Mediterranean Light : Delicious Recipes from the World's Healthiest Cuisine

Rating:
Summary: I Cook Regularly From This
Review: My rule of thumb is, if you get three recipes that you cook regularly out of a cookbook, and you otherwise enjoy it, it has earned its selling price. Let's see: I use the recipes for hummus, white bean and tuna salad, tabouleh, semolina bread, that thing with chard and fish . . . and there's lots more. The author explains how to do it all from scratch, which is always good to know, but I've saved some time substituting already cooked beans and, when I don't have any I've made myself, I've used commercially produced, fat-reduced chicken stock. Nutritional data is provided for each dish.

Rating:
Summary: Even my teenaged daughter likes it...
Review: Sometimes finding a good cookbook is a question of compatibility and style. I find her directions very easy to follow and so far everything I've tried has been a hit. I'm an inexperienced breadmaker, but the breads I've tried have all come out terrific. The proof of the pudding, however, is that when I made Provencal chicken my teenaged daughter bit into a piece of chicken and went "Mmmmm!" My husband and I looked at each other in disbelief since she has not liked anything I've cooked for what seems like forever. For me, this is the most powerful endorsement possible. This is a great cookbook!

Rating:
Summary: A Hit-and-Miss Introduction to Mediterranean Cuisine
Review: This was the only cookbook I took with me on an extended trip to Greece, and in some respects it was a good choice. I found tons of recipes here for the types of wonderful ingredients I found in the open-air markets there, and many of the dishes were excellent--the pizza dough alone is worth taking a look at Mediterranean Light for, not to mention the Turkish style cornbread. Many of the dishes, however, have proved disappointing in practice. Her Moroccan-style shrimp with cumin overwhelmed the delicate shrimp with too-heavy spicing, a real let-down after all the fussing with shrimp-shell stock this recipe required. Other dishes required too much fussing for very simple results--notably a chicken soup requiring three days of preparation! Others required such shortcuts or compromises that they were guaranteed disappointments; instead of stewing a chicken with vegetables and seasonings for her avgolemeno, Shulman dumps some eggs and lemon into a pre-cooked broth. The good dishes here, like a lovely low-fat hummus which I make regularly, are very good indeed; but the reader should be aware that many recipes in this collection will not live up to their promise on the page.