Finger Food (Le Cordon Bleu Home Collection, Vol 14)

Rating:
Summary: Adequate tastes, adequate recipes
Review: I borrowed this book for a dinner party, and while I won't buy my own, there are a few recipes I'd make again -- a suitable description of my overall happiness with it.

Good things: the recipes are accessible to novice cooks (like me), minor errors and amateurish skills are (mostly) ok, and we were able to pull off all of the recipes we tried.

Bad things: there are a lot of gotchas, like assumptions about tools that novice cooks may not have; the portion measurements were regularly off (every dish we made didn't come out to the right amount -- too many, too few...); the ratings of easy to hard seem way off.

Overall, some hits (pronto puff pizzas, salmon/trout roulade) and some misses (cheese-filled mushrooms) with the crowd, and I wouldn't rush to make any of them again.

Rating:
Summary: The Cordon Bleu should be ashamed to put their name on this!
Review: Mundane recipes with little preparation information, but terrific photos. Buy it if you only like to look at food. Inexperienced cooks will be confused by the lack of preparation instructions. Serious cooks will find this book dull.