Cookbook Reviewitas

Some of you may know that one of my favorite pastimes besides reading is cooking.  I have gotten a few cookbooks over the past several weeks, and I've been testing them by using one or two recipes from each.  Which brings me to a dilemma- when you review a cookbook, how many recipes must you try before you can write a good review?  Do you have to try any?  Or all?  I usually try a couple and then base most of my review on the set-up of the book- the ease with which I can find important information.  So... hopefully that works for you, too!  These are pretty short reviews, so I'm calling them reviewitas.

As a huge fan of the local farmers' market, I was so excited to get Fast, Fresh & Green!  Unfortunately, as most vegetables aren't in season right now, I haven't been able to do much with this book quite yet.  However, I am all set to use it through this summer and fall!  In flipping through this book, I feel like it's well set-up.  Almost all the dishes in here are sides.  At least, I think they are as the book is not set up with "Appetizers/Mains/Sides" etc., the way that many traditional books are set up.  Rather, it's set up by the way you cook the vegetables (sauteeing, braising, stir frying, etc).  I like this book for emotional reasons.  So many people are anti-vegetable.  As I grew up in a household that was vegetarian probably 70% of the week, I find this fact very difficult to stomach (pun intended).  And I can't help but think that people are anti-vegetable because they don't know how to cook them properly.  So... here is a book that makes it so simple and has a lot of fantastic ideas on how to make vegetables a major part of your diet and enjoy them, too!  There's way more to do than just steam them, I assure you.

I received a copy of Creating Empty Bottle Moments to review, and it's very different than I expected.  Not in a bad way at all.  There aren't that many recipes in this book.  Rather, Clive Berkman shares with readers some "empty bottle moments"- occasions he participated in with friends and family and others and how special they were.  And then he shares with us the recipes he used for those occasions.  As there aren't too many recipes in here, I certainly wouldn't use this as your go-to cookbook, if you were to only purchase one.  But it's a nice coffee table book and I used his very simple phyllo brie recipe and it was a hit!  The only thing I disliked somewhat about this book was the index.  It was indexed by course, so I couldn't look up an ingredient (i.e., "chicken") and find all recipes relating to that ingredient, which I found annoying.

This last book, Wine Cocktails, I haven't made any recipes from mostly because I am lazy, mixology-wise.  But I love the idea of this book.  I think wine intimidates many people, and so I like that this book gives you inventive and creative ways of including wine in a cocktail party.  I am a huge fan of wine, though I never really analyze it in any way.  I just like to have wine with friends, often over a meal.  I love drinking wine outdoors in the summer.  I like the culture that surrounds wine.  I just think it's fun, and I'm thrilled that now I have a book that will let me experiment more with it.