Customer Reviews

James McNair's Stews & Casseroles

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James McNair specializes in short cookbooks that cover a single topic, such as pizza or rice. In "Stews and Casseroles," McNair does not attempt to provide full coverage of these topics. For example, of the 27 stew recipes, none of them are the basic beef or chicken stews that most home cooks make. Instead, the stew recipes focus primarily on ethnic (Thai Vegetable Curry, Filipino Chicken and Pork Stew) and U.S. regional (Louisiana Gumbo, California Cioppino) dishes. Further, the dishes are not exactly easy, week-day foods. I've made one of the stews - New Mexican Green Chile Pork Stew; the dish tasted fairly good but was relatively involved and time-consuming to prepare. In addition, the recipe didn't call for any salt. I usually cook with no or little salt, but the dish clearly needed some.

Each recipe is depicted in a full-page color photo, all of which were taken by McNair. Unfortunately, every dish is shown with the exact same granite background and white dish shown on the cover, which results in monotonous photos. In addition, "Stews and Casseroles" was first published in 1992, and the photos have not aged particularly well. Some of the dishes look rather unappetizing, especially the Spicy Turkey Shepherd's Pie with a mashed potato crust with white, orange, and purple stripes! In addition, a rather large portion of the recipes contain lamb, veal, or game - which are likely to be unappealing to many readers.

Overall, this cookbook is passable. Based on the one recipe I've made from here, however, I don't think I'd use the cookbook again. It's most likely to appeal to cooks who enjoy making relatively complex recipes.

I love this kind of food and every recipe I've tried in this book has been delicious without being too complicated to make. And it has a great variety of flavors to suit any taste or mood. Beautifully photographed too. Highly recommended!