It's a cook book

I received a book I ordered last week from Amazon on Friday. It's titled "The Cook's Book" as you can see in the picture down below. Jill Norman is the editor but the writing is done by top chefs, each writing about their own specialty.

I read a review of the book on a cooking blog a month or so ago, probably Ariela's lovely site, Baking and Books. In any case, I had the book on my ordering queue for a while and finally decided to buy it. It's not cheap. The book lists at $50 but discounted down it's around $30-35.

It is most definitely worth the money. Just as eye candy for your coffee table it's worth the moola but when you consider actually using it... the possibilities are astounding. The book has mouth watering illustrations of food--the photography is amazing--but even more important to us amateurs, it's well illustrated with basic and advanced cooking techniques. It's a mid-level book that gracefully allows beginners to join in. Nice!

There's also a "concise" edition that was just published 2 months ago. It shaves off about 150 pages, which brings it down to 496, and drops the price 20 bucks. It's discounted 34% at Amazon to $19.80. I've not seen the concise edition so I don't know how it compares. It's got to be a lot lighter. The book I have weighs something like 7 pounds.

I hope to try out a few of these recipes between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's amazing how much more incentive a book with great pictures gives you. You just feel a desperate need to eat when you see how this food looks.



Click on any of these pictures if you want to see them bigger.

That picture above is a good example of how the book teaches techniques with a lot of pictures.

The book is divided into 24 sections that range from basic techniques like making sauces, stocks, and flavorings to cuisines like Thai, Middle Eastern, Indian and many others. Wild game? It's covered. So are the food types like grains, pastries, meats, veggies, etc.

There's 10 reviews of the book on Amazon and all are highly favorable. The main criticism seems to be that some of the sections are rather brief and that's valid. A few are only 10 pages or so. However with a page count that's over 600 already it'd be difficult to do a lot more in one volume. I guess if you want a real strong treatment of any of these specialties you'd have to buy a book on that one area. Since there's 24 sections they average a bit over 25 pages each.

The two pictures below are neat. I'm doing a roast today in my crock pot. I should have tried the technique below instead. Baking a roast in salt dough. Nice. Just look at how it turns out in that second picture--meat in a nice round of bread. I love it.