Customer Reviews

Cooking with the Seasons: A Year In My Kitchen

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I find this cookbook to be wonderfully readable, whether for cooking or for curling up by the fireplace to read on a Sunday afternoon. I am not a very experienced French cook, I am just learning. However, I visited France for a period of time, staying with a French family. I find the recipes here to be much the same as the home cooking I recieved while in France. It may not be fancy Parisian fare with elaborate sauces, but it is not intended to be that. It seems to be written as a book for French (Brittany to be specific) country home cooking. True French cusine focuses on the freshest local ingrediants available, beautifully prepared, and that is just what is in this book.

Cooking With the Seasons is an excellent book filled with delicious recipes as well as snippets of the author's memories of growing up in France. The variations listed at the end of most recipes give the everyday cook the opportunity to adapt to what is on hand. Monique's tips, which are scattered throughout the book, are useful bits of information to aid the cook with common delimmas.

I was disappointed to learn that the recipes had already been adapted to what is available in America. This is useful to those who live in the US, but to those of us anticipating a move to France or those who wish to create a truly authentic French dish, it is less than ideal.

Nevertheless, it is a beautifully done book with wonderful recipes, delightful memories, and great tips. It is a book that deserves a place of honor in any cook's kitchen.

A lovely book with charming snippets of memories from the author's childhood in France, this cookbook takes you through a year, month by month, using the ingredients in season and readily available to create wonderful, everyday meals. The recipes are well written, and offer tips for variations and substitutions. A feature I found very useful was "Monique's Tips". They offer practical answers for kitchen delimmas.

I was disappointed in the fact that the recipes were adapted to suit the ingredients most commonly found in the United States, rather than those found in France. This makes it great for creating dishes with a French flair in the States, but makes it less useful for someone who plans to use it as a cornerstone cookbook when moving to France.

All in all, this is a cookbook worth buying. The lessons Monique Hooker teaches about using what is on hand and experimenting with herbs and spices are just as useful in any country, with any style of cooking. Add to this the memories of childhood in France, and you have a book you will return to again and again.