Customer Reviews

How to Boil Water

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you're one of those "Sure, I know how to cook...except I don't want to" people, you need this book. This book gives you the basics on how long you can keep meat, how to pick good cuts, what to do with vegetables, and the essential hints on everything you need to get started. The best part of this book aren't the recipes, but rather the reference guides on the things you never quite know, like how to cook specific vegetables and how to build a soup or smoothie. Great for someone who has just moved into an apartment, or for anyone who wants to get a primer on cooking. If you are puzzled about what tools you need, fear not--it's all very simple, and there are many, many diagrams in case you freak out with too many words.

I would say it's useful for anyone with less training than professional cooking experience. The pictures are wonderful.

This book is incredibly informative. It's everything I wanted to learn about food, but was too lazy to ask -- where it comes from, what to look for when buying it, how to cut it all up... and that's aside from the great recipes. This mass of info is fortunately so intelligently written and laid out that it never really feels like overload. I'd put the book on my coffee table if I didn't need it so much in the kitchen.

I ordered this cookbook for my daughter who is away at college. I reviewed it before I sent it to her. It has all the basics, how to shop for food, how to store it, how to prepare it, even basic cooking utensils that a beginner would need. She loves it and uses it all the time. So I think this the true measurement of the book being user friendly.

I like to eat - other people's cooking. This can be a problem as friends sometimes expect you to reciprocate and invite them over for more than beer and peanuts. Thanks to this book, I was actually able to have a dinner party - well two friends - over to the house on Saturday and feed them a roast chicken and green salad. That may not sound like much to you but it was a big deal to me. The nice thing about this book is that it doesn't make you feel stupid even if you know nothing about cooking. For know nothings like me, it can start you at the beginning, but if you already have your four standby recipes it looks as if it could help you double or triple that number. I recommend it for everyone.

I'm a decent cook, but I always like to review the basics once in a while. This book just increasingly irritated me the more I read it. As a basic manual (so implied by the title!) it is haphazard and rarely informative, if you can find the information, that is.

Several things about the format of this book I didn't like. White font on a light yellow or green background? Are you serious?? There were a couple pages I couldn't even read. There are also several font-style changes. The hand-written font is often very small and difficult to read.

The pictures are frequently unlabeled, although very pretty. Many times I had no idea what I was looking at because there was no caption, or no sense of scale, or the pictures were very small. I couldn't tell if I was looking at a grain of rice or a loaf of bread.

Some of the recipes are simple enough, but there are some that require ingredients that I would never normally have in the cupboard, nor make a special trip for.

I think the writers from the Food Network may have been too advanced to realize that a book with this title would need to be a lot simpler. I think this is an intermediate book at best, and not very well put-together.

This gives you STEP BY STEP instructions on how to make hard boiled eggs, baked potatoes and other simple procedures that all new cooks should learn. It has lots of photos so you can see how your food should look.

There are definitely more pros than cons about this book.
Pros
Visually appealing; the photos could cause salivation in just about anyone.
Illustrations for basic kitchen know-how from holding a knife, folding an omelette, or setting the table.
Recipes keep up with current trends in cooking, from sundried tomatoes to tofu.
Detailed charts for steaming and and roasting veggies.
Detailed, illustrated instructions for making coffee, smoothies, and putting a well-balanced meal together.
Useful "Wisdom" pages for various foods and techniques.
The photos, the photos, the photos.

Cons
Difficult to read white writing on a color background.
White or yellow type on a white page is tough to read even for those under 50.
Recipes call for fairly exotic ingredients, unfamiliar or extravagant for new cooks, like fresh herbs, chutneys, and fresh mozzarella.

This Food Network Kitchen book is very well thought out, visually stunning, and has abundant information for the semi-beginning chef. While some basic instruction - hardly ever seen in cookbooks - is here and much appreciated, the recipes' ingredients and information is slightly upscale for the very beginner, and in that respect the title is misleading.
That said, there are enough beginner cooks with an appreciation of food who would certainly get a lot out of this book. And beginning cooks of all sublevels would find the illustrated instructions and basic information helpful. It's a great graduation gift for those moving out on their own. You will be helping them ease into independence a little better equipped to take care of themselves. 50 Ways to Leave Your Mother

I love cookbooks (I have 20+), and this is one of my favorites. When I look at a cookbook, I am looking for (a) something that is "modern" - not a cookbook that is just chock-full of frozen casseroles or potted meat product, (b) has skill levels, (c) doesn't call for fussy ingredients or at least gives me substitutions for those fussy ingredients, (d) has lots of brightly-colored pictures and some "step-by-step" methods, and (e) is at least vaguely health-conscious (for example, finds other ways to be fresh and flavorful without calling for 16 oz. of sour cream in a two-person dish).

This book meets all of those criteria. It has regular recipes for chocolate chip cookies, deep-dish brownies, "date night chicken" and smoothies, but also teaches you the basics of putting together a killer vinaigrette, how to buy and cook different cuts of meat, and how to make a good gravy by deglazing. There are a lot of normal recipes with minor tweaks that make them fresh and modern - for instance, we tried their recipe for oatmeal that added lemon zest and strawberries to plain Jane oatmeal, and it turned out amazing.

I haven't had any of these recipes fail me, taste awful, or call for unobtainable ingredients which can occasionally happen in the other compilations. Although I regularly turn to the internet for recipe ideas, "How to Boil Water" is still one of my foolproof, top-two keeper cookbooks, along with "Anyone Can Cook" by Better Homes & Gardens. Although I can cook and bake fairly well now, I still enjoy books that take the time to break directions down for me, tweak tried-and-true old recipes with fresh new flavors, and includes helpful hints that I can use in other recipes. I would definitely buy this book again, and I think it's a bargain for beginning and experienced home cooks alike.

I'm a decent cook, but working fulltime, I don't have time to make frilly recipes, so I'm always on the lookout for stuff that's not time-consuming or complicated. So when I got *How to Boil Water* as a gift, I thought it would be right up my alley. Well, as someone with actual experience cooking and planning meals, I found both good and bad things in the book.

I noticed right off that many recipes call for stuff like arugula, miso, and so forth, that are not that easy to find, are hard to obtain in such small quantities, and aren't used often. If you're single or in a household of two, which seems to be the target audience, you will end up having to throw these products away before you're ready to use them again. I would've liked to see recipes that use the real basic staples everyone keeps (ground beef, for instance, which can be packed in the freezer in small quantities, or bell peppers) instead of fancy ingredients that aren't much good on a day-to-day basis in the real world.

Then we get to the salad section. As the cook in a household of two, I couldn't believe what I was reading. First, the editors advocate bagged greens. Well, bagged greens are already stinky when you first open the bag, and then they go bad within 40 seconds of being out of the bag, so they're a terrible choice for a small household. The other choices, such as baby spinach, watercress, etc., also go bad fast and are never available in the small quantities called for. Worst of all, though, there is no information on the real staples--celery, carrots, peppers, and the like. How much should you buy if you want to make salads for two on Monday and Thursday? How can you plan your week's menu to use them up before they go bad? How do you keep them from going bad since you won't be using them all up at once? (For instance, carrots and celery can be kept for at least a week and a half if packed in water, but there's no mention of any techniques like that.)

As for the good, I think the "upgrades" idea is great because it helps you start thinking like a cook--what else can you use that will add to the recipe and/or use up leftovers from other recipes? Also, there are some recipes that do sound good and not too hard to make. There is also abundant information on how to choose produce and meats, sanitation, and food preparation.

I think the value of this book is handicapped by the desire of the editors to purvey "hip" food instead of stuff that's actually easy to make and uses widely available ingredients in realistic quantities. *How to Boil Water* can be a helpful book, but I don't think it can stand on its own as an introduction on how to cook and run a kitchen. A good companion to this book would be *The Fannie Farmer Cookbook,* which has a lot of information on staples plus many recipes that call for few ingredients, are fast to make, and taste good.

The only other cookbook I've tried is Betty Crocker. I've also tried a number of recipes from different websites (epicurious, food network, all recipes, etc.).
Every recipe I've tried from this book was absolutely delicious and full of flavor and I am far from a good cook. The flank steak I made tasted like it was from a restuarant.
I am trying out a vegan diet for a month right now and went to this book because other recipes I've tried tended to be kind of bland. The roasted potatoes and tomato salsa I made last night were so yummy that I had to write this review today. The "know-how" tips are very helpful. Great book for beginners or those of us who have never shined in the kitchen. You'll be a star with this book!