Customer Reviews

Get Cooking: 150 Simple Recipes to Get You Started in the Kitchen

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Get Cooking takes the beginner through all the steps, clearly and briefly, from how to study a recipe to make sure that you have all the ingredients and tools and to understand the whole process of preparing the food to getting it on the table on time.

Each chapter begins with the essential facts about the type of food, the tools and ingredients that you will most often use, and even an assessment when the inexpensive or moderately priced tools and ingredients will suffice and the times when the added expense is worthwhile.

Katzen describes the cuisine as "'Big Tent,' accommodating a broad base of tastes and needs, vegetarian, meat-loving and everything in between." Most of the dishes are familiar - the items that you'd find at a party, picnic, or enjoy at home. We've made the teriyaki chicken thighs and the poached salmon - which were both easy and tasty! I am eager to try the recipes for carmelized balsamic-red onion soup with cheese-topped croutons, linguini with clam sauce, linguine with spinach and peas, green pea and feta quiche, and deeply roasted cauliflower.
The three bean salad, mac and cheese, spaghetti with meatballs, pasta with tuna, white beans, and artichoke hearts, chinese-style peanut noodles, chocolate-chip mint cookies and intensely chocolate brownies are sure to become regulars at our home.

Get Cooking would be excellent for someone just learning to cook - it gives you the essentials of cooking in simple steps and offers tasty rewards for your effort.

Publisher: HarperStudio (October 13, 2009), 288 pages.
Review copy provided by the publisher.

As a vegetarian, Mollie Katzen's cookbooks have been my bible, but my sons eat meat, and this book comes out just in time for one to graduate college and start his own household while the other moves off to college in an apartment with a kitchen for him to start cooking in. The recipes are of a wide variety, all easy and quick for the beginning cook. Since I have no idea how to cook or serve meat, this book is the perfect send-off for both my sons so that they'll eat well and healthily and learn the basic tools of the cooking trade. Coming from Mollie Katzen, I trust that the recipes are all nutritious and delicious, and that's a priceless gift!

I got this book as a gift when I moved into my first apartment, my cooking abilities had been limited to hot pockets and frozen pizza before I became interested in cooking. The first night in my apartment I tried the Salmon Burgers, delicious! I love this book and I can't wait to try more recipes.

I wish I had found this book before trying other more complicated and less well written recipes from other cookbooks. My talents in the kitchen are modest, at best, and while I can roast a chicken quite well thanks to Nigella Lawson that and grilled cheeses pretty much rounds out my repetoire.

This cookbook not only provides recipes that call for few, if any, exotic ingredients, it provides incredibly detailed instructions. While other cookbooks might instruct you to "cook the pasta" Mollie Katzen tells you how much water to put in your pasta pot, when to check it for doneness, how to taste test it to determine if its cooked, and instructions or whether or not the pasta should be rinsed after cooking (in most cases, it shouldn't because it removes the starches the sauces should be sticking to).

With the detailed instructions provided in this cookbook, as well as the ability to freestyle and customize with the suggestions Katzen provides in the sidebars with each recipe, I was able to fix a delicious Pasta Shells with Chickpeas and Arugula. In full disclosure, I substituted fresh baby spinach for the arugula per the sidebar suggestions and it turned out great! I can't wait to try the Mango and Chickpea Curry and the Chocolate & Peanut Butter Things.

Each chapter begins with a description of the basics concering the types of food and dishes included in the chapter and this is an enormous resource for novice cooks. While there are books like Joy of Cooking that provide an encyclopedic knowledge of food, I found such large books to be overwhleming. Get Cooking provides all the necessary information to be successful in the kitchen and, unlike many recent cookbooks, Get Cooking provides a photograph for each and every recipe.

I can't begin to tell you how much I wish I had found this cookbook last year instead of last week at the library. Although I did check this book out from the local library it is absolutely worth owning a copy as I think the recipes are absolutely worth repeating. This cookbook would also make an excellent housewarming gift.

With her extensive knowledge but approachable style, Mollie has written an accessible book for the novice or timid cook. Well organized with delicious, easy to prepare recipes, I have already made 8 of them, and I've only had the book 2 weeks. Great variety; tips to change it up or make a vegetarian dish vegan, I found something for every member of my family in this delightful new cookbook.

Let me preface this by saying that I don't love to cook but love good food, especially vegetables and pasta. Interesting and EASY recipes inspire me. Well I marked so many pages of this book that I just gave up. It's my new favorite. Simple, fresh and with the options to expand and get creative with the basics-fantastic.

Although the book is not entirely vegan (or even vegetarian), it had lots of great recipes and tips for the vegans out there (including me). Mollie clearly labeled which recipes were vegan, and included ideas on how to make many of the non-veg receipes into veg-friendly recipes.

The tips in this book are absolutely priceless.

For instance, I will never eat broccoli the same way again - her "absolutely the best broccoli" was simple and DELICIOUS.

My teenage daughter picked up this book at our local library, thinking it would help her learn to cook and it was not a typical "kid" cookbook. I was thrilled. But she never got around to actually cooking, even though she had picked out a few dishes that she thought she might like. Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I found myself looking for a quick recipe for corn chowder using items I had on hand. Found it in "Get Cooking", and it was fabulous. the next day I needed a quick vinaigrette and I found the "soy-ginger-sesame vinaigrette", which was fast, easy and delicious. I've since picked it up several times in the last week, looking for something simple using specific ingredients. It has not failed me!
So, as an experienced cook, with little spare time for shopping and standing in the kitchen these days, I am quickly falling in love with this book. I have a large collection of receipe books that I love to browse and sometimes use, but I just don't have the luxury of the time needed to plan and create many of the more involved dishes. We recently joined an organic co-op, and I am learning to cook with what I find in my bin, instead of shopping daily for ingredients needed. "Get Cooking" is the perfect companion when you just don't have the energy to shop or be overly creative, but you still want delicious home cooked food that is not boring. The recipes use simple, common ingredients to create meals my whole family loves.
I am buying this book today!

This latest book from the marvelous Mollie Katzen makes cooking up a meal or side dish a not so dauting thing to do. Well known for all her many fabulous cookbooks, Mollie's Get Cooking helps children and novice adult cooks alike (including me!) want to prep their own healthy and most importantly delicious foods. This book is packed with tempting and delicious recipes using whole foods as well as easy to understand and implement instructions that make producing beautiful and oftentimes healthful foods to feed yourself and your family simple as pie. As a registered dietitian who loves good food and loves to cook (but doesn't as much as I'd like to), I found this book to be just what I needed to inspire me to spend a little more time (but not a TON of time) in the kitchen. Thanks Mollie for writing such a wonderful book and for encouraging, inspiring, and making it possible for so many families who are time-crunched and perhaps intimidated to get and stay in the kitchen and make, relatively easily, beautiful food together!

This is another fabulous collection from my favorite cook book author. Geared towards young people just starting to cook, the recipes are affordable, easy, and , miraculously, also fantastically delicious. Although I am a vegan and won't personally be cooking the meat recipes, I was glad to see that Ms. Katzen's approach is thoughtful here: she does push meat eaters in the direction of sustainable choices, which is what is truly needed if our fragile planet is to survive.

The photos are wonderful, too -- while I love Ms. Katzen's art work, it is also nice, especially for young cooks, to see what the dishes they're creating will actually look like.

Another gem of a book from Mollie Katzen!!!