The Bottom Line
- Large, hardcover book, suitable for gift-giving or coffee table
- Seasonal menu suggestions
- Many recipes are not difficult or don't take too long to prepare
- Not all recipes have a picture of finished product
- No nutritional information provided
- Non-food photos don't have captions indicating where they were taken
Description
- Seasonal Southwest Cooking contains 150 original recipes, from snacks to desserts.
- There are 12 menus included in Seasonal Southwest Cooking, focused on the holidays for each month.
- Most recipes in Seasonal Southwest Cooking are not very complex, and require no special equipment.
- There are several selections in Seasonal Southwest Cooking that are suitable for vegetarians.
- A resource list for Southwestern ingredients/spices is included if you can't find them in your area.
Guide Review - Seasonal Southwest Cooking
I read Seasonal Southwest Cooking the first time in a waiting room at a doctor's office. Every time I had to get up to complete a form, or see someone about something, someone in the waiting room would go over to my seat and pick up the book. I kept having to retrieve it, apologizing that it did not belong to the office!
Seasonal Southwest Cooking is, at the end of the day, a recipe book. Recipes, though, can be found on soup cans, on the Internet, on packages of gelatin, or in the newspaper. What makes Seasonal Southwest Cooking different is the friendliness of the author's descriptions and instructions, the full color photographs, and yes, the sheer size of the book.
While I would have liked to see nutritional information provided for the recipes, and I would have appreciated more photographs of the food so I could see how it would look if I prepared it correctly, I was pleased that not all the recipes were terribly complicated. Yes, I have a blender. Although the words 'parchment paper' usually send me into hiding (I'm not much of a gourmet cook!) I can handle wax paper. Most of the ingredients can be readily found at local grocery stores in the Southwest.
Seasonal Southwest Cooking is an attractive book, and anyone who receives this book will enjoy the recipes, menus, photographs of both food as well as the beauty of the Southwest, and the Southwest cultural explanations that are provided by the author.
