Customer Reviews

Nueva Salsa: Recipes to Spice It Up

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Nueva Salsa is full of fun and interesting recipes presented with mouth-watering photos! Who would have thought there were so many Salsa's out there for the making? From hot and spicy, to sweet desserts, this book has them all and is written with informative and delightful prose that make you feel you've travelled the world! These recipes added greatly to my summer entertaining and I look forward to them heating up my Holidays!

I've made a few of these recipes, so far, with my boyfriend --real good time in the kitchen!! This is a sexy cookbook.
These salsas are sure to get you ooohs & aaahs from friends as well.
Great gift idea!

This is an outstanding cookbook for healthy recipes. Many of the salsas in this book can easily be used to top baked fish (like talapia) or grilled chicken breasts. I have high cholesterol so I have to watch what I eat. This book shows that by mixiing fresh ingredients and a few spices, you can make a nice salsa to spice up your everyday foods.

It is difficult to even know where to start in reviewing this magical little cooking book. I suppose that I need to start with a couple of statements about myself. First, when the news that salsa is now the number one condiment in this country (and others), beating out ketchup, I was absolutely thrilled. I am not a ketchup lover. I know this is un-American of me, but so be it. Secondly, I love salsa and use it on just about everything that it can be used upon, and some things that it was never meant to be a part of. Thirdly, I am not overly fond of most of the canned, bottled and prepared salsas on the market, although I do use them in a pinch. Forth...this is another of those books that I have been too cheap to purchase yet, although I do have good intentions in this area, and I have been repeatedly checking this out of the library copying like mad for the past two years. Now that all being said.....

For those of you that are unfamiliar with salsa, you need to know that salsa in Spanish means "sauce." Now I am a great lover of sauces myself, they make or break a dish, but you must keep in mind that salsa is not so much a sauce as it is a garnish. A good traditional sauce is a blend of flavors which creates yet another flavor and indeed becomes a part of the dish being prepared. Salsa though, is a blend of flavors but in its case, each ingredient stands alone and each is easily identified when eating, but the blend of each of these distinct flavors does not become a part of the dish being served, but rather enhances it...the flavor of the salsa bounces off and around the dish being garnished.

Chef Rafael Palomino and Arlen Gargagliano have done us a bit favor here in presenting this work. Over 60 wonderful recipes have been presented here and so far (yes, we have tried several of them), there is not a dog in the bunch. One of the most delightful and helpful aspects of this work is a bit hidden and you don't realize what is happening until to make and taste these offerings. Good salsa needs to be fresh and served as soon after creating as possible. Each and ever salsa here contain ingredients that are for the most part easily found and more importantly, each salsa is surprisingly easy to prepare. All you need is a half decent food processer or a whopping sharp knife or grater, and you can whip any one of these dishes up in no time flat.
A short sampling of what is offered here is:

Grapefruit, Cucumber, and Mint Salsa
Kimchee and Mango Salsa (Don't go Ewww over the Kimchee...this is great stuff!)
Feta Cheese Salsa (This is one of our favorite)
Avocado and Wasabi Salsa
Sun-Dried Tomato Rainbow Salsa (Excellent choice for so many dishes).
Grilled Asparagus and Blue Cheese Salsa (Another we have tried and love).
Garbanzo, Roasted Pepper, and Green Onion Salsa.

And then there are the Pepper Salsas....Oh my! A scrambled egg is not a scrambled egg without a good pepper salsa on it's top!

Many of the salsas offered here are sort on the exotic side and certainly drift from the realm of what we feel is "traditional." This is a good thing though. We tend to get stuck in a rut with our eating habits and it is works like that that will jerk your taste buds around, hoist you up by your ears and force you to take a second look at what you really like and dislike.

These are extremely healthy condiments, and for the most part are extremely vegetarian and indeed, even vegan friendly. The photographs of many of these dishes by Miki Duisterhof are absolutely top quality and will have you drooling as you read through this work.

Please trust me folks. You should probably go out an actually buy this thing as I promise you that you will be using it over and over again. And I also promise you that you are in for some fantastic eating here. I dare say there is not a dish, of the over 60 presented here, that will not appeal to the majority of people trying them for the first time. We have served several of these to various guests; some of the ultra picky food snobs like my wife, and we have yet to receive anything but yummy smacking noises as they ate and each and ever individual has always asked for the recipe...of which we never give them as I claim that each and ever one is an old family secret that I dare not divulge. Hey, I am that kind of guy.

Don Blankenship
The Ozarks

A really great book! Full color pictures and lots of variations. The only place this book falls short is that I wish every recipe had a picture. I've eaten at Chef Palomino's restaurants several times and am thrilled he has this book out. I can't wait to try more recipes. So far, everything I've made, I've loved. Recipes are organized according to types of salsas (fruit, tropical, exotics, tomato, vegetable, chile, bean, and dessert) and there are over 50 different and innovative recipes. He also includes an index of where to find hard-to-find products.