The Zen of Cooking: Creative Cooking With and Without Recipes

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Summary: Delicious, nutritious, and elegant dining
Review: In The Zen Of Cooking: How Recipes Can Teach Us To Cook Without Them, self-taught chef Lucille Naimer provides the aspiring and adventurous kitchen cook with an impressive collection of 130 base recipes (including their variations) for appetizers, pastas, main dishes, vegetarian dishes, soups, salads, sauces, marinades, salad dressings, and desserts. From Whole Wheat Peanut Butter Cookies; Tarragon Sour Cream Marinade For Poultry; and Turkey in Chocolate and Chili Sauce; to Cauliflower with Mustard Sauce and Vegetarian Meat Loaf; Wild Rice and Black Bean Soup; Polenta with Sausage Ragout; and Veal Rollette with Roasted Pepper Sauce, The Zen Of Cooking offers a highly recommended compendium of delicious, nutritious, and elegant dining.

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Summary: Zen brings out the creativity in every aspiring chef.
Review: Some cookbooks talk about the ingredients used in various dishes. And others provide great detail about the recipesthemselves. The Zen of Cooking goes ones step beyond. Claire and Lucille present, in a very conversational-like fashion, an understanding of the very essence of cooking. Their approach is to bring out the creativity in all of us by changing the very way we think about cooking. Simpkly, if one understands the core elements of a dish, that dish can not only be replicated with precesion but also personalized and enhanced by one's own preferences. As a result, I who understand that the core of cole slaw is a stiff green like lettuce and a dressing, can take this very American staple and turn it into something ethnic. Simply by varying the vinaigrette to perhaps include a rice wine vinegar and a bit of sesame oil and tossing in some spicier greens like anaheim peppers, I have transformed this US classic into something distinctly Asian! The Zen of Cooking is a must for anyone who enjoys cooking and entertaining and likes to be creative.