Customer Reviews

I'm Just Here for the Food : Cook's Notes

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

If Alton Brown saw this book at his local megamart, he would not buy it for all the reasons he recommends people go to hardware stores and restaurant supply stores to buy less expensive and more functional versions of high priced items. Do not buy this item. It is not a ?book?. It is simply a blank book with AB?s brand recognition mug on the cover. Must be the former advertising producer coming out. You will be much better served by going to the local office supply superstore and purchasing a small, inexpensive three (3) ring binder and a 3 ring hole punch to punch holes in all the recipes you download from the internet.

If AB really wanted to sell something for your 15 bucks, he would have:

1. Made it loose leaf bound instead of spiral bound, so that you could buy additional blank pages at the aforementioned office supply superstore, or even at the local drugstore.
2. Included a comprehensive set of unit of measure conversion tables.
3. Included tables of cooking methods and times for a wide variety of meats and vegetables. A perfect tie-in to the organization of the book whose success this item is milking.
4. Included tables of various flours and grains, and the things for which they are best used. For example, the best applications of: Bread flour, all purpose flour, cake flour, whole wheat flour etc. Similar things could be done for beans and lentils.
5. Included checklists of the best dry and fresh spices and herbs to keep on hand and the time it is safe to store them. The list should indicate which are best used fresh and which are quite acceptable used dry. Most sources, for example say that dry basil is a very poor substitute for the fresh herb while dry thyme is quite acceptable for almost all applications. A selected list of internet spice dealers would be peachy here as well.

I think AB should attone for this shameless marketing ploy by doing a ?Good Eats? show on how to economically store kitchen notes and recipes. If Martha Stewart can do it, I?m sure he can do an even better job.

I would give a 5 star rating if I were looking for a blank journal. I am an avid Alton Brown fan and ordered this "book" months before it was published, expecting to get pearls of wisdom similar to his awesome book, "Food + Heat = Cooking" (which I would give 10 stars out of 5 if I could). I felt really foolish to find that I had ordered a completely blank journal. It actually is a nice one and contains a handful of quotes such as, "the least used utensil in the kitchen is the brain." I guess that is his whole point, "do your own cook's notes!"

This is the last time I buy a book just because I had liked the author's other works. The description does say that it's a perfect place to jot down your favorite tips etc., but it didn't click in my head that this ISN"T A BOOK AT ALL because the title "Cook's Notes" means
Cook = Me
Notes = My Notes, not AB's

In short, this is A BLANK NOTE PAD with celebrity picture on the cover. A totally juvenile and 20th century merchandizing product. As much as I like AB's cooking show Good Eats, I would not have bought this had I known what it is. This is also not very much in the spirit of modern and scientific way of life/cooking for this day and age.

Recommended only for devoted Alton Brown fans who don't have a PDA.

Why can't we give 0 stars?

Alton Brown has now joined the ranks of others who sell out the very fabric that made them famous just to make more money.

If you like a spiral bound book with nothing but lines on the blank pages, go ahead and buy this. However, you're better off taking the 10 bucks and going to a store to buy three or four reams of paper. You'll get more use out of it.

I've lost some respect for the guy. It's a shame that Alton is now groveling at the Emeril level.

The other reviewers seem to feel they've been mislead. The description clearly says that it's a journal. I purchase journals all the time for various uses. I usually try to find something with a nice cover design that appeals to me. Why not have a journal with Alton Brown's face on it for my cooking notes??? I love the show. I love his other books. I don't see what the big deal is! And I don't think he's "sold his soul" as someone else mentioned. It's OK to provide a kitchen journal that matches your cookbooks! If you want to be cheap and use notebook paper--OK. But maybe some of us want something a little nicer or a little more fun?

I don't know... call me silly.. but this is a perfect little book (ie.. it is bound and has pages). Also, It never claimed to be anything other than what it is. A place to jot down your thoughts, ideas and recipes. I purchased my book for almost nothing at a retail store and I'm hoping to find more here. I like the way it looks and I like the way it is laid out. So please, folks, read carefully what you intend to buy so there will be no disappointments.

As someone else posted, IT'S A JOURNAL!!!!! Do you normaly go out and purchase a journal that someone else has written in. The whole point of this book was to get the customer to experiment in the kitchen and create their own recipes. Maybe watch his show on TV and jot down some of his hints and tips.

Does anyone bother to read the book description before purchasing. It clearly states "viewers--now have the perfect place to jot down their favorite tips and quips-as well as their own food notes." Nowhere in that description does it say that Mr. Brown has written all his pearls of wisdom for the reader to use. How hard is that to understand??? I think this is a great cook's journal and a wonderful addition to any serious chef's kitchen.

A lot of people do not seem to like this because it has the face of wonderfully goofy TV chef Alton Brown on the cover but does not contain any words of wisdom from him. To be fair, that's a good point, but it does not detract from the fact this is a solid cook's tool. Assuming it was not just a money grab to put his name and face on the cover, you have to think Alton would agree too.

So what is it? It is a well made, spiral bound book full of blank and lined pages for notes. The few words printed in it by Brown suggest this is like a cook's journal but I use mine as a recipe book. I have a lot of cook books and it can be a bother to look through them for a particular recipe I like enough to do regularly. So instead of thinking `which Bobby Flay or Julia Child book was that in which name it was called, I can write them down here. Infamously I spent hours trying to recreate a particular dessert for my wife's family once, doing recipe after recipe of different syllabubs when what I really wanted to do was a whipped fool. This takes that chaos away.

The book is compact, about 5" X 8" and hard cover so it can take some abuse in the kitchen. The pages are not overly crowded so you can write recipes in your style and your notes rather than be forced into someone else' format. The paper used in the pages is particularly heavy so there is some protection against ink bleeding through from page to page or other cooking liquids destroying multiple pages.

The spiral bindings are particularly solid and seem to be a point of contention here. I like them. They are solid and pages are not going to tear out easily. I know some people want a ring binder so they can switch pages around but in my experience these tear far too easily for my comfort.

That does lead to the one weakness I have with the book. The inside are just the pages with no way to mark them off. I bought a packet of those page dividers that you can stick on the top of a page to mark off section on "meat" "veggies" "chicken" "fish' etc but if you miss-guess what you need, it can leave you scrambling with too few pages in a popular topic and too many blanks in another.

This however is my only complaint with this and it's not a biggy. I am so please with this I have two, covering different topics and different styles, all neatly documented. Some fans of AB have here complained that he would have nothing to do with a project like this because it is - gasp- uni-tasker, and the only one of those allowed in my kitchen is one of these -holds up fire extinguisher. But I'd challenge you on that point. I'd say there is nothing more multitasking capable than a blank page onto which the human mind may project words. Far from a uni-tasker, this is definitely a multi-tasker- it just falls to you to appreciate it.

I didn't realize this was a blank book or journal when I ordered it (good for me for not reading descriptions!) but I really like it anyway. I'm going to set it on my coffee table for when I see something on the Food Network that I want to remember.

Length:: 2:06 Mins

I thought it'd be helpful to show what the pages looked like in my video so you know exactly what you're buying.