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Rating: 
Summary: a great variety of recipes, and exotic dishes
Review: all of the recipes in this book look wonderful, there are plenty of beautiful pictures to accompany this book. most of the recipes are fairly simple and quick to prepare. the only downfall is that many of the recipes require special ingredients that you might not find at your local grocery store. if this is not a problem for you, then you will enjoy the book. the ideas are great and there is a lot of variety, recipes for all kinds of meats, vegetables and some sea food. it also includes descriptions of ingredients, if you're new to asian foods!
Rating:
Summary: a great variety of recipes, and exotic dishes
Review: all of the recipes in this book look wonderful, there are plenty of beautiful pictures to accompany this book. most of the recipes are fairly simple and quick to prepare. the only downfall is that many of the recipes require special ingredients that you might not find at your local grocery store. if this is not a problem for you, then you will enjoy the book. the ideas are great and there is a lot of variety, recipes for all kinds of meats, vegetables and some sea food. it also includes descriptions of ingredients, if you're new to asian foods!
Rating:
Summary: Good cookbook, but frustratingly poor adaptation for US
Review: First off, this is a gorgeous cookbook. It's a large format and very well illustrated. Virtually every recipe includes four pictures: a large picture of the finished dish, and three smaller ones illustrating various steps. A key also grades the recipes on a difficulty scale of 1-3. Few recipes rate above a 1 (easiest).What I really like about this cookbook, other than its good looks, is the wide variety of stir-fries included. It covers beef, pork, lamb, poultry, seafood, tofu, and vegetable stir-fries; there are stir-fries with noodles, for serving over rice, as salads, or as a stand-alone dish. I think stir-fry is the ultimate quick weeknight meal, and all the choices here could keep you going for weeks without getting bored. However, there is a problem. This book was originally published in Australia, and very little has been done to adapt it for the US. For instance, bell peppers are called "capsicum," and ramen noodles "instant noodles." I figured out that English spinach means regular spinach, but I'm still not sure about Lebanese cucumbers, or a few other things. A small chart at the back translates the US names of a handful of items, but not enough. The recipes were developed with metric measurements, and although conversions are given, they tend to come out as awkward odd measurements: 3-1/2 ounces of mushrooms, or 13 ounces of beef. Also, the book is not consistently written. For instance, although there is a key to stir-fry ingredients at the front of the book, I ran across some things that either were not in the list, or were listed under another name. One recipe called for "Golden Mountain Sauce." I could not find this in the list, until I finally noticed that it was alphabetized under "Seasoning sauce" (gee, why didn't I think to look there?). Buried in the text describing seasoning sauce, it said, "also sold under the name Golden Mountain Sauce." There were one or two other things I didn't recognize that weren't described in the list, but I suspect this is because they are common Australian terms that didn't translate. You can also tell that the recipes were written by different people and not edited to appear consistent, as the same techniques are described differently in some recipes; some leave out hints/steps like freezing beef in order to get thin slices; and some specify a cut (usually rump steak for beef--I think this is boneless sirloin?) but some just say "beef." Bottom line, this book offers enough good things to outweigh the bad, so on balance I do like it. But the bad things just shouldn't be there in the first place. It should have been reworked before publication in the US.
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