Cooking Light Annual Recipes 2007: EVERY RECIPE...A Year's Worth of Cooking Light Magazine (Hardcover)

by Editors of Cooking Light Magazine (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Savvy cooks are already setting a place at their tables for the 11th edition of an always popular collection. This handy compendium gathers more than 1,000 recipes from a year’s worth of Cooking Light, the world’s most widely read food magazine. Tips, techniques, planning, preparation, presentation—they’re all there, not to mention updated and innovative dishes in the lighter, guilt-free versions we love. Features

Eating smart becomes a culinary delight with great-tasting, good-for-you recipes

An emphasis on international cuisines, classic comfort foods, and new twists on traditional favorites—in their skinnier versions, of course

Triple-indexed to find what you need in a jiffy

Plus the editors’ favorite recipes, the best-of-the-best recipes

From the Publisher
Cooking Light is the world’s largest food and healthy lifestyle magazine with 11 million readers monthly (1.7 million circulation)

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Oxmoor House; First Edition edition (November 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0848730712
• ISBN-13: 978-0848730710
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 8.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #132,924 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Frustratingly organized, January 14, 2007

By	alpha_grrl (Olympia, WA) - See all my reviews

The pictures are gorgeous, that makes the book worth buying. However, I have a few problems with it. Firstly, when I turn to a cookbook, I'm often looking for inspiration for a specific category of recipe, be it a main dish or dessert or side. All of Cooking Light's Annuals are organized in the oddest manner (I assume by their original theme grouping in the magazine articles?). So if you're looking for a recipe for "soups" for example, you have to look in the index and endlessly flip pages back and forth to see soup recipes. I'd find it easier to have the book organized by category. Secondly, many of the recipes use unusual ingredients in wee tiny quantities. If you're making an effort to add variety to your cooking or you've got a gourmet pantry that's fine but sometimes it gets annoying to have to make a trip to the store and spend a ton of money for ingredients you use by the teaspoon (though I do appreciate that the recipes don't rely on "diet" ingredients heavily and rather try to make things lighter by other modifications to the recipes). Five stars for being a gorgeous book and interesting read. 1 star for organization. 3 stars for practicality of recipes.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A mixed blessing, March 8, 2007

By	Born To Cook (Warrenville, IL United States) - See all my reviews

Been a subscriber to the magazine for years and look forward to each new issue. When I'm looking for inspiration for the week's menus, the first book I turn to is my "Complete Cooking Light Cookbook." The recipes, whether I'm getting them from the book or the magazine, have always led to a good result and many have become family favorites.

Having said that, I have to agree with alphagirl about the weird organization of this book. Organized by the *month in which the recipe was published*? Jumpin' jiminy. Most people can't remember which month they last took their car in for an oil change, let alone which month's issue of a magazine had a fabulous recipe for 'Uber Tubers'. It's driving me nuts that I can browse through one section that contains all the fish dishes, for example. Like alphagirl, I find it obnoxious to have to keep flipping back and forth between 'fish' in the general the index and the recipes.

Huge ding on overall star rating: there is no way to tell from any of the indexes (and there are several, to help overcome the problems caused by organizing the book according to magazine issue) which recipes are vegetarian friendly, which is a mandatory feature for any multi-purpose cookbook in our 2-omnivore/1 vegetarian household.

I understand the point of keeping related recipes together, such as presenting together every recipe from a cooking lesson article, regardless of the dish type. However, because people don't march into the kitchen and cook their way from start to finish through any one of the 'cooking lessons', wouldn't it make more sense to organize the book traditionally, then have smaller chapters/sections for each cooking lesson, which can reference the recipes already provided in the 'beef' or 'soups' sections? That way I can go bone-up on my beef cooking skills by reading the advice and technique information, then tackle any of the beef recipes in the rest of the book with absolute confidence.

I will continue to buy each edition of the fabulous 'Complete Cooking Light Cookbook' while the ink is still wet from printing, but I have purchased my first and last of the annual recipe collections unless they do something about the book's organization.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Healthy cooking resource, January 4, 2007

By	Beth Harris (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews

I love the Cooking Light Magazine for healthy recipes and for every day cooking. It is much easier to find recipes using the Cooking Light Annual Recipes than flipping thru various magazines. Even if you don't take the magazine, I recommend getting the cookbook as a good resource for cooking variety and recipes without a lot of additional fat, sodium etc.