FOOD \u0026 WINE Annual Cookbook 2013: An Entire Year of Recipes by Food Wine Magazine

FOOD \u0026 WINE Annual Cookbook 2013: An Entire Year of Recipes Reviews

• 
  Gina

  Random library book sale cookbook find that will probably end up getting re-donated. I had higher hopes for this after a mostly positive experience with the Food & Wine Staff Favorites cookbook I reviewed last year. That one wasn't perfect either, but I at least found a few recipes that will be (or already have become) do-overs. Not so with this one. It isn't that anything I made was bad. We ate at least 1 meal, maybe 2 with leftovers, off of everything I made. We weren't always excited about those leftovers, however, and I didn't make anything I'd make again. As always, I didn't make every recipe, but I made recipes from a variety of categories and types to try and get an overall feel.
  The best thing I made was the $4 Spaghetti (more like $7 with current inflation), a take on a NY chef's $24 spaghetti from their restaurant, which had simple ingredients but a lot of steps. We found this very tasty, and it's the only recipe we ate all of over about 3 different meals. But, I don't think I'd make it again. It was a lot of prep and hassle for weeknight cooking, felt it wasted some ingredients (boiling a lot of mushrooms just to get mushroom broth then tossing the mushrooms), and while it was good, it wasn't really better than some other pasta/tomato sauce recipes I already make. Recipes like the Monte Cristo Strata or the Brussel Sprouts Salad were tasty. We ate some leftovers but I ended up throwing a significant amount of both out - the Strata because it made a huge pan, we got tired of it, and it wouldn't freeze well, and the Salad because it didn't keep in the fridge beyond a day. The Keema Beef Curry was OK, but it tasted more like a curry recipe you'd find in a Midwest church cookbook (bland an not appetizing looking) than in a gourmet food magazine. The only recipe I threw out after we ate one serving was the Pecan Pie with Ginger. We love pecan pie, and we love ginger. We should have at least liked this, but it was just not good - weird filling to nut ratio, weak ginger flavor, just weird ratio of ingredients all around. I made many more recipes than this, but there are just so may ways to say meh.
  I should note that I didn't have a hard time finding any of the ingredients in the recipes I made, but I also specifically picked recipes where that wouldn't be an issue. There are plenty in here that will require extra sourcing effort.
  This cookbook isn't bad, really. There are probably some hidden gems in here, I'm just tired of searching.
• 
  Jerry

  The 20th century Food & Wine collections were all very useful; this is the first of the 21st century collections I’ve picked up (regardless of whether you think the year 2000 is in the 21st century, it only collects recipes from 1999).
  
  This one is also very useful. The pork roast with citrus and green sauce was phenomenal. The garlicky potatoes, green beans, and cauliflower that I ate with them were also very good. The “healthy” potato gratin looked better than it tasted, but it tasted quite good.
  
  And I still have a bunch of recipes bookmarked to try: Burmese-style eggplant, cornmeal-almond cake, Egyptian red lentil soup, and red kuru squash soup.
  
  If it turns out that Food & Wine really has stopped publishing this as a physical collection, my chronic collector’s disease will probably kick in enough to pick up the other sixteen from the 2000s. But then, I’m probably part of the problem from their perspective, as I don’t buy them new.
• 
  Bert Edens

  I always feel weird saying I read a cookbook since it's not like a typical book and it's not like I read every ingredient and instruction in detail. I do however look at each recipe to see if it looks interesting, mark those that do, and sometimes make notes outside the book for combinations of ingredients I hadn't considered before, etc.
  
  That said, I really like this one. Lots of solid recipes, plenty of pictures of completed dishes, and they even suggest a wine with each one (well, it is from Food & Wine magazine, to which I'm a subscriber). There are definitely some gems in there.
  
  As a aide note, as a lover of Korean cuisine, it was nice to see several Korean dishes and dishes containing kimchi. Yum!