Customer Reviews

Home Cooking with Charlie Trotter (Gourmet Cook Book Club Selection)

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

 

 

This is a great book. It has many recipes that you can actually make, some even on a weeknight but it turns out I already had. As I leafed through it, I was struck by a sense of Deja Vu. The appetizer I made for thanksgiving, a roast chicken I know I've had, a chicken dish I've wanted to make and then...last night's dinner! It is basically just "Charlie Trotter Cooks at Home" with a new pictures. A few of the recipes have been altered slightly - blue cheese becomes chevre in ravioli, a veal chop was substituted for pork tenderloin. If you don't have the other, I highly recomend it but If you already own "cooks at home," you will be looking to re-gift it as I am.

This book is so fantastic! It's worth the price just for his beet salad recipe, let alone soup, etc. We are vegetarians and are thrilled to have such nice recipes, for non vegetarians there are wonderful meat recipes..Charlie Trotter has brought his wonderful restaurant food to a home cooking level.

This book has motivated me to cook. I love cookbooks but rarely use them. Either too complicated or too boring. This one is just right. Sophiticated flavor profiles but easy- peasy to execute. These recipes are suitable for casual family dinners but elegant enough for "company'. The entrees and salads I've made are delicious and work without having to make changes to the recipes, and the combination of ingredients are interesting without being over the top or hard to find.
There seem to be some proof- reading errors in this book. my copy has one correction note slipped into the book, but I have found one other- pg.160- roasted tomatoes w/ quinoa. Should say 1 cup of quinoa- not 1/4 cup.
Maybe these have been corrected in later editions.
Other than that this a great cookbook for a cook who likes upscale tasting food without a lot of fuss and muss.

This book claims to be about home cooking, but I don`t think Charlie Trotter cooks all these dishes at his home unless he brings a lot of stuff from his restaurant. Take "Slow Roasted Salmon with Garlic and Thyme Risotto." Before you can make the dish you have to prepare an elaborate meat stock reduction (to "drizzle over" the finished dish) and you have to roast garlic cloves. This is just not week night home cooking and as for preparing it for an elaborate weekend dinner, frankly the finished product didn't justify the work that it took to produce it. For example, no one would have noticed if I had left out the meat stock reduction or the roasted garlic cloves.

Charlie Trotter also has esoteric ingredients lists that include things you probably won't find at the Safeway and maybe not at Whole Foods. 1/2 C orange blossom honey? 2 Tb fresh horseradish? 1 Tb red amaranth sprouts? I don't have the food purveyors that a first class restaurant does, nor the time to run down these ingredients at multiple stores. And do all the herbs have to be fresh? Yes, fresh herbs taste better, but who can afford to buy and store so many of them? Finally, I hope that if I substitute "fresh thyme" for "fresh BABY thyme leaves" that it won't compromise the quality of the food too, too much.

The book does contain some interesting recipes that aren't as involved as the salmon recipe, and you don`t have to be too clever to figure out to use dried herbs, prepared horseradish, and clover honey. (But I don`t know what to do about the amaranth sprouts). You need to read the recipes carefully to decide which are do-able, which are are over the top, and which steps or recipes are simply not worth the time and trouble. The recipes do not offer the helpful (though usually unrealistically optimistic) estimates of cooking time and prep time that are becoming common.

To me, this isn't the best book for home cooking, and I am not convinced it has enough useful recipes to justify the cost. If you're thinking about it, my advice would be to look through it, read a few recipes carefully, and decide whether it would work for you. But be careful to focus on the recipes, because the book -- to its credit -- is seductively packaged with beautiful pictures, layout, and overall feel.

Fortunately, I got another cook book for Christmas -- Jacques Pepin's More Fast Food My Way -- which works for me. I enthusiastically recommend it for imaginative, flavorful, and reasonable home cooking.

Great cookbook and addition to my library. Most of what I have tried has hit the mark with my whole family. Recommend a purchase for this one!

This book is an excellent and substantially revised version of Charlie Trotter Cooks at Home. The main changes: some new recipes, a slightly more compact layout, and lovely pictures of the finished dishes (instead of the earlier book's equally lovely if somewhat incomprehensible photograms). Both books are excellent, and the substance of my review applies equally to each.

The recipes are uniformly delicious and approachable. Many have suggestions for alternate cooking vessels, and all are simple enough that you can make main-ingredient substitutions successfully. They also scale up wonderfully - it's obvious that many of these were originally meant to be done in substantial batches. All of the main dishes take at least 45 minutes (this can frequently be spaced out across several days), so plan ahead. Take the "Olive Oil-Poached Cod with Roasted Tomatoes and Broccoli Rabe" as an example: there are three components (roasted tomatoes, sauteed broccoli, and poached cod) to the final dish. Each component is fairly simple to make and doesn't need any special attention once it's cooking, but the overall effect at the end is an elegant dish...it just takes time and cleanup. Making this recipe for two people is a lot of work, making it for four people is a nice experiment, but making it for twelve people is paradoxically low-stress.

I use my copy mostly for inspiration and as a reference, mostly because I have too many cookbooks and never plan ahead. Home Cooking with Charlie Trotter has followed me through two moves, though, and I intend it to follow me through several more.

I checked this book out of the library and snickered as I leafed through the recipes. In the introduction, Trotter states that "the ingredient lists are necessarily simple in scope", although almost every recipe in the book requires either ingredients that would be very difficult or impossible for the average cook to obtain, or stocks that by themselves would take hours to make.

I noticed a couple of reviewers mentioned making the "almond-crusted chicken breast". Kind of hard to believe that they found the "amaranth grains" and "fresh soft baby thyme". Yes, unbelievably, many recipes would require you to grow your own herbs or sprouts and harvest them at exactly the right time, as would be the case with the recipe requiring "tiny purple basil leaves". Seriously.

I'm pretty pleased with this book, having now made 4-5 entree recipes. Some of the fish recipes (herbed halibut, sweet and sour cod) are extremely easy and so delicious and healthy. The almond crusted chicken is quite easy and the orange blossom honey chicken is embarrassingly easy. I tried the vegetarian lasagna and it was a lengthier process than I realized when scanning the recipe and I didnt' find it particularly tasty. I think if you select the right recipes, there are some excellent and fairly easy ones in here. To me, the book was worth it for those alone.

I purchased this book based on a review from Food and Wine. This is the same book as a book published in 2000 called Charlie Trotter Cooks at Home (which, btw, I already own) What a surprise to me when I opened my new Charlie Trotter book and found it to be EXACTLY the same.

This is a reissued version of Charlie Trotter Cooks at Home. This is not mentioned anywhere in the book or Amazon page. As far as I can tell, there may be a few subtle changes to the text, and new photographs, but it is 99% the same content as the earlier book. Shame on Amazon and 10 Speed Press for not noting this.

The book itself is very good.