Friday, October 14, 2016

Good Taste: Simple, Delicious Recipes for Family and Friends by Jane Green


I signed up to review Good Taste: Simple, Delicious Recipes for Family and Friends, today, but neglected to block off a quick jaunt taken this past weekend on my calendar. As a result, I won't be able to cook from the book until this coming weekend, since it's really my husband that does the bulk of the cooking and he has been gone for the better part of the last 5 weeks. When we cook together, I typically read the instructions aloud and he puts me to work chopping while he does most everything else. Having said that, I have to tell you that I want to cook absolutely everything in Good Taste, which is highly unusual because I'm kind of a picky person.

Here's what I love about Good Taste:

1. It's beautiful. The cover is, in my opinion, way too easy to walk past. But, open the book and flip through and you'll find at least one full-size photo for every dish, sometimes several smaller, decorative images, as well. I have learned my lesson about cookbooks that don't have photos of the finished product: we don't use them. So, the photos are not just great to look at, they're crucial.


2. The word "simple" is not an overstatement. While a few of the recipes have a longish list of ingredients, only one that I recall required the preparation of a second item to use in the recipe (and that ingredient is available at Trader Joe's, if you have one). Most ingredients are easily obtainable, even in our location, which is sadly lacking in options. So, the list of ingredients is almost always all you need. The curry shown above has one of the longer ingredient lists. Most fall closer to 8-10 ingredients.

3. My husband wants to cook just about everything, too. He'll eat just about anything once, but he very seldom finds a cookbook that he thinks is up to snuff, primarily because so many of them involve too many ingredients or complex preparation. After I gushed to him about Good Taste, he spent an hour or so flipping through the book and reading recipes. He was completely sold and is looking forward to cooking out of it, too. He's the chief cook in this house but I often foist recipes on him. If he's not interested, he won't budge. I also have let a couple other people flip through the book and they thought it looked appealing, too. We're at 100% approval, here, people. That's amazing.

4. The text is marvelous. If you've read Jane Green, that's probably not surprising. Jane Green is a novelist. She tells anecdotes about her family, her cooking history, her childhood, etc., in Good Taste, and they make the book just as fun to read as it is to flip through for the photographs and recipes. If you like a little extra material that goes beyond recipes, you'll enjoy the text.

Highly recommended with a side note - I've already mentioned this but it bears repeating that I have not yet cooked a recipe from Good Taste. However, the lists of ingredients are on the minimal side (always a plus) and I found the recipes easy to visualize preparing. Because I seldom cook, anymore, I often have a lot of questions about preparation -- I don't always "get" the instructions -- so that bodes well for less experienced cooks. I even want to try the meat recipes. Husband got a good belly laugh when I told him I even want to try the ribs because I'm one of those weird people you've heard about who don't like messy food -- you know, the ones who use a knife and fork on pizza? Yeah, I'm that weirdo. I don't like messes and I'm not a fan of meat. So, it's pretty weird that I want to try a rib recipe.

I may not do a full review of any recipes we cook this weekend, but I will definitely let you know the results in one of next week's posts.

UPDATE:  I talked about the 4 recipes from Good Taste that we cooked over the weekend in my Monday Malarkey post. Scroll down to "In other news" toward the bottom to read what we cooked and what we thought (in brief: we liked everything).


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8 comments:

  1. I really loved this cookbook. I made the Chocolate Banana Cake and that was a real hit here, with one person who hates cake! Yes, my husband hates cake! Now, he's a weirdo!

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    1. I guess we're all weirdos in some way. :) I'm glad to know he enjoyed the Chocolate Banana Cake. I wondered what everyone thought of it. At the time you cooked it, you didn't have any confectioner's sugar so nobody was eating it and then . . . I left town. So glad you dropped by to tell me it was a hit!

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  2. I've been curious about this one as I've been reading a lot of Jane Green this year! What would you say the ratio of meat to veggie options is in the book? I don't do meat/fish and can't justify buying a cookbook for only 10% of the recipes...

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    1. It's divided into three sections: beginnings, middles, and endings. The middles are almost entirely meat items and I'd say they're a little more than a third. Beginnings are soups, nuts, tarts, and other appetizer-like items, the idea being things to eat as a starter while you wait for the main dish, althhough plenty of those soups and tarts would be a main dish in our house. The endings secion is desserts and, ohmygosh, they sound amazing. I'd say over 50% of the book is meat-free. I only see one item with meat in it in the beginnings and none in the desserts. It's definitely way over 10% meatless.

      I haven't read Jane Green in years! I read Jemima J, Bookends, and some others, maybe in the 90s? It's been a while! Loved her writing.

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  3. Big beautiful pictures of the dish are definitely a must for me in any cook book! And minimal amounts of food and prep. There's nothing worse than spending hours cooking to eat it in five minutes. And then you have to clean up. Easy and yummy is always best.

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    1. Yep, same here. We've gotten books without photos or with photos of only *some* of the items, in the past, and we just don't use them. We mostly feel the same about cooking (occasionally, husband will do something that takes hours, if not days, to cook . . . just because he likes to play in the kitchen), the simpler and the fewer dishes and ingredients involved, the better. Plus, we have so much trouble getting ingredients that a lot of cooks seem to think are available everywhere that I always look at how easy the ingredients are to acquire and this one looks excellent in that regard. Thumbs up, baby.

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  4. Sold! Now to remember to ask for it for my birthday or Christmas.

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    1. Hope you love it, when that happens, Les! We're really enjoying it. I want to try more new recipes, this weekend.

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