****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I received this book as a gift, and I was pretty excited to try some of the recipes. I really want to love this book. The recipes are quite good, and they use common, easy to acquire ingredients. The recipes are generally easy to follow and contain no terms an average home cook wouldn't understand (you will never find Julienne or Paysanne terms in this book, for example). The steps are succinct and easy to follow.I rarely want to give negative feedback on a book like this, but this book has so many specific pain points that it's obvious that it's lacking insight and it really hurts the book:* This book could use some good editor love, and if given that it would definitely receive 5 stars. Going through the table of contents, it was immediately clear this book had not been proofread. Some of the titles are in block capitals, the others are in title case. Several of the headings are split into two lines, resulting in two entries in the table of contents (e.g. "Avocado gazpacho with" pg 80, "Sourdough Croutons" pg 80, and there are multiple entries of this). Then there's the missing ingredients problems (other reviewer identified some, pg 81 also has missing ingredients, pg 180 has two lines of ingredients that should have been 1, pg 237 has weight but not cups so it's not entirely guesswork, etc.). All of these could be fixed with some technological help and someone proofreading the book beforehand.* The really basic things are spellcheck, checking the table of contents doesn't have two adjacent entries with the same page number (because they used headers split across two lines, and Word and similar text entry treats this as two individual recipes) and verifying that every recipe has quantities attached to the food.* Two other changes that could be made that would substantially improve this book is creating an index section, where for the major ingredients one might have in excess - chicken, beef, etc. - it is organized by recipes that contain that major component. Have SOME organization component to it that makes sense, even if it's purely that you just sort the recipes alphabetically, and explain it in the forward of the book. Regional cooking would also be a possibility, as would equipment (one pot, slow cooker, etc.). By season would also be reasonable.* The forward of the book is the first section people are going to see that's not recipes. It represents part of the author's ideology with cooking, organization, or even talks about their back story. Apparently the backstory of this author is legal disclaimer and assertion of rights.* Several of the photos are rotated 90º and stretched, distorting the images. In addition to this, I know it would have cost more to print but the photos in color would have been immensely helpful, especially considering the cover photo is beautiful.* Add a small section near the front for the typical items used in the book. For example, I saw 6 qt slow cookers appear frequently in the recipes. One or two pages would do the trick.In short, I would not buy this book in its current form. I would get the version 2 of this book, which is hopefully in color, with all of the above fixed, and that's the version I would be very happy to gift to someone.
