Description:
If you have a friend who thinks of Ritz crackers and cheese spread as a meal, you aren't likely to go there for unbelievably delicious recipes, are you? But what if you are pals with Fran McCullough and Suzanne Hamlin, two of the mighty among food editors and food writers? Then you'd be on the receiving end of the best recipes they can find and test, recipes annually culled from every source imaginable--newspapers, magazines, books, e-mail, backs of boxes, advertising inserts, Web sites, word-of-mouth, fortune cookies, subway graffiti. Figure on two recipes a week for a year with two weeks vacation thrown in: that'd be, oh, 100 recipes, wouldn't it? And that is what you get when you dip into The Best American Recipes 1999. Within you'll find starters and drinks, soups and stews, salads, main dishes, side dishes, breads, and desserts. These aren't your common, everyday, what'll-I-feed-the-kids-for-dinner recipes. That's why you get two a week for a year (albeit, all at once; you divvy them up however you want). And as a bonus, you get the authors' choices for the top 10 whatevers of the year. Comeback of the Year? It's cheese. Condiment of the year? Finally, it's salt. Cooking technique of the year? Only fitting that it's brining. Be sure to try the Salmon in Sweet Red Curry, one of the top 10 dishes of the year that ran in the Los Angeles Times. Or the Brazilian Seafood Stew, a little something from Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger. Nancy Silverton's Definitive Hot Fudge Sauce is here and may be the price-of-admission winner. And so, too, is a delicious Moroccan Tomato Soup from Barbara Kafka's Soup: A Way of Life. But here's the bottom line: any book that publishes a recipe by the Bay Area's fabulous Niloufer Ichaporia King, Parsi Deviled Eggs in this case, is indeed a book you want to use. --Schuyler Ingle
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