Customer Reviews

1001 Four-Ingredient Recipes

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a niche market cookbook excellent for those just learning to cook and for those who compulsively must have a recipe. Thus one gets such complex recipes as "Parsley Leaf Potatoes" (roast russet potatoes and top with flat leaf parsley) and "Parsley Potatoes" (steam new potatoes and top with snipped parsley) ... Well it does get the author to his 1001 recipes more quickly. One also gets recipes that you must be a kid to appreciate - fish sticks wrapped in crescent dinner rolls.

But once one gets past some of the absurdities, the cookbook provides some very good introductions to basic home cooking flavors and mixtures: corn with bell peppers, fresh green peas with garlic, curried green beans, cucumbers in sour cream. It's strength, however, is that it moves beyond the standard pantry:
dandelion greens, eggplant parmigiana, bamboo shoots with chili sauce, shallots, steamed taro with swiss chard.

The recipes never exceed 4 ingredients plus pantry items. The instructions require only minimal cooking experience. Occasionally the recipe includes variations but the normal pattern is for variations to be separate recipes.

The recipes are printed 3 to a page - a random sample pair of pages gives an idea of the breadth of the material: on the left "Pressed Lamb Loaf with Herbs", "Prosciutto with Pasta Sauce", "Quick Lamb Fricassee"; on the right "Quick Ham and Pineapple" "Red Flannel Hash" and "Rice and Cheese with Frankfurters". The odd juxtapositions provide entertainment when one scans for a recipe.

Even an experienced cook will find some interesting recipes, but the real value of this cookbook is for those just learning what might go with what.

When I'm looking for an ideal cookbook I have a few criteria:

1. It should be well-written and have plenty of substance.
2. It should have photos of the dishes.
3. It should have recipes that are fast and easy to make.
4. I should be attracted to the food I'm going to make.

This book has all the of the above. Each double page has six recipes along with a color picture of the dish. The recipes are simple and yet very innovative and exciting (to me).

I'm a single man so I can't be bothered buying and preparing a really long recipe. On the other hand I love great food and a varied diet.

My other favorite cookbooks are:

Mark Bittman - How to Cook Anything - very comprehensive and authoritative. Wonderful book.

Nobuyuki Matsuhisa - Nobu the Cookbook - a good look at a form of modern Japanese cooking.

How To Eat - Nigella Lawson - very interesting to read.

David Joachim - Brilliant Food Tips and Cooking Tricks - good reference book.

Best food reviews and amusing essays: Jeffrey Steingarten's books.

My boyfriend usually does all the cooking and I must confess I'm a little lost on what to eat when he isn't around. If, like me, you can't be bothered to cook and are quite incompetent at doing so, but are sick of toast or cheese and crackers, then this book is excellent. If, like me, you've looked for recipes and have been frustrated to find that most of them have long lists of ingredients with complicated instructions, then this is the book you need.

It has both basic and original recipes. For instance, it tells you how to make a basic white sauce, but it also has nifty recipes like bacon and cream cheese roll-ups. I think even a competent cook could gain a lot from this if they want to just make something simple once in a while, as this will have plenty of simple ideas they probably hadn't thought of.

Tandouri chicken, pork chops in cherry sauce... so many tasty and simple recipes that there will be something to delight everyone's palate. A friend bought this book and I just had to have one myself. One of the books I turn to again and again when I want to try something different that won't take me all day to fix.

I'm a "low vision" cook,and I think if you know anyone who is blind or visually impaired, they will not have any trouble preparing recipes from this book.

Ronda Del Boccio

I'm not much of a cook, but as of late, I have been getting more into the habit of getting into the kitchen. My only problem though was that I only knew how to make a handful of things, and the dishes that I enjoyed or rather would like to try I could never find a recipe I liked or found easy enough to follow. Enter the 1001 4 ingredient cookbook. I already have one of Gregg Gillespies books from before and i loved how simplistic the recipes were to follow as well as the nice variety of dishes for you to try. So you could only imagine my joy when I learned G.G. had published something like this.

All in all, if you're already a fan of Gillespie's series of cookbooks, or are looking for recipes that require very few ingredients and (for some of the recipes) not much prepartion and/or cooking time, this is the book for you.

Great home cooking, doesn't have to be difficult! Not, when you have Gregg Gillespie's 4-ingredient magic at your fingertips. The wide range of tasty recipes he's put together here - the largest such collection ever compiled - includes everything from appetizers, soups, and salads, to poultry, fish, meat, vegetables, side dishes, and desserts. Each and every recipe is illustrated in color and features easy to follow instructions, serving suggestions, and cross-references to handy chapter on seasoning blends, sauces, dips and dressings.

My mother bought me this book because she thought it would make cooking easier for me. Unfortunately I could find few recipes in the book that sounded tasty enough to make. Also, just because the recipes only had 4 ingredients didn't necessarily mean they were easy to make, or the ingredients commonplace. I opened this book 20 times in the first month I owned it and made one recipe (which I didn't like). I have never used it since.