Aunt Lois
Review: As I child, I spent my summers in the small gold minning town of Dutch Flat, California. My Aunt Lois ran the local hotel for years and people came from San Francisco+ to enjoy her home town cooking. She taught me to grow organic vegetables, use pure ingredients, and even bake pies with hand picked berries. So, twenty years ago, while the mother of five children, I decided to write a vegetable cookbook where I gathered and reinvented my childhood memories into favorite recipes. The result was Too Many Tonatoes... Thanks to all of you who enjoy this book. God Bless, Happy Cooking, I send my love, Lois Landau
Rating:
Summary: Can't live without it!
Review: I bought this book at least 20 years ago, when I first started cooking. I originally bought it to find ways to use produce received from a neighborhood co-op. As a result I learned ways to cook items that I thought I did not like. Now, many of my favorite recipes are from the book.
Over the years, I used this cookbook so much it literally fell apart. So, I was thrilled to see it available on Amazon.com. Now I have a nice new copy.
I consider it an essential cookbook for any cook. The recipes range from classic to unique - all are easy to make; none too fancy.
It's a winner.
Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic concept--poor execution
Review: I love the *idea* of this cookbook. It presents chapters organized alphabetically by garden vegetable. Each chapter includes notes on growing and harvesting the vegetable, yield information, a few nutritional notes, information on storage, freezing, cooking, basic preparation, and complementary herbs. The freezing information is perhaps the most useful, in my mind. The one truly great piece of information I got out of this cookbook is that you *can* freeze and then reheat potato dishes, as long as you don't thaw them first; most cookbooks will just tell you that you can't do this. (However, it doesn't give any instructions as to which sorts of dishes work well for this and which don't--and believe me, some work *much* better than others. Let's just say that if you want to freeze potato dishes, freeze ones in which the potato is in as mashed and creamy a state as possible, with few chunks.)The recipes themselves are all over the map in terms of quality, and lean very heavily on fatty dairy products to make them flavorful--which means that they won't be very useful to vegans or folks on a diet (two major groups of people who are going to want to make heavy use of vegetables in their diet). Most of them also don't use a huge amount of the vegetable in question, and don't state whether they freeze well or not (and if they do, how to alter the cooking instructions for the frozen dish), which means that these recipes aren't any more useful for the cookbook's stated purpose than those in other cookbooks. The only advantage is that in here they're organized by vegetable, and, well, that's what an index is for in other cookbooks. You'd be better off with a copy of the Joy of Cooking--it covers all the vegetables as well, and the recipes are of much more consistent quality. Speaking of the recipes... Some of the recipes have blatant mistakes in them (like the recipe that called for WAY too much salt--our best guess is that it should have called for one *teaspoon* instead of one *tablespoon*). Others just don't taste very good; rarely have I found a cookbook with such incredibly mediocre recipes. Because of the way the recipes are written up, sometimes it's tough to tell which groups of ingredients go with which instructions. Although the recipes look incredibly simple, sometimes that's because they under-explain things or leave out steps, which means that the kind of cook who'll appreciate having simple recipes will probably have problems with them. This book is a great concept, and it saddens me to have to give it such a poor review. But it just doesn't stand up to real use.
<< 1 >>
|
