My Favourite Recipes - Easy To Cook - Great Taste!

... actually, the soup recipe books I use. They are great and offer some truly exceptional recipes. Also I use them as inspiration for my own creations.

Reading cookbooks to me is like reading a good novel. When I read a recipe I can very well imagine how the finished dish will taste.

Who's hungry? EVERYONE. Who has time to cook? NO ONE.

Dig out the slow cooker. Add a second and a third if you wish. Fill one with main-dish fixins and the others with go-alongs. Do it in the morning-or between work and after-school events. Come home to richly-flavored, ready-to-serve food.

Slow cookers are having a comeback. With good reason. They are friends on a day of running errands. They allow easy entertaining with no last-minute preparation. And vegetarians won't find a better way to work with dried beans.

Slow cookers are gentle with the food budget - less expensive ingredients flourish in their slow, moist heat.

Fix-It and Forget-It, the cookbook featured below offers the range of recipes slow cookers do well:

Appetizers and Snacks, Soups and Stews, Main Dishes (with and without meat), Vegetables and Go-Alongs, Desserts and Beverages. More than 800 recipes - the whole range of recipes slow cookers do well.

Tips and Hints are dropped in throughout, urging one additional small step for lots of extra flavor, offering ways to make your cooker a complementary appliance, explaining seasoning to maximum effect.

This book is a great introduction to many other phenomenons that happen when you start to work with food. A kitchen is no different from most science laboratories and cookery may properly be regarded as an experimental science.

Food preparation and cookery involve many processes which are well described by the physical sciences. Understanding the chemistry and physics of cooking should lead to improvements in performance in the kitchen.

For those of us who wish to know why certain recipes work and perhaps more importantly why others fail, appreciating the underlying physical processes will inevitably help in unravelling the mysteries of the "art" of good cooking.

Eating raw isn't just for naturalists anymore. Today, health-conscious eaters are filling their plates with the foods nature has already prepared. And these foods go well beyond the sprouts, carrots, and celery typically associated with this type of diet.

In Living Cuisine, celebrated raw chef Renee Underkoffler shows how varied, exciting, and healthy raw-foods cuisine can be. She introduces the many benefits of eating raw and offers guidelines for incorporating this healthier regimen into one's lifestyle. She provides clear, step-by-step instructions for raw-foods processing techniques-juicing, sprouting, culturing and fermenting, dehydrating, and even blanching.

At the heart of Living Cuisine are the more than 300 tantalizing recipes inspired by a wide range of ethnic and regional foods. These beverages, soups, salads, appetizers, side dishes, sushi, entrees, and desserts are all delicious and simple to prepare. This unique resource includes thorough information necessary for a foray into raw-foods living

This extensive volume provides a compendium of information on the chic raw foods movement.

Underkoffler, a Maui-based restaurateur and workshop facilitator, devotes several hundred pages to descriptions of fruits, vegetables and the other essentials of a raw foods diet; the economic and social effects of eating raw foods; and the health benefits of adhering to such a diet.

Many of the volume's recipes make the prospect of eating all raw foods quite appetizing. Indonesian vegetable Pad Thai in Coconut Sauce, Golden Butternut Soup with Provençal Pesto, Pesto Stuffed Mushrooms and Crumble Apple Strudel Bundt Cake are all dishes that even non-raw converts might savor.

And the author offers little tips to help soften the strict rules of eating raw. For example, she explains, "A wonderful secret of raw foods preparation is to serve soup in a warmed bowl. It allows the flavors to bloom a little bit more and keeps the soup warm without having to heat the soup to unhealthful temperatures upon serving."

For readers who don't mind lukewarm bisque, or the significant effort that goes into preparing it, this book offers nice variety and valuable information.

If you think "raw food" means carrots and alfalfa sprouts, Raw will astound you with its elegance and inventiveness. It's a combination no-cook book featuring gourmet recipes using raw and dehydrated vegetables, and a gorgeous, eye-popping, food photography book.

The large, glossy book is beautifully designed, with well-arranged recipes, presentation notes, elegant language, and full-page, bigger-than-life photographs of exquisitely arranged food. Each recipe is introduced by an enticing description, e.g., "the juxtapositions of the crunchy peppercorn pieces and the creamy cheese [made from cashews], the crispy smoked almonds, and the chewy dried apricots, the erotic gooeyness of the honeycomb mounds and the elegant crispiness of the thyme spouts" This is for special meals, not everyday--the recipes are not quick to prepare, and many include references to other recipes.

Authors Charlie Trotter and Roxanne Klein are master chefs at two internationally acclaimed gourmet vegetarian raw-food restaurants--Charlie Trotter's in Chicago and Roxanne's in California. Photographer Tim Turner turns food photography into contemporary art. Wine notes by Jason Smith give the final touch of elegance.

Highly recommended for the adventurous, gourmet cook willing to go the next step in vegetarian fine dining and anyone-- cook or not--who appreciates food photography. --Joan Price

The collection of vegan recipes, all cooked at temperatures below 118°F, is decidedly gourmet. Dishes worthy of dinner parties include Three Peppercorn-Crusted Cashew Cheese with Honeycomb and Balsamic Vinegar, Salsify with Black Truffles and Porcini Mushrooms, Portobello Mushroom Pave with White Asparagus Vinaigrette, Indian Red Peaches with Vanilla Ice Cream (made with almond milk) and Banana Chocolate Tart with Caramel and Chocolate Sauces.

Wine notes with each recipe remind readers that raw food can be complemented by a fine vintage without breaking any rules because "wine, at its most basic, is also an unadulterated creation, never rising above 118°F during its production."

The recipes tend to be labor intensive since the taste, textures and flavor of sophisticated raw food can't be bought pre-packaged at the supermarket. But for those who want to reap the reported health benefits of raw food without sacrificing the luxurious taste of fine cuisine, the effort required for these recipes is worthwhile.